Read time: 9 minutes
Sometimes you stumble across a new Workday trick and go “Wait, you can do THAT?!”
Well, this is one of those 🤓
Related Calculations are back!
And this time they’re doing something a bit unhinged 🤪 — bridging the gap from Payroll Lookup Table to calculated fields to make those values reportable.
By the end of this issue, you’ll have a fully dynamic SECURE 2.0 report where Payroll can simply check a box to identify employees subject to mandatory Roth catch-up ☑️
No hardcoded IRS limits or digging through individual payroll results 😎
It's the kind of report Payroll can (should?) run every pay period, year after year.
Let’s get into it.
SECURE 2.0: Who is getting the Roth treatment?
Beginning in 2026, SECURE 2.0 Act (among other things) required employees age 50+ whose prior-year OASDI wages exceeded $150,000 to make their 401(k) catch-up contributions via Roth, regardless of how their elections are set up…
…which means, for employees subject to this requirement, your Payroll team needs to make sure any employee catch-up contributions get properly directed to Roth as their contributions approach the annual limit.
How does Workday account for this?
The IRS limits live inside of Lookup Tables, like this Workday-delivered one:
These Lookup Tables work by returning a specific value based on defined criteria. They’re often used in payroll calculations to determine rates, amounts, or limits without hardcoding every possible value. In case of this SECURE 2.0 Act, these values and criteria and maintained by Workday for you.
Now that’s nice and all, but how can Payroll identify that catch-up contributions are being directed to Roth for the right employees without checking each employee’s individual payroll results?
By making a custom report on the worker business object, of course!
Not so fast… lookup tables aren’t directly reportable
The challenge is that Workday’s report fields — and any calc fields you create — can't directly reference values stored in payroll lookup tables.
But!
There’s a workaround that lets you get at these values “round-aboutly” 😂 via some strategic payroll config and nested calc fields.
That’s what you build here.
This is where the good stuff lives.
Free builds awareness. Premium fills all the gaps 🦄
Below:
How to pull values typically locked inside payroll lookup tables into your custom reports and calc fields.
Find every mandatory Roth catch-up employee with a single checkbox as a custom report prompt.
Reuse this calc-engine-to-worker workaround for other cases across your tenant!
Plus everything else in Premium:
⭐️ Release Ratings & Reviews
🔐 Full archive access
🗳️ A say in what gets built
