Government-backed workplace pension scheme the National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) saw a record of more than 8,350 new employer sign-ups in the last week of January.
This is because the staging period ended on 1 February, which means that the last companies to join auto-enrolment had to do so by then.
Nick Sex, chief operating officer at Nest, who disclosed these numbers, said there was still sometime before the staging process can be considered complete.
He said: "Once registered, employers still have to enrol their workers, submit schedules of what the contributions will be for their workers, and then process these payments. This will take time to be fully completed and transition to a more steady-state."
The staging dates started with the largest firms, moving onto the medium-sized firms and to the smallest employers, who had getting ready to comply with their 2018 staging date.
Employers paying PAYE income for the first time between July to September 2017 were the last ones to join auto-enrolment, with the duty to enrol their workers in a workplace scheme by 1 February 2018.
Nest wasn’t the only provider seeing an increase in new sign-ups.
Smart Pension, with almost half a million members, saw the number of new employers signing up to the scheme doubling in January.
Nevertheless, Claire Altman, head of financial services at the workplace provider, didn't believe this increase was due to the last phase of staging.
She said: “It was just circumstantial. We get company sign-ups through financial advisers, and it was that in that particular month an adviser came on board with a lot of extra companies. We haven't seen a trend.”
Now: Pensions and The People’s Pension declined to provide details on their January numbers.
In December, Nest was already seeing high numbers of new sign ups, as it was processing up to 1,500 new employers a day.
In the same period, the workplace scheme also reached a new milestone, surpassing 6m members.
This is 1.5m members more than it had at the end of March, according to figures from its annual report.
Nest is now getting ready for the next phase of auto-enrolment, which will see the minimum total contribution – now at 2 per cent - increase to 5 per cent in April, with the employee paying 3 per cent.
One year later, it will increase again to 8 per cent, with the worker paying 5 per cent.
A total of £17bn a year will be going into workplace pensions by 2019 to 2020 because of auto-enrolment.
Mr Sex said: "While it’s important to take the time to step back and look at what we’ve achieved, the hard work continues.
"We have a fantastic platform for future development now that employers and workers are involved in pension provision. It’s important that we build on this success, which is why Nest is gearing up for phasing and we’re looking forward to what the future holds."
Introduced in 2012, auto-enrolment has now reached nine million people, with opt-out rates of less than 10 per cent.
According to official figures, 1m employers have now enrolled their staff into a workplace pension through auto-enrolment.
maria.espadinha@ft.com
