Teacher Pay Point & Progression Calculator (2026/27)

Step 1: which pay point would I be on?

The England main pay range has six points, M1 to M6, and the structure is intended to be walked one point a year: a teacher starting as an early career teacher on M1 reaches M6 in their sixth year. That gives a simple lookup — completed years of service to scale point — which is what the first half of this tool does, for each of the four English pay regions.

The honest framing matters, though, so it is worth stating twice. Progression up the main pay range is not automatic. The STPCD ties it to a successful annual appraisal against your school's pay policy, and a school can decline progression where the appraisal outcome does not support it. In practice most teachers meeting their objectives progress each year, which is why the lookup is a genuinely useful reference point — but it tells you the point you would be on if nothing interrupted annual progression, not the point you are entitled to.

The second caveat is bigger in scope than most teachers realise: academies and free schools are not bound by the STPCD at all. A multi-academy trust can set its own pay scale with different point values, a different number of points, or no scale structure at all. Many trusts choose to mirror the national scales, and some publish that commitment in their pay policy, but it is a choice rather than a legal requirement. If you work in an academy, treat the figures here as the national benchmark you are comparing your trust's scale against — which is a useful thing to know at appointment or appraisal — rather than as your own pay scale.

The England main and upper pay ranges for 2026/27

These are the confirmed STPCD figures, effective from 1 September 2026, following the government's acceptance of the STRB's recommendations in full on 1 July 2026 (a 3.5% uplift across all ranges).

Why your actual point and your years of service often disagree

A mismatch between the lookup and your pay statement is common and usually has a mundane explanation. The most frequent causes, roughly in order of how often they come up:

• You work in an academy with its own pay scale, as above — the single most common reason the national figures do not match a payslip.
• You work part-time. Your pay is the full-time point value multiplied by your full-time equivalent fraction, but the point itself is the same. Progression is not slowed by working part-time.
• You were appointed above M1. Schools have discretion to recognise relevant prior experience — including overseas teaching, relevant non-teaching experience, or previous service — when setting a starting point, and are not obliged to start every new teacher at the bottom.
• A period of your service did not count. Supply work, a career break, or a year in a non-teaching role can leave a gap between "years since I qualified" and "years of service that counted toward progression".
• You moved schools. A new school sets your pay on appointment. It will normally match your existing point and many do so as a matter of policy, but there is no automatic portability of a scale point between employers — it is a matter for negotiation at the point of appointment.
• You are past M6. There is no seventh main range point. Once at the top of the main range, further movement requires a successful upper pay range application, which is why the lookup stops there.

Step 2: what a different route is actually worth

The second half of the tool answers a question teachers ask constantly and that is almost never answered with real numbers: is it worth applying for the upper pay range, or taking on a TLR, and by how much? The instinct is to compare gross figures — "U1 is about £2,200 more than M6" — which overstates the immediate benefit, and to ignore the pension entirely, which understates the long-run one.

Why the output is a difference and never a total

There is a category of career earnings calculator that will happily tell you that you will earn £1.8 million over your career. Those numbers are close to meaningless. To produce one you have to assume pay awards for thirty years, continuous full-time service, no career break, no change of sector or nation, and a specific progression timeline — and each of those assumptions compounds into the headline. Change the assumed award from 2% to 3% and the total moves by a six-figure sum.

A differential behaves far better. If both scenarios assume the same pay awards and the same service, the award assumption largely cancels between them, and what survives is the thing you actually wanted to know: the gap between two routes. That is why this tool reports only the gap, in 2026/27 money with no future awards assumed at all, and why it will not show you a career total even though it computes the underlying year-by-year figures to do so.

The pension value of a TLR — the half of the decision nobody does

This is the genuinely underserved part of the question, and it is the reason the tool reports two numbers for each scenario rather than one. A TLR is fully pensionable. The Teachers' Pension Scheme career average arrangement adds 1/57th of each year's pensionable pay to the annual pension you will eventually be paid for life, and a TLR is part of pensionable pay. Every year you hold one, you permanently add roughly 1.75% of its value to your retirement income.

Take a concrete example the calculator will reproduce: a teacher starting on M1 in the rest of England, compared over ten years, who takes on a TLR2 at its statutory minimum of £3,651 from year four and holds it for the remaining seven years. Against the identical baseline of main range progression alone, that scenario is worth about £14,654 more in cumulative take-home pay over the decade — and it also builds about £448 a year of additional career average pension, payable for life from retirement. On a plain twenty-year retirement that second figure is worth approximately £9,000 in today's money, before any revaluation or indexation is applied to it.

The point is not that the pension value makes every TLR worth taking. Workload, the reviewability of the role, and whether it is work you want to be doing are all real considerations, and the TLR calculator exists to show you how little of the gross figure reaches your bank account each month — typically 55–68%. The point is that the two effects run in opposite directions, and most people only ever see the first one. A TLR is worth less than the headline in immediate cash and more than the headline over a lifetime, and you should be weighing both halves.

The upper pay range comparison

Scenario B works the same way for a threshold application. Crossing from M6 to U1 in the rest of England is a gross step of about £2,194, and whether you then move up through U2 and U3 — and how quickly — depends entirely on your school's pay policy, because the STPCD sets no national interval for upper pay range progression. That is why the tool asks you for the interval instead of assuming one, and why its default is "stay on U1, no further progression assumed": the most conservative assumption available, rather than the most flattering.

One structural difference between the two routes is worth keeping in mind when reading the comparison. An upper pay range point is a judgement about you as a teacher and is not tied to a particular duty, so it does not disappear if your responsibilities change. A TLR is attached to a specific post: it is reviewable, it can be withdrawn if the role ends, and it generally does not transfer with you to a new school. The calculator models both as continuing for the rest of the comparison period, which is the more generous treatment for the TLR scenario — if there is a realistic chance the responsibility ends after three years, model it over three years and see what the difference looks like then.

What to do with the comparison

The most useful application is a negotiation or a decision you are already facing, not idle curiosity. Three concrete uses:

Deciding whether to apply for the upper pay range this year or next. Set the crossing year to this year in one run and to two years' time in another. The difference between those two differentials is what a delay actually costs you — and because the effect persists for every subsequent year, it is usually larger than people expect.

Weighing a TLR offer. Put the specific figure you have been offered into Scenario C rather than the band minimum. TLR bands are wide — TLR2 runs from £3,651 to £8,913, and where in that range a school sets an award is genuinely negotiable — so the band label alone tells you very little.

Sanity-checking a move. If you are considering a role in a different region, the lookup will show you the same point's value in Fringe, Outer London and Inner London, which is often a larger difference than any progression step. Weigh it against the cost of living where the job is, obviously, but know the number.