The My Future Fund employer portal: what you have to do.

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If you employ anyone in Ireland, you have probably met the My Future Fund employer portal by now, or you are about to. This is a plain-English guide to what the portal is, what the law requires of you, and the deadlines that matter. It also covers the part the official guidance mentions only in passing: if your staff are in a qualifying pension scheme through payroll, they are not enrolled in My Future Fund at all, and most of this admin stops applying to you.

The short version

The My Future Fund employer portal is the online system run by NAERSA, the National Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings Authority, where employers register for Ireland's auto-enrolment pension scheme and manage their obligations under it. Every employer with eligible staff must engage with the scheme, which launched on 1 January 2026. Employees are automatically enrolled if they are aged 23 to 60, earn over €20,000 a year, and are not already paying into a pension through payroll. That last clause is the one that matters most, and we come back to it below.

First question: do you need the portal at all?

Before you spend an afternoon on registration, check whether the scheme even applies to your staff.

An employee is exempt from auto-enrolment if they are already contributing to a qualifying pension scheme through your payroll. New regulations introduced by the government in December 2025 put the qualifying bar at a minimum total contribution of 3.5% of gross pay, of which at least 1.5% comes from the employer.

Run the numbers on what that means. If you provide a pension that clears that bar, your eligible staff are never enrolled in My Future Fund, there are no state-scheme deductions to reconcile each payroll cycle, and the two-year re-enrolment machinery never touches them. The portal becomes something you registered for and rarely think about.

If you do not provide a pension, everything below applies to you in full, every pay cycle, for every eligible employee.

Either way, read on. The obligations are the same whether you meet them through the state scheme or your own.

What the portal is for

My Future Fund does most of its work through payroll data. NAERSA identifies eligible employees from payroll submissions and enrols them automatically. You do not choose who goes in. Your job as the employer splits into three parts:

1. Register your business on the employer portal at myfuturefund.ie. Registration is a legal requirement for employers with eligible staff, not an optional extra.
2. Facilitate the deductions. Employee contributions come out of gross pay through your payroll each cycle. Your payroll software or provider needs to be set up for this, so if you run payroll in-house, confirm your software version supports auto-enrolment before your next run.
3. Pay the employer contribution. For every eligible employee in the scheme, you contribute a percentage of their gross pay. The rate is 1.5% now and rises in legislated steps to 6% by year ten of the scheme. The State adds €1 for every €3 the employee puts in. Employer and State contributions stop on earnings above €80,000.

There is no discretion in any of this. You cannot set the rates, choose the fund, or decide who is in. That is the design: My Future Fund is the default, built for employers who provide nothing else.

The problems employers hit

The official guidance describes a smooth system. The experience on the ground, in the scheme's first year, has been less smooth, and it is worth knowing where the friction is before you meet it.

The paperwork is real. When something goes wrong with an enrolment, the fix frequently involves the postal system. One journalist, wrongly enrolled in January, described the correction process in The Journal: hours on hold, then a form posted out, to be printed, completed, bundled with payslips and posted back, with a six-to-eight week processing time quoted at the end of it. Employees who hit these walls bring the problem to one place: you. Payroll gets the query, and payroll has no more leverage with the scheme than the employee does.

Corrections run at the speed of the scheme, not the speed of your payroll. Enrolments triggered in error, staff who should have been exempt, contribution mismatches: these get resolved on NAERSA's timeline. Budget for that in any month where your payroll data and the scheme's records disagree.

Forum threads about portal issues currently rank on the first page of Google for portal searches. That is not a detail we would normally include in a guide, but it tells you something useful: enough employers are hitting problems that their complaint threads are outranking official documentation.

None of this is a reason to ignore the scheme. It is a reason to decide deliberately whether you want your staff in it.

The part you cannot ignore: penalties

As of March 2026, more than 6,600 employers had still not registered with the auto-enrolment scheme as required, and NAERSA has warned that prosecution is possible. The legislation provides for fines of up to €50,000 and imprisonment for breaches of the rules around My Future Fund.

If you have eligible staff and have done nothing, you are in that cohort, and the exposure grows with every payroll cycle. Whatever you decide about the scheme versus your own pension, decide it now. Non-compliance is the one option with no upside.

The alternative: meet the bar with your own scheme, at zero cost to you beyond the contributions

Here is the calculation the official guidance will not do for you.

To keep an employee out of My Future Fund, you need a qualifying pension scheme through payroll at 3.5% total contributions with at least 1.5% from you. Under My Future Fund, you are paying 1.5% of gross pay for that employee anyway, rising to 6% over the decade, with no say in any of it.

So the employer contribution costs you the same either way. The difference is everything around it.

With a Zen Pensions PRSA, the employer pays no fees. No setup cost, no platform fee, no per-employee charge. You pay only the contributions you were going to pay under the state scheme regardless. Setup runs through a digital portal, staff onboard from their phones in minutes, and there is no paper in the process. Your employees get full marginal-rate tax relief on their own contributions, up to 40% for higher-rate taxpayers, where My Future Fund's state top-up equates to 25%. For every €100 a higher-rate employee puts into a PRSA, the net cost to them is €60. The same €100 into My Future Fund costs them €75. For any business with senior staff, that gap is a retention conversation waiting to happen.

And the friction runs the other way. Instead of a scheme that enrols people by algorithm and corrects errors by post, you get in-app chat with real people behind it.

Zen Pensions is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland and the product is approved by the Pensions Authority. The fee to the employee is a single all-in 0.9% a year, reducing to 0.7% depending on fund size, with no contribution charges and no broker in the middle.

If you want your staff out of My Future Fund and into something you chose, it takes one call and less time than the portal registration. [Book a call.]

Employer FAQ

Do I have to register on the My Future Fund employer portal?Yes, if you have eligible employees. Registration is a legal obligation, and it applies even if you intend to provide your own qualifying pension. Register first, then sort the pension question.

Can I be fined for not engaging with auto-enrolment?Yes. The legislation provides for fines of up to €50,000 and imprisonment for breaches. NAERSA has publicly warned that prosecution of unregistered employers is possible.

My staff are already in a company pension. Does auto-enrolment apply to us?If the pension runs through payroll and meets the qualifying minimums (3.5% total contributions, at least 1.5% from the employer), those employees are exempt and will not be enrolled. Staff not in the scheme, or in arrangements outside payroll, are enrolled if eligible.

An employee has a personal PRSA they pay themselves. Are they exempt?No. A PRSA paid outside payroll does not exempt them. The pension must run through your payroll to count. Moving that PRSA into a payroll arrangement with an employer contribution is usually the cleanest fix, and it is exactly what a workplace PRSA is for.

Can I set up my own pension scheme now, or do I have to wait?You can set one up at any point. Once an employee is contributing to a qualifying scheme through payroll, their My Future Fund participation pauses. Anyone who tells you there is a six-month lock before you can act is wrong.

What does a qualifying alternative cost the business?The contributions, and with Zen, nothing else. The employer minimum is 1.5%, the same as the My Future Fund employer rate, and Zen charges the employer no fees on top.

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