If you run a Long Island business with ten or more employees, have been operating for at least two years, and do not offer a retirement plan, you had a legal deadline this year to register for one. Depending on your headcount, it fell in March, in May, or on July 15. All three have now passed.

This is the least-discussed compliance obligation to hit small employers in New York in years, and the reason is not hard to identify: nothing about it is dramatic. There is no new tax, no employer contribution, no filing with a penalty printed on the form. It is a registration, and registrations are exactly the sort of thing that gets postponed until someone mentions them.

Who it applies to

Three conditions, all of which have to be true.

Ten or more employees in New York. In business for at least two years. And no qualified retirement plan already offered to those employees.

If you already offer a plan, a 401(k) or anything else qualified, you are not required to participate. You are required to certify that exemption, which is a different thing from ignoring the letter.

The three deadlines

The state staggered registration by employer size. Employers with 30 or more New York employees were due by March 18, 2026. Those with 15 to 29 employees were due by May 15. Those with 10 to 14 employees were due by July 15.

If yours has passed and you have not registered, the guidance from every direction is the same: register now. As of this writing the state has not publicly announced the specific penalties for non-compliance, which is a genuinely unsatisfying sentence to have to write. It is not a reason to wait. An unannounced penalty schedule is not the same as no penalty schedule, and the obligation itself is statutory, sitting in Article 43 of the General Business Law.

What you are actually signing up to do

This is the part worth reading closely, because the mechanics are lighter than the phrase "state retirement mandate" suggests.

The accounts are Roth Individual Retirement Accounts, funded by the employee through payroll deduction. Enrollment is automatic, at a default contribution of 3 percent of gross wages. Employees can change that rate, choose a different investment option, or opt out entirely, at any time.

The employer does not contribute. The employer does not select investments and does not advise anyone on them. What the employer does is register, run the deduction through payroll, and hand out the paperwork.

On that last point there are specific timing requirements. Informational materials have to go to employees at least one month before you begin facilitating the program, and to new employees at the time of hiring. Payroll deductions do not start until 30 days after an employee is enrolled, which is the window in which they can opt out before any money moves.

How to register

Registration happens through the program's online portal, and it takes two things: your federal employer identification number, and a unique access code issued by the program administrator.

That access code is the detail that catches people. It arrives by email or letter from the program, and you cannot complete registration without it. If it was sent to a general inbox in the spring and never opened, or went to an address that is no longer monitored, that is a very common reason a business is out of compliance without knowing it.

The program is at securechoice.ny.gov. The Secure Choice Savings Program Board can be reached at 518-486-1263 or [email protected], and requesting a replacement access code is a routine thing to ask for.

The rest of what changed for Long Island employers this year

Secure Choice did not arrive alone, and if you are auditing your payroll anyway, these are the numbers to check against it.

The minimum wage for New York City, Long Island and Westchester rose to $17.00 an hour on January 1, 2026, with the rest of the state at $16.00 and inflation-linked adjustments beginning in 2027.

The salary threshold for the executive and administrative exemptions in this region rose to $1,275.00 a week, which annualizes to $66,300. Any salaried employee below that is not exempt, whatever their title says, and misclassification at the boundary is one of the more expensive errors available to a small employer.

The Paid Family Leave employee contribution for 2026 is 0.432 percent of gross wages per pay period, capped at $411.91 for the year. Employees earning below the state average weekly wage of $1,833.63 contribute less than the cap.

Why this one is worth the half hour

Long Island runs on small employers. Forty local businesses splitting $200,000 in grants is a story here precisely because the scale of the average payroll is small enough for $5,000 to matter.

Which is also the argument for the mandate. A business with twelve employees rarely has the administrative capacity to stand up a retirement plan, and so its employees have historically had nothing. Secure Choice is the state deciding that the plan should exist without the employer having to build or fund it.

Reasonable people disagree about whether the state should be in this business. Nobody disagrees about the deadline, and the last one was two weeks ago.