Ireland’s Department of Social Protection (DSP) has confirmed it will publish the tender for the asset management of the government’s upcoming automatic enrolment (AE) pension scheme this week.

The DSP previously stated that it will award contracts to four investment management firms and plans to offer a high-risk, medium-risk and low-risk investment strategy to savers, with a default fund for those who do not make an active decision.

The long-awaited AE scheme, which will be known as My Future Fund, is still expected to launch on 30 September 2025 after facing several setbacks. In July last year, the bill for the scheme was finally passed by the Dáil.

The DSP has already secured Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to administrate the scheme, under the guise of the National Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings Authority (NAERSA). It signed a 15-year contract with TCS in October 2024 to implement and run the country’s AE scheme.

Around 800,000 workers are expected to be enrolled into the My Future Fund pension scheme. Under the scheme, people aged between 23 and 60 who do not have a pension scheme and are earning more than €20,000 a year will be auto-enrolled into the new system.

For every €3 a worker puts into their auto-enrolment pension scheme, their employer will also contribute €3 and the state will top it up by €1.

Contribution rates will increase gradually as the scheme progresses, with employees contributing 1.5 per cent of their gross salary during the first three years of enrolment.

This will rise to 3 per cent from the fourth year, to 4.5 per cent from the seventh year, before reaching the top employee contribution rate of 6 per cent from the 10th year. Employer and state contributions rise in line with this, resulting in total contributions of 14 per cent of an employee’s gross salary from the 10th year onwards.

Ireland is the only OECD country that does not yet operate an auto-enrolment or similar system as a means of promoting pension savings.

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