Nevada's Retirement Plan Mandate: What Employers With Six Or More People Must Do
Quick Answer
- Nevada law requires an employer with more than five employees in this State that has been in business at least 36 months to facilitate the Nevada Employee Savings Trust, unless the employer already maintains a tax-favored retirement plan.
- An employer that maintained a qualifying retirement plan at any time in the current calendar year or the three immediately preceding calendar years is exempt and certifies that exemption rather than registering.
- The Nevada Employee Savings Trust enrolls covered employees in a Roth IRA at a default rate of 5 percent of compensation, escalating 1 percent each January to a maximum of 10 percent.
- Nevada publishes no non-compliance penalty amount. NRS Chapter 353D contains no fine, assessment, or enforcement provision, and penalty figures circulating online belong to other states' programs.
- The Nevada Employee Savings Trust is capped by the 2026 IRA limit of $7,500, while a 401(k) permits elective deferrals of $24,500 in 2026 plus employer contributions, per IRS Notice 2025-67.
Most Las Vegas business owners found out about this from a piece of mail they assumed was junk. A state envelope, an access code, a deadline, and a program name nobody recognized.
It was not junk. Nevada now requires most employers of a certain size to give their workers a way to save for retirement through payroll, and the obligation is already in force. What follows is who it covers, what it actually asks of an employer, and the part almost nobody explains honestly: what the state program is good for and where it stops.
Which Nevada businesses does the retirement mandate actually cover?
Nevada applies the requirement to an employer with more than five persons employed in this State that has been in business at least 36 months. Six employees and three years is the shorthand, and both conditions have to be true at once.
There is a third condition that takes most companies straight back out again. An employer that maintained a tax-favored retirement plan at any time in the current calendar year or the three immediately preceding calendar years is not a covered employer. A business that already runs a 401(k), a SIMPLE IRA, or a SEP is exempt, and the practical effect of the exemption is a certification rather than a registration. The full definition sits in NRS Chapter 353D[1], the chapter created by Senate Bill 305 of the 2023 session[2].
Exempt is not the same as finished. The state sends the same notice either way, and an employer that already has a plan still has to log in and say so. Ignoring the letter because the business has a 401(k) leaves the company sitting in the unregistered column of a state database.
What counts as a covered employee
A covered employee under NRS 353D.060[1] is someone employed by a covered employer for not less than 120 days, aged 18 or older, whose wages are allocable to Nevada. Railway Labor Act employees, workers under a Taft-Hartley plan, and government employees are excluded.
One detail the statute does not settle is how the six-employee count gets measured. Nevada has not published a counting method, a measurement date, or a full-time-equivalent formula. A business hovering at five or six people, which describes a great many Clark County operations, is in genuinely ambiguous territory and should ask the program directly rather than assume. A seasonal staffing pattern makes that worse, and Las Vegas is full of employers whose headcount swings with the convention calendar. The related question of when headcount changes the benefits picture generally is covered in how many employees are needed for group health insurance.
What are the registration deadlines, and have they already passed?
Both published deadlines are behind us, which is the part that confuses people reading old pages. Nevada ran an initial registration wave covering roughly 14,000 employers with a deadline of September 1, 2025, then an annual wave for newly eligible employers that closed June 30, 2026.
No deadline has been published for 2027. Worth knowing why that is less reassuring than it sounds: NRS Chapter 353D contains no registration deadline at all. Every date attached to this program is administrative, set by the NEST Board of Trustees and its administrator, while the statutory duty to facilitate the program is continuous. A business that crossed the six-employee and 36-month thresholds last month is a covered employer now, with no date to wait for.
Two of the Nevada State Treasurer’s own pages still display “register by September 1, 2025,” which is a year stale. The current employer guidance lives on the program site rather than the Treasurer’s marketing pages, and an employer checking status should trust the program portal over either.
What is the Nevada Employee Savings Trust?
The Nevada Employee Savings Trust, called NEST, is a state-facilitated payroll deduction retirement program. Covered employees are automatically enrolled and the money goes into an individual retirement account in the employee’s own name.
The default account is a Roth IRA, with a traditional IRA available by employee election. Employees are enrolled at a default contribution rate of 5 percent of compensation, which increases automatically by 1 percent each January until it reaches a maximum of 10 percent. An employee has 30 days from the enrollment notice to opt out, and may opt out at any time afterward without penalty. The program’s own employer program details page[3] lays out the mechanics, and the NEST FAQ sheet[4] published by the Nevada State Treasurer covers the eligibility test.
The default rate is stickier than anyone expects. Program administrators reported an observed average contribution rate of roughly 5 percent, which is to say almost nobody moves the dial in either direction.
What the employer actually has to do
Four things, and none of them involve picking investments. Register or certify exemption using the access code tied to the business EIN, maintain the employee roster as people are hired and leave, run the payroll deductions, and remit what was withheld.
The remittance deadline is the one with a number attached. NRS 353D.310 requires contributions to be remitted not later than 10 business days after the date the amounts otherwise would have been paid to the employee. Beyond that, the employer is explicitly not a fiduciary of the program under NRS 353D.320, may not make matching or any employer contributions, and may not advise employees on IRA eligibility or investment choices.
There is no employer fee. Savers pay the program’s costs, currently a $26 annual account fee plus asset-based fees running between 0.223 and 0.31 percent depending on the investment option chosen.
For a business already outsourcing payroll, this is a configuration task. For a business running payroll on a spreadsheet and a bank login, it is one more recurring obligation with a statutory deadline attached, which is the calculus worked through in PEO versus payroll service versus DIY and in when should a business outsource payroll.
What happens if a Nevada employer never registers?
Nevada has published no penalty amount, and that deserves saying plainly because nearly every article on this subject implies otherwise. NRS Chapter 353D contains no fine, no civil action, no assessment, and no enforcement provision of any kind.
The program FAQ describes no consequence. The employer pages state only that eligible employers are required by law to facilitate NEST. The NEST Board of Trustees materials describe a compliance strategy built entirely on outreach, mailings and phone campaigns to employers who have not responded. The per-employee-per-year penalty figures that circulate in payroll marketing belong to California, Illinois and Colorado, whose programs do carry statutory fines. Nevada’s does not.
That is not a reason to skip it. The obligation is statutory whether or not a penalty is attached, the state maintains a database of who has and has not complied, and an unresolved compliance item is exactly the sort of thing that surfaces at the worst moment in a sale, a financing conversation, or a due diligence request. It also does nothing for a business trying to hold onto people, which is the actual argument made in do employee benefits reduce turnover.
How many Nevada employers have actually registered?
Fewer than half have resolved their status, and the state publishes the numbers. NEST Board of Trustees materials dated April 15, 2026, report figures as of March 31, 2026: 14,526 employers identified as potentially covered, 3,039 registered, and 4,269 certified as exempt.
That leaves roughly 7,200 Nevada employers who have neither registered nor certified. On the saver side the same report counts 20,129 funded accounts holding $11.1 million, an average balance of $552 and an average monthly contribution of $157, which is what a program two years into its life looks like when the default rate is 5 percent and almost nobody adjusts it.
For an owner who assumed everyone else had this handled, that data is genuinely useful context. It also means the outreach is not finished. The same board materials describe paper mailings to thousands of employers who never opened the email, telephone follow-up, and further out-of-compliance communications, alongside a Paychex payroll API integration targeted for the first half of 2026 and a plan to add a NEST registration question to the Secretary of State’s annual business registration form. The mechanism that eventually reaches an unregistered employer is administrative persistence, not a fine.
But an employer deciding what to do deserves the real reason, and the real reason is the gap in the next section, not a threatened fine.
How does the state program compare with a real 401(k)?
The gap is large and it is a contribution limit problem, not a quality problem. The Nevada Employee Savings Trust is an individual retirement account, so it lives under the IRA ceiling, while a 401(k) lives under a much higher one.
Per IRS Notice 2025-67, announced November 13, 2025[5], the 2026 figures are these.
| Nevada Employee Savings Trust | 401(k) | |
|---|---|---|
| Employee contribution limit, 2026 | $7,500 | $24,500 |
| Catch-up, age 50 and older | $1,100 | $8,000 |
| Additional catch-up, ages 60 to 63 | none | $11,250 |
| Employer match permitted | No | Yes |
| Employer tax credits available | No | Yes |
An employee who wants to save seriously hits the NEST ceiling in the first quarter and has nowhere to put the rest through payroll. An owner who wants to reward a long-tenured manager cannot contribute a dollar. And the federal credits built to offset the cost of starting a real plan do not apply to a state program, which is the subject of the small business retirement plan tax credits guide.
Where the state program genuinely wins
For a business that was never going to sponsor a plan, NEST is a real improvement over nothing, and the comparison that matters there is not against a 401(k) but against an employee with no retirement account at all. It costs the employer nothing, carries no fiduciary duty, and requires no plan document.
That is a legitimate answer for a six-person shop with thin margins. It is a poor answer for a business with retention problems, owners who want to shelter their own income, or a payroll large enough that the federal startup credits would cover most of the setup cost. Which of those describes a given company is the entire question, and it is worth an hour before defaulting into the state program by inaction.
ProtectHealth is an official Paychex partner, which means the retirement mandate, payroll, HR and the employee benefits strategy sitting on top of all three get mapped in one conversation instead of four vendor calls.
Book An Employer Strategy ConversationWhat should a Clark County employer do this month?
Four steps, in order, and the first one takes about ten minutes.
Find out which column the business is in. Registered, certified exempt, or unresponsive. The access code arrived by mail and email tied to the EIN. If nobody can find it, the program can reissue it.
If the business already has a plan, certify the exemption rather than ignoring the notice. An exempt employer that never responds is indistinguishable from a non-compliant one in the state’s data.
Count the employees honestly, including part-time staff. Nevada has not published a counting method, so a business near the threshold should ask the program rather than interpret the statute on its own.
Before defaulting into the state program, price a real plan once. The federal startup credits are significant enough to change the answer for many businesses of exactly this size, and the comparison only has to be run a single time.
We are insurance nerds, not tax professionals. Whether a specific business is a covered employer, how its headcount is counted, and which retirement structure fits its tax position are questions for a licensed tax professional and a qualified retirement plan advisor. What belongs here is making sure the question gets asked before a default answer gets chosen by silence.
Employers weighing the rest of the picture will find the benefits side in the small business benefits playbook, the payroll tax angle in how a Section 125 plan cuts employer payroll tax, the warning signs that a business has outgrown its administration in the HR warning signs checklist, and the full decision framework in the ProtectHealth buyer’s guide.
The product should serve the strategy, not become the strategy. A state-run Roth IRA is a product. Deciding what a business is actually trying to accomplish for the people who work there, and only then choosing the vehicle, is the strategy.
Sources
- Nevada Legislature — NRS Chapter 353D
- Nevada Legislature — Senate Bill 305 of the 2023 session
- nest.nv.gov — employer program details page
- nevadatreasurer.gov — NEST FAQ sheet
- Internal Revenue Service — IRS Notice 2025-67, announced November 13, 2025
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Nevada employers are covered by the retirement mandate?
Nevada law applies the requirement to an employer with more than five persons employed in this State that has been in business at least 36 months. An employer that maintained a tax-favored retirement plan at any time in the current calendar year or the three immediately preceding calendar years is not a covered employer under NRS 353D.070.
What is the Nevada Employee Savings Trust?
The Nevada Employee Savings Trust, known as NEST, is the state-facilitated retirement savings program created by Senate Bill 305 of the 2023 legislative session and codified at NRS Chapter 353D. Covered employees are automatically enrolled in an individual retirement account funded by payroll deduction, with a 30-day window to opt out.
Is there a penalty for not registering for the Nevada Employee Savings Trust?
Nevada has published no penalty amount. NRS Chapter 353D contains no fine, civil action, or enforcement provision, and neither the program FAQ nor the NEST Board of Trustees materials describe an assessment mechanism. Per-employee penalty figures found online come from other states' programs, not from Nevada.
Can a Nevada employer contribute to an employee's NEST account?
No. The Nevada Employee Savings Trust does not permit employer matching or any employer contributions, and NRS 353D.320 states the employer is not a fiduciary of the program. An employer that wants to contribute toward employee retirement needs a qualified plan such as a 401(k) instead.
How much can an employee save in NEST compared with a 401(k)?
The Nevada Employee Savings Trust is an individual retirement account, so it is capped at the IRA limit of $7,500 for 2026, or $8,600 for savers age 50 and older. A 401(k) permits elective deferrals of $24,500 for 2026 plus catch-up contributions and employer contributions, per IRS Notice 2025-67.
What's the next step?
Nevada mandates retirement access, the federal credits that offset a real plan are generous, and pre-tax premiums cut employer payroll tax. ProtectHealth is an official Paychex partner, so the whole employer picture gets mapped in one conversation.
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ProtectHealth brokers are insurance professionals, not tax professionals. Nothing on this page implies every self-employed person or business automatically qualifies for any specific structure. Eligibility depends on business structure, income, and household situation. When tax or business structure enters the conversation, a brief chat with a licensed tax professional is a make-sense next step.