What this calculates, and what it deliberately doesn't
This tool calculates statutory redundancy pay — the legal floor beneath which no qualifying employee's redundancy payment can fall, whoever employs them. It does not attempt to model "enhanced" local authority or academy trust terms as a single formula, and that is a deliberate decision rather than a gap. As our teacher redundancy pay guide sets out, there is no national enhanced formula for teachers: local authority discretionary compensation schemes differ from one authority to the next, and academy trusts set their own policies entirely, ranging from Burgundy Book-style generosity to the bare statutory minimum. Any calculator claiming to produce your "academy redundancy payment" from a couple of inputs is guessing.
What the calculator does instead is give you a statutory figure you can trust, plus two explicit, clearly labelled controls that mirror the two ways real employer policies actually improve on the statutory minimum: waiving the weekly pay cap so your full salary is used, and applying a multiplier to the number of statutory weeks. Set those from your employer's written policy and you get a reliable figure. Guess at them and you get a guess — which is why both are labelled with what to ask HR for.
£751
Statutory weekly pay cap for dismissals on or after 6 April 2026 (England, Wales, Scotland)
The statutory formula, and the mistake almost everyone makes
Statutory redundancy pay is built from three ingredients: your age during each year of service, your number of complete years of continuous service, and your weekly pay. The age bands are:
| Age during that year of service | Weeks' pay per full year |
|---|---|
| Under 22 | 0.5 week |
| 22 to 40 | 1 week |
| 41 and over | 1.5 weeks |
Read that first column carefully, because the wording carries the whole calculation. It says the age you were during that year of service — not the age you are now. The classic error, which appears in online calculators, in HR spreadsheets, and in a great many confident staffroom estimates, is to take your age at dismissal, pick the one band that age falls into, and multiply it by your total length of service. For anyone who crossed 22 or 41 partway through their employment, that materially overstates the payment.
The correct method works backwards from the dismissal date, one complete year at a time, for a maximum of 20 years. Each year is banded by the age you had already reached when that year of service began. So a teacher dismissed at 45 with 10 years' service worked those years between the ages of 35 and 45: four of them at 41 or over, and six at 40 or under.
Only complete years count
Worked example: a teacher dismissed at 45 with 10 years' service
Take a teacher at the top of the Main Pay Range on £46,940, made redundant at 45 after 10 complete years of continuous service. Counting backwards from the dismissal date, the years of service were worked at ages 44 down to 35:
| Band | Years worked in that band | Weeks |
|---|---|---|
| Aged 41 or over | 4 | 4 × 1.5 = 6 |
| Aged 22–40 | 6 | 6 × 1 = 6 |
| Under 22 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 10 | 12 weeks |
Their actual weekly pay is £46,940 ÷ 52 = £902.69, which is above the statutory cap, so the calculation uses £751. Statutory redundancy pay is therefore 12 × £751 = £9,012.00, comfortably under the £30,000 threshold and so paid tax-free and free of National Insurance.
Compare that with the wrong method. Applying the current-age band of 1.5 weeks to all 10 years gives 15 weeks and £11,265.00 — an overstatement of £2,253.00. That is the single most common reason a teacher's own estimate and their employer's calculation disagree, and in our experience the employer is usually right.
Worked example: hitting both caps at once
Now a teacher on U3, £52,835 a year, dismissed at 60 after 28 years at the same school. Two separate caps bite here. First, service is capped at 20 years, so 8 years drop out — from the oldest end, working backwards from dismissal, which is the more favourable treatment because the recent years carry the higher multiplier. Of the 20 years counted, 19 were worked at 41 or over and 1 at 22–40, giving 29.5 weeks.
Second, their actual weekly pay of £1,016.06 is well above the £751 cap. At the capped rate the payment is £22,154.50. Had their employer's policy waived the cap and used their real weekly pay, the same 29.5 weeks would be worth £29,973.70 — a difference of £7,819.20, and the single biggest variable in most teachers' redundancy settlements. It is the first thing to check in your employer's written policy.
Note that the overall maximum of £22,530 is not an independent limit so much as the arithmetic ceiling of the other two: 20 years, all at 41 or over, is 30 weeks, and 30 × £751 is exactly £22,530. It only ever binds when the weekly cap is in force.
Worked example: early-career service under 22
The under-22 band matters less often but is worth showing, because it is the other half of the same trap. A teacher dismissed at 24 with 6 complete years' service — having started at 18 — has 4 years in the 0.5-week band and 2 in the 1-week band, giving 4 weeks rather than the 6 weeks a flat current-age calculation would produce. The principle is identical; only the direction of travel differs.
Local authority terms versus academy trust policy
This is where the national picture stops being national, and it is the reason this calculator hands you the controls rather than pretending to know the answer.
Local authority maintained schools
Teachers at maintained schools are typically employed on terms referencing nationally and locally agreed conditions of service, commonly called the Burgundy Book. Alongside those, most local authorities operate a discretionary compensation policy under the regulations that let local authorities enhance redundancy payments. In practice that usually means one or both of the two things this calculator lets you model: using your actual weekly pay instead of the statutory cap, and applying a multiplier — often somewhere between 1.5 and 2 — to the number of statutory weeks. Some authorities also offer employer-funded early access to pension benefits, which can be worth considerably more than the redundancy payment itself. The detail is set locally and genuinely varies, so the authority's own published policy is the only reliable source.
Academy trusts
Academies employ staff directly and set their own redundancy policies. A trust formed by conversion from a maintained school will often have inherited Burgundy Book-style terms through TUPE at the point of transfer, and many continue to honour them — but TUPE protection can erode over time for matters not specifically and clearly protected, and a trust can, subject to proper process and consultation, change its policy going forward. Our TUPE guide for teachers covers what transfers, what is protected, and what is not. Trusts formed without conversion, or staff appointed after a conversion, may be on trust-specific terms that sit much closer to the statutory minimum from the outset.
The one question that matters most
How redundancy pay is taxed
A genuine redundancy payment is one of the few payments from an employer that is not simply treated as earnings. The first £30,000 is free of income tax, and employee National Insurance is not due on a redundancy payment at all, at any level. Amounts above £30,000 are taxed as income in the tax year of the payment, stacked on top of everything else you have earned that year — which is why the calculator asks for your other taxable pay, and why the marginal rate applied to the excess can be higher than your usual rate if the payment pushes you into a higher band.
Two things commonly get lumped in with "redundancy pay" and should not be. Pay in lieu of notice and accrued untaken holiday pay are normally fully taxable and subject to National Insurance in the ordinary way, and they do not shelter under the £30,000 threshold. If a settlement figure has been quoted to you as a single number, ask for it broken down: the split between the genuinely tax-free redundancy element and the taxable elements can change your net position substantially. And if you leave partway through a tax year, you may well have overpaid tax overall through PAYE and be due a refund — worth checking after the end of the tax year rather than assuming the payroll got it right on the way out.
What to do with the number
A statutory figure is a starting point for a conversation, not a verdict. Three practical steps once you have one. Ask your employer for their calculation in writing, broken down by age band, weekly pay figure and any multiplier, and compare it line by line with the breakdown above — most disagreements resolve as soon as both sides show their working. Get your union involved early rather than late, particularly around selection criteria and consultation process, where the time limits for challenge are short. And treat the pension question as separate and potentially larger: for a teacher in their fifties, employer-funded early access to benefits can dwarf the redundancy payment, and it is a discretionary decision that is much easier to influence during consultation than after it.
If the wider context is useful — what makes a redundancy genuine, how selection and consultation are supposed to work, and what happens to your Teachers' Pension — the teacher redundancy pay guide covers the process end to end, and our piece on why academy trusts are making teachers redundant covers the funding pressures behind the current wave.
Where these figures come from
Frequently asked questions
Why is my statutory redundancy pay lower than other calculators say? +
Almost always because the other calculator applied a single age band to your whole length of service. The statute bands each year of service by how old you were during that particular year, working backwards from your dismissal date — so a 45-year-old with 10 years' service gets 12 weeks, not 15. Only the 4 years they actually worked after turning 41 attract the 1.5 weeks rate; the earlier 6 years attract 1 week each. At the capped weekly rate that is a difference of £2,253, which is exactly the sort of gap that turns into a difficult conversation with HR if you have budgeted on the wrong number.
What is the statutory weekly pay cap for 2026/27? +
For dismissals on or after 6 April 2026, gov.uk states that weekly pay is capped at £751 and the maximum statutory redundancy pay is £22,530 in England, Wales and Scotland. Northern Ireland sets its own limits — nidirect gives a weekly cap of £783 and a maximum of £23,490 — because employment law is transferred rather than reserved there. These figures change every year on 6 April, so check the current ones on gov.uk or nidirect before relying on any estimate, including this one.
Do I need two years' service to get anything? +
For statutory redundancy pay, yes — two years' continuous service with the same employer is the qualifying threshold, and below it the statutory entitlement is nil regardless of age. That does not mean you leave with nothing: contractual notice pay, pay in lieu of notice, and accrued untaken holiday are separate entitlements that do not depend on two years' service, and some employer policies pay a discretionary sum below the statutory threshold. Continuous service also carries across a TUPE transfer, so a maintained school converting to an academy does not reset your clock.
Will my local authority or academy trust pay more than the statutory minimum? +
Possibly, and there is no national answer. Teachers at local authority maintained schools are typically employed on terms referencing nationally and locally agreed conditions — commonly the Burgundy Book — and many local authorities operate discretionary compensation schemes that waive the statutory weekly pay cap, apply a multiplier to the statutory weeks, or both. Academy trusts set their own policies and range from mirroring Burgundy Book-style terms to sitting at the bare statutory minimum. Because those policies vary far too much to model nationally, this calculator gives you the statutory floor and two explicit controls to layer your own employer's terms on top. Get the written policy from HR rather than relying on what a colleague received.
Is redundancy pay taxed? +
The first £30,000 of a genuine redundancy payment is free of income tax and free of employee National Insurance entirely — employee NI is not due on a redundancy payment at any level. Anything above £30,000 is taxed as income, stacked on top of the rest of that tax year's taxable pay, so the marginal rate depends on what else you have earned in the year rather than on the payment in isolation. That is why the calculator asks for your other taxable pay. Note that pay in lieu of notice and accrued holiday pay are treated differently — they are normally fully taxable and NI-able, and do not shelter under the £30,000 threshold.
Does the 20-year cap drop my oldest or my newest years? +
Your oldest. Service is counted backwards from the dismissal date, so the 20 years that count are the most recent 20 — which is also the most favourable outcome for you, because the years nearest to dismissal are the ones carrying the highest age multiplier. A 60-year-old with 28 years' service has 8 years dropped from the far end, and still reaches 29.5 weeks because 19 of the counted years were worked at 41 or over.
Can I access my Teachers' Pension early if I am made redundant? +
Sometimes. If you are over the minimum pension age and have sufficient qualifying service, redundancy can open routes to drawing benefits early — either actuarially reduced to reflect the longer payment period, or in some cases with employer-funded enhancement where the employer chooses to meet the cost. Whether your employer will fund any enhancement is entirely a matter of their own discretionary policy, and it is one of the most valuable things to ask about during consultation. If you are not near retirement age, your benefits are simply preserved and continue to revalue until you claim them normally.
What if I think the figure my employer has offered is wrong? +
Ask for the calculation in writing, broken down into weeks by age band, the weekly pay figure used, and any multiplier applied — not just a single total. Most disputes resolve at that point, because the three commonest errors are visible as soon as the working is shown: banding every year at the current-age rate, using the wrong weekly pay figure, and miscounting complete years. If it does not resolve, raise it formally with union support, and do so promptly — employment tribunal time limits are short.
Related guides
Teacher Redundancy Pay Explained
The full guide: what makes a redundancy genuine, LA versus academy terms, consultation, selection and pension implications.
TUPE for Teachers Explained
What transfers when your school converts or changes employer, and how long protection actually lasts.
Teacher Take-Home Pay Calculator
Work out your current net pay, and your weekly pay figure, before modelling a redundancy.
Teachers' Pension Calculator
See what your career average benefits are worth if you are weighing early access against staying.