If I employ someone to provide me with care and support, will I need to put them into a pension scheme?

If you directly employ one or more people to provide you with care and support, often called a personal assistant or a personal care assistant, you’re an employer and automatic enrolment duties will apply to you. This will be the case whether you use the money provided by your local authority or the NHS in the form of direct payments or a personal budget to pay your personal care assistant, or you use your own money.

If your care is provided by an agency, and it pays your personal care assistant’s national insurance contributions, you don’t need to do anything.

Automatic enrolment is similar to your employer responsibility to deal with National Insurance and tax. So, in the same way that you have to pay employer National Insurance in respect of your personal care assistant’s earnings and deduct PAYE tax from their pay, depending on the circumstances (see next question), you must also put your personal care assistant into a pension scheme and pay money into it on their behalf. Use our online tool to find out your duties.