Part-Time & Job-Share Teacher Pay Calculator (2026/27)

What this calculator does that a plain take-home calculator doesn't

If you already know your actual annual salary, any decent take-home pay calculator will tell you what lands in your bank account. This one exists because part-time teachers routinely do not know their actual salary — they know a full-time-equivalent figure from a pay scale and a fraction from a contract — and because two specific rules that apply to part-timers are widely misapplied by the people doing the calculating, including by school business managers and payroll providers working in good faith.

The first is the pension contribution tier. The Teachers' Pension Scheme charges member contributions in bands, and the band is charged on your whole pensionable salary rather than marginally on the portion above each threshold. Which figure sets the band therefore matters enormously — and it is your actual pensionable pay in that employment, not the full-time equivalent rate for the post you occupy. Assuming otherwise overcharges part-timers, sometimes by hundreds of pounds a year, and it is a mistake that produces a plausible-looking payslip rather than an obviously broken one.

The second is what happens when you hold more than one contract. Each employment is tiered independently against its own earnings. That means a genuine job share, or two real part-time posts held by the same person, can attract lower total member contributions than a single contract paying the identical amount — while building up precisely the same pension. That is not a loophole; it is the straightforward arithmetic of a banded structure applied to smaller employments, and it has never been available as an interactive tool anywhere we can find. The part-time and job-share guide sets out the mechanics and the Teachers' Pensions guidance behind them in full; this page turns them into something you can put your own numbers into.

How your pro-rata salary is actually worked out

Part-time teachers are placed on exactly the same pay ranges as full-time colleagues. You are not on a separate part-time scale, and you do not progress differently: you sit on a pay point, that pay point has a full-time cash value, and your salary is that value multiplied by your contracted fraction. The STPCD calls this the pro rata principle, and paragraph 40.1 defines it precisely — the proportion of total remuneration corresponding to the hours you are employed during the school's timetabled teaching week, as a proportion of the total hours in that timetabled teaching week, where "total remuneration" means what you would be paid in the same post full-time.

Two things follow from that definition that catch people out. The denominator is the school's timetabled teaching week, not a notional 32.5 hours or whatever the school day happens to look like — so two schools with different timetable structures can produce different fractions for what feels like the same working pattern. And paragraph 40.2 requires the pro rata principle to be applied not only to your normal contracted hours but to any additional hours you agree to work at the headteacher's request, which is the provision to point at if you are regularly asked to cover on a day you are not contracted for.

Whatever fraction comes out of that, the resulting figure is your actual salary — and it is the number that income tax, National Insurance, student loan repayments and, critically, your pension contribution tier are all calculated from. It is the number this calculator works forward from once you enter your FTE salary and fraction.

Which salary sets your pension contribution tier

Teachers' Pension Scheme member contributions are tiered across six salary bands, and because the rate applies to your whole pensionable salary rather than marginally, crossing a band boundary is a genuine cliff edge rather than a gentle slope. The England and Wales bands for 2026/27 are:

Teachers' Pensions' guidance for employers is explicit that the band is set by the member's annual salary rate for a particular employment rather than the full-time equivalent rate for it, with the rate derived from the pensionable earnings actually paid in each pay period. A 0.5 teacher whose post is worth £40,000 full-time has an annual salary rate of £20,000 for tiering purposes, regardless of what a full-timer in that post would earn.

This was a deliberate change made when the career average scheme came in, and it was made for a reason. Under the older arrangement contributions were assessed on the full-time equivalent, which meant a 0.5 teacher could be charged the percentage appropriate to a salary they were not receiving — a straightforwardly regressive outcome that fell hardest on the people least able to absorb it. If you are choosing a nation other than England or Wales in the calculator above, note that the Scottish Teachers' Pension Scheme and the Northern Ireland Teachers' Pension Scheme have their own, different tier tables; the calculator switches to the right one automatically, because these are three separate schemes rather than one UK-wide arrangement.

Worked example: 0.6 FTE on £46,940 full-time equivalent

Take a teacher at the top of the Main Pay Range on the National scale, where the full-time-equivalent salary is £46,940, working 0.6 FTE with no responsibility allowance. Their actual salary is £46,940 × 0.6 = £28,164.

Now the mistake. The full-time-equivalent figure for this post is £46,940, which sits in the 8.9% band. If the tier were wrongly read off that figure, this teacher would be charged 8.9% of their actual £28,164 salary — £2,506.60 a year instead of £2,084.14. The correct treatment is worth £422.46 a year to them, and they accrue exactly the same £494.11 of annual pension either way.

Worth noticing: the tier is a cliff edge, so small changes in fraction can matter more than they look. Going from 0.7 to 0.8 of a well-paid post, or picking up a responsibility allowance, can push your actual pensionable pay across a threshold and lift the rate charged on the whole amount. If you are negotiating a fraction and you are close to a band boundary, it is worth checking both sides of it in the calculator before you agree.

The two-contract comparison, and why it is not obvious

Here is the part that genuinely surprises people. Teachers' Pensions tells employers that where a member has more than one employment in the Scheme, the earnings in each employment separately determine the contribution rate paid for that particular employment, and instructs them to derive the annual salary rate for each employment rather than adding the salaries together and averaging them. The same applies where the two contracts happen to be with the same school.

Apply a banded contribution structure to two smaller employments instead of one larger one and you get a lower blended percentage, for exactly the same total earnings. Using the same £46,940 post: a teacher holding a £28,164 contract and a £18,776 contract has both employments in the 7.4% band, paying £3,473.56 across the year. The same teacher on one contract earning the identical £46,940 is in the 8.9% band and pays £4,177.66 — a difference of £704.10.

The gap widens further up the pay scale, because the bands are further apart there. Two teachers job-sharing a U3 post worth £52,835 full-time each hold a 0.5 contract worth £26,417.50, both in the 7.4% band, contributing £3,909.79 between them. A single full-time holder of the identical post sits in the 9.9% band and contributes £5,230.67 — £1,320.88 more, for the same work, the same total pay, and the same total pension accrued.

One important caveat, and it is the reason the toggle in the calculator is framed as a comparison rather than a recommendation: this is something to understand about a situation you are already in, not something to engineer. Splitting a single substantive post into two artificial contracts to manipulate the tier would be a contrivance, and separate contracts bring real complications around continuity of service, appraisal, directed time and how INSET days are allocated. Use the comparison to check that a genuine job share or two real part-time posts are being tiered correctly — not to design a structure that does not reflect the work.

TLRs for part-timers: what STPCD paragraph 20.7 changed

Until recently, a Teaching and Learning Responsibility payment was pro-rated in line with your contracted fraction in exactly the same way as base pay. That produced a long-standing unfairness that part-time responsibility holders complained about for years: the payment shrank cleanly with the fraction, and the responsibility very often did not. A head of department at 0.6 FTE received 60% of the TLR while remaining accountable for 100% of the department's outcomes, staffing, data and parental communication — including on the two days a week they were not contracted to be there.

The STPCD now addresses this directly. Paragraph 20.6 provided that, from 1 September 2025, relevant bodies may determine the value of any existing or new TLR1 and TLR2 payment based on the proportion of the TLR the teacher is undertaking — the proportion of the full-time equivalent responsibility — and that where a part-time teacher takes on the responsibilities associated with a TLR1 or TLR2, relevant bodies are no longer mandated to use the pro rata principle. Paragraph 20.7 then converts that discretion into an obligation: from 1 September 2026, it becomes a requirement that relevant bodies determine the value of all existing and new TLR1 and TLR2 payments on the proportion of the responsibility undertaken. Paragraph 41.1 still sends salary and every other allowance through the pro rata principle, but explicitly excepts TLRs, and paragraph 41.2 routes them to 20.6–20.8 instead.

That is why the calculator asks for your fraction and the proportion of the responsibility you hold as two separate numbers, defaulting to matching but letting you unlink them. In cash terms on a £49,134 U1 post at 0.6 FTE with a TLR2 of £3,651: the old pro-rata treatment produced a TLR of £2,190.60 and total pensionable pay of £31,671; valuing the same TLR on a full responsibility gives £3,651 and total pensionable pay of £33,131.40 — £1,460.40 of additional gross pay, fully pensionable, for identical work.

Three practical points. First, this cuts both ways: paragraph 20.6 expressly allows a part-time TLR to be awarded to a full-time teacher, which is how a responsibility genuinely shared between two full-timers is meant to be paid. Second, paragraph 20.8 states that the pro rata principle does not apply to any TLR3 award at all — TLR3 is pro-rated to the project's duration, not to anybody's fraction. Third, the STPCD's own wording is that the responsibilities agreed should be capable of being undertaken within the part-time teacher's normal hours, and that the level of payment and the responsibilities should be agreed between the teacher and the employer. That makes the scope of the role a negotiation, in writing, before you accept — which is exactly the conversation the old pro-rata rule made it hard to have. Our TLR payments guide covers the tier thresholds and the negotiation itself in more depth.

What your fraction does and does not affect

It is worth separating two questions that get conflated constantly, because doing so removes a lot of unnecessary anxiety about going part-time.

The projection at the bottom of the calculator's pension panel puts the accrual point in perspective. Career average benefits build up year by year and are revalued each September while you are still working, so a decade at a reduced fraction is not a decade of nothing — it is a decade of proportionally smaller, fully revalued additions to a pot that keeps growing. If you want the full projection with your own salary growth and revaluation assumptions, the Teachers' Pension calculator models it properly.

Before you rely on any of this

Three caveats worth stating plainly. The scale points built into the picker are the confirmed England STPCD figures for 2026/27; Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland set their own pay documents with different values and, in Wales' case, a different range structure entirely, so type your FTE salary in directly if you teach outside England. Academy trusts are not legally bound by the STPCD and can set their own pay points, so check your trust's own pay policy alongside the national figures. And a week's pay, a fraction, and a responsibility proportion are all things your contract should state explicitly — if any of the three is vague or only ever discussed verbally, that is the thing to fix first, before the arithmetic matters at all.