SECURE 2.0 Act Section 603 Catch-Up Eligibility Update

We have enhanced the Start-of-Year process to include support for SECURE 2.0 Act Section 603 catch-up eligibility updates.  You no longer need to manually manage the Eligible for Pretax Age Catch-Up field on the employee Reporting Information cards.

The process derives a single eligibility outcome per payroll relationship.

To configure Section 603 catch-up eligibility processing:

  1. Open the payroll statutory unit (PSU) organization calculation card, and select the Benefits component.
  2. In SECURE 603 High Earner Evaluation Level, select the evaluation level.
  • Payroll statutory unit

This is the default.

  • Tax reporting unit (TRU)
  • Tax group
  1. Run the Start-of-Year process using the SECURE 603 Catch-Up Eligibility Update data type.
  2. Review results in Draft mode before running the process in Final mode.

  • Reduces manual maintenance of SECURE 603 pretax catch-up eligibility.
  • Helps automate annual high-earner evaluation processing.
  • Improves consistency between payroll processing and SECURE 603 requirements.
  • Supports audit and review activities through process output and warning messages.
  • Supports rerun processing for retroactive wage corrections.

Steps to enable and configure

You don't need to do anything to enable this feature.

Tips and considerations

  • When you run the Start-of-Year processing, it:
  1. Evaluates employees according to the SECURE 603 high-earner evaluation level you selected.
  2. Determines high-earner status.
  3. When you run the process in Draft mode, provides preview results for your review.
  4. When you run it in Final mode, updates Eligible for Pretax Age Catch-Up on the employee Reporting Information cards.
  5. Generates audit and warning details in the process output in both modes.
  • The process doesn’t consider wages aggregated across multiple PSUs or multiple payroll relationships in its evaluations.
  • If an employee exceeds the threshold in any evaluated TRU or tax group, the process treats them as a high earner for the entire payroll relationship.
  • The process only updates Eligible for Pretax Age Catch-Up. It doesn’t create or manage employee elections.
  • Current-year manually maintained values are protected from overwrite during reruns.
  • You may need to continue to manually set the Eligible for Pretax Age Catch-Up value if your organization can’t easily be mapped to your EIN by PSU, TRU, or tax group, you may need to perform manual maintenance, such as:
    • PSU includes multiple employer EINs
    • One EIN is split across multiple TRUs that aren’t represented by a single tax group
    • You're using tax groups for payroll reporting, but they don’t match your EIN assignments for the retirement plan