Academy Trust CEO Pay Explained: The £174,000 Threshold

What the 2024-25 accounts actually show

Academy trusts are charitable companies. Like any charitable company they file annual accounts, and those accounts carry a statutory disclosure note listing higher-paid employees in £10,000 bands. That single reporting requirement is the reason the sector's executive pay is one of the most heavily scrutinised areas of public sector remuneration in England — it is simply possible to collect it, at scale, in a way that most comparable pay data is not.

On 9 July 2026, Schools Week published an analysis of more than a thousand of those trust accounts covering the 2024-25 financial year. Its headline finding was that 182 trusts paid their chief executive at least £175,000, and that 90% of those chief executives had received a pay rise in the year. The three highest disclosed packages were Sir Dan Moynihan at the Harris Federation, reported at a minimum of £530,000; Simon Beamish at Leigh Academies Trust, at a minimum of £380,000; and Dayo Olukoshi at Brampton Manor Trust, at a minimum of £350,000.

Those "at least" formulations are not journalistic hedging. Because the disclosure is banded, a trust reporting a chief executive in the £530,000 to £540,000 band produces a figure of "at least £530,000" and nothing more precise. It is worth carrying that limitation through every number on this page: the underlying data is a set of £10,000 bands, not a payroll extract, and whether employer pension contributions are included varies with how an individual trust presents its note.

The shape of the 182 is as interesting as the size. They are not uniformly enormous organisations. The trusts in that group run an average of around twelve schools each, but 32 of them run five schools or fewer, and twelve are single-academy trusts — one school, one chief executive, a package above £175,000. A great deal of the public argument about trust executive pay treats it as a question about a handful of very large chains; the distribution suggests it is at least as much a question about how small trusts benchmark themselves.

The new controls, in plain terms

The Academy Trust Handbook is the Department for Education's compliance document for academy trusts. It is not legislation in the ordinary sense — it takes effect because every trust's funding agreement with the Secretary of State requires compliance with it — but in practical terms a "must" in the handbook is as binding on a trust as a statutory duty, because breaching it puts the funding agreement in play.

The Academy Trust Handbook 2026 was published on 15 July 2026 and takes effect from 1 October 2026. It introduces two executive pay provisions that between them represent the most significant intervention in trust leadership pay since the sector began.

Why this is an approval gate, not a cap

Almost every piece of coverage, including some from people who should know better, describes £174,000 as a cap. It is not, and the distinction matters a great deal if you are a trust leader, a trustee, or a candidate looking at an executive vacancy.

The practical consequence is that the 182 chief executives already paid at or above the threshold are not affected by paragraph 2.34 at all while they remain in post. What changes is what happens when they leave. A trust that has been paying £250,000 and now needs to recruit a successor cannot simply re-advertise at £250,000; it has to approach the Department first and demonstrate that the figure is defensible, transparent and proportionate. The mechanism works by attrition, which means its real effect will take several years to appear in the accounts.

The maintained school anomaly

Here is the part of this story that has been reported far less than it deserves, and which has genuine consequences for anyone weighing up a senior leadership move.

The Academy Trust Handbook binds academy trusts. It does so through funding agreements between trusts and the Secretary of State. A community school, a foundation school, a voluntary aided school or a maintained special school is not an academy trust, has no funding agreement of that kind, and is therefore entirely outside the handbook's scope. Its headteacher's pay is governed by the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document instead — which contains real controls, but nothing resembling a £174,000 threshold and no requirement to consult the Department for Education about anything.

On 17 July 2026, Tes published an analysis identifying at least ten local authority maintained school leaders already paid above £174,000. The named examples included:

Alongside the named individuals, Tes identified two senior school leaders in Barking and Dagenham in a £225,000 to £239,000 band (a figure which, on that authority's disclosure basis, includes employer pension contributions), and unnamed school employees in Croydon, Enfield and Hackney in bands between £175,000 and £185,000. It also reported that nearly 330 state school headteachers nationally earned over £150,000.

Read those two datasets together and the position is genuinely striking. From 1 October 2026, a multi-academy trust running twenty schools cannot advertise a chief executive post at £180,000 without asking the Department for Education first. A single local authority maintained secondary school, two boroughs away, can pay its headteacher £244,901 and needs to ask nobody. The same Secretary of State funds both.

The sector's objection to this is not primarily about fairness to chief executives. It is about the incentive structure the anomaly creates. As one leader quoted by Tes put it: "Why, as a well-paid headteacher, would you want to step up into a CEO role with no additional money or, in some cases, less?" If the pay control applies to the sector the Government is actively encouraging schools to join, and not to the sector it is encouraging them to leave, the control works against the structural policy.

Why the year-on-year comparison is harder than it looks

You will find confident claims that the number of £200,000-plus academy chief executives has risen, or fallen, depending on which pair of investigations someone has placed side by side. We have deliberately not presented a single trend line here, because the published investigations do not use a consistent sample, and treating them as a time series produces results that are simply wrong.

To show the problem concretely, here is what the different analyses actually examined:

The 2022 analysis looked at a deliberately selected group of 258 trusts that had previously received government letters about high pay — in other words, a sample chosen precisely because it was likely to contain high earners. The 2024 analysis covered around 400 trusts. The 2026 analyses covered roughly 1,100. A count of "CEOs above £200,000" drawn from a 258-trust purposive sample and a count drawn from an 1,100-trust near-census are not measuring the same population, and the difference between them is dominated by sample size rather than by any change in pay.

What can be said with reasonable confidence, because it comes from within a single consistent analysis rather than across several, is that 90% of the 182 highest-paid chief executives received a rise in 2024-25, that the average chief executive package across all trusts analysed rose to around £142,000 from around £135,000 the previous year, and that 74% of the trusts analysed increased executive salaries. Those are within-study comparisons, and they point clearly upward.

Who actually holds these jobs

The demographic picture of the top of the academy sector is the finding most likely to be quietly dropped from summaries of this research, and it is among the most robust things in it, because counting is easier than valuing.

• 69% of the 182 highest-paid chief executives are men — more than 120 of them — in a workforce where roughly three-quarters of teachers and around 70% of the combined leadership group are women.
• Around 5% are from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds — nine individuals out of 182.
• Women held just over a quarter of the chief executive posts at the 100 largest trusts by school count.
• Among chief executives paid at least £200,000, 27% were women, up from 22% the year before — improvement, but from a very low base.
• The median package for male leaders at the 100 largest trusts was £191,452, against £170,000 for female leaders — a gap of £21,452, or 11.2%, reported as the widest for at least three years.

It is worth stating the obvious implication plainly, because it is easy to lose in the aggregate. The teaching profession in England is majority female at every level including senior leadership, and becomes majority male only at the point where the pay stops being set by the STPCD's national framework and starts being set by individual trust boards exercising discretion. That is not proof of causation. It is, however, exactly the pattern you would expect if discretionary, individually negotiated, benchmarked-against-peers pay-setting systematically advantages the group that already holds the incumbent positions being benchmarked against.

The 22 people below CEO level

Chief executives are not the only people in the sector paid at this level, and the sub-CEO layer is where the new approval regime is least tested.

Across the twenty largest trusts by school count, Schools Week identified 22 employees below chief executive level already earning above the £174,000 threshold. Nine of those 22 work at the Harris Federation alone.

These are typically deputy or executive directors: a chief operating officer, a director of education, a regional director with responsibility for a cluster of academies, a chief financial officer. Paragraph 2.34 is drafted to reach them — it refers to "new appointments within academy trusts where remuneration exceeds £174,000", not to chief executives specifically — so a trust advertising a director-level post above the threshold from 1 October 2026 needs DfE approval in exactly the same way.

What the provision does not reach is the structural alternative: a trust that responds to a constrained chief executive salary by building a broader, flatter executive team of people each paid comfortably below £174,000. Nothing in the handbook limits the number of executive posts a trust may create, and paragraph 2.33's growth-rate control operates on remuneration rather than on headcount. Whether the sector responds that way is one of the genuinely open questions about how these controls will land.

Executive headship is a different thing entirely

"Executive headteacher" and "trust CEO" are used interchangeably in a great deal of careers writing, and they are not the same role, are not paid through the same mechanism, and are not subject to the same controls. If you are considering a move into leadership across more than one school, this is the distinction to get straight first.

The unit-score mechanic in paragraph 6.6 is worth understanding because it is the only place in the national framework where leading multiple schools is converted into pay by formula rather than judgement. An ordinary school scores 7 units for each pupil in the preliminary stage and key stages 1 and 2, 9 units for each key stage 3 pupil, 11 for each key stage 4 pupil and 13 for each key stage 5 pupil, with three additional units for each pupil with an EHC plan in a special class (and at the relevant body's discretion for such pupils outside one). Those totals map onto the eight groups: up to 1,000 units is Group 1, 1,001 to 2,200 is Group 2, and so on up to 17,001 and over for Group 8.

Combine three small primaries of 100 pupils each and you have roughly 2,100 units — Group 2, not Group 1, purely by addition. That single arithmetic point is why executive headship across a federation is paid more than headship of any one of its schools, and why it is paid considerably less than people often expect: three small schools added together are still, in unit terms, a fairly small school.

How executive headteacher pay is really set

The DfE's non-statutory guidance Managing Teachers' and Leaders' Pay sets out a three-stage process that governance boards should adopt when setting pay for new appointments to headship or the wider leadership team. It is the clearest published account of how leadership pay decisions are meant to be constructed, and it applies to executive headships as much as to single-school ones.

Annex A of the guidance works six illustrative examples through this process, and the last of them is the small-rural-schools federation case directly relevant here. Three separate small rural schools wish to appoint a shared executive headteacher. At stage 1 the combined unit total assigns the post to headteacher group 1. At stage 2 an appointing committee representing all three governance boards concludes that the challenge of a post involving three schools and three separate budgets requires an experienced leader and that the group 1 maximum is not sufficient, so it uses its discretion to extend the indicative range above the group maximum. Having selected a candidate, it sets the salary on appointment towards the bottom of that extended range.

The 25% extension discretion

The discretion used in that Annex A example is worth setting out properly, because it is the single largest source of legitimate variation in headteacher pay and it is widely misunderstood as an exceptional-circumstances power when it is in fact an ordinary governance board judgement.

STPCD paragraph 9.3 provides that headteacher pay ranges "should not normally exceed the maximum of the headteacher group", but that the range "may exceed the maximum where the relevant body determines that circumstances specific to the role or candidate warrant a higher than normal payment". The constraint is that the maximum of the range, together with any temporary payments made under paragraph 10, must not exceed the group maximum by more than 25% other than in exceptional circumstances — and in those exceptional circumstances the governing body must seek external independent advice before agreeing and must support the decision with a business case.

Put in cash terms against the 2026/27 figures, that discretion is substantial:

A Group 8 school — 17,001 units or more, so a very large secondary, or a federation whose combined total reaches that level — has a headteacher group maximum of £148,829 for 2026/27. Apply the 25% extension and a governing body can set a pay range topping out at roughly £186,036 without any external adviser, any business case, or any conversation with the Department for Education. That is the mechanism by which the maintained-school figures reported by Tes become possible, and it is the whole of the answer to how a maintained headteacher can out-earn a trust chief executive who now has to seek DfE approval to be advertised at all.

What it means for teachers in a trust

It is reasonable to ask whether any of this touches an ordinary classroom teacher's pay, and the honest answer is: less than the coverage implies, but not nothing.

Academy trusts are not bound by the STPCD at all. They can set their own pay scales, their own allowance structures and their own progression rules, and while the great majority choose to mirror the national framework, that is a choice rather than an obligation. Our trust-by-trust pay section sets out where individual trusts actually sit against the national scales, including the Harris Federation and United Learning.

The genuinely new link is paragraph 2.33. For the first time, a trust's freedom to raise executive pay is formally tethered to what it does for its teachers: executive remuneration "must not increase at a faster rate than that of the academy trust's teachers" without prior DfE approval. In a trust that applies the national award in full, that sets the default at the 3.5% uplift confirmed for September 2026. In a trust that has chosen to pay above or below the national framework, the comparison becomes a matter of what the trust actually did — which makes a trust's own teacher pay decisions directly relevant to what its chief executive can be given.

What the handbook emphatically does not do is require a trust to increase teacher pay, create any entitlement, or give staff any standing to challenge an executive package. It is an accountability mechanism operating between a trust and the Department, not between a trust and its employees.

If you are aiming at an executive role

For a serving or aspiring leader, the practical conclusions from all of this are reasonably concrete.

• Executive headship and trust CEO are different destinations. One is an STPCD role paid from a combined-unit-score headteacher group; the other is a company officer role paid by board judgement. They require different evidence, attract different selection processes, and now sit under different pay controls.
• The maintained sector is not the lower-paid option at the top end. For a leader at the very top of the range, a large maintained school or a maintained federation executive headship can now pay more than a comparable trust role, with fewer approval steps. That is a genuine reversal of the assumption most careers guidance still carries.
• Ask which group the school is in, and whether the range has been extended. An advertised leadership range that sits above the published group maximum tells you the board has used its paragraph 9.3 discretion — useful information about how the post is being positioned, and a reasonable thing to raise at interview.
• For any trust post above £174,000, ask whether DfE approval has been obtained. From 1 October 2026 it must be, before the post is advertised. A trust advertising above the threshold without it has a compliance problem, and a candidate has a legitimate interest in knowing the salary can actually be paid.
• Expect executive pay growth to slow, not reverse. Paragraph 2.33 constrains the rate of increase; paragraph 2.34 constrains new advertisements. Neither reduces anyone's current pay, and the visible effect on published accounts will take several reporting cycles to appear.
• Treat banded disclosures as bands. Whether you are benchmarking your own package or reading coverage, remember the underlying data is £10,000 bands with inconsistent pension treatment. Precision beyond that is manufactured.

For the stages that lead to any of these roles, and what actually changes at each one, our pathway to headship guide covers the sequence from a first TLR through to headship and the leadership group bandings that sit behind it — including the point, easy to miss, that joining the leadership group means giving up both your TLR and the 1,265-hour directed time protection.