Head of Department Pay: What TLRs Are Really Worth

Why there is no national answer, and why that is the finding

The question every middle leader eventually asks — "what should a head of department actually get?" — has a genuine, documented answer, and it is that nobody decides this nationally.

The Department for Education's Managing Teachers' and Leaders' Pay guidance says it in one sentence: "Schools have the freedom to decide for themselves the relative weight of TLR posts and the appropriate levels of reward within the minima and maxima for each TLR set out in the STPCD." That is the whole of the national position. There is no schedule linking department size to tier, no DfE benchmark table, no STRB annex, and no union survey that maps named roles to amounts. We looked for one specifically in order to publish it, and it does not exist.

The statutory framework supplies only three things: the outer boundaries of each band, a set of qualifying criteria in STPCD paragraph 20.4, and one hard rule at the top tier — paragraph 20.5, which requires that before awarding a TLR1 the relevant body must be satisfied the responsibility includes line management responsibility for a significant number of people. Our guide to which responsibilities actually attract a TLR works through those criteria in detail.

The gap between the bottom of TLR2 and the top of TLR1 is £14,168 a year — comfortably more than the difference between an ECT's salary and a top-of-scale classroom teacher's. All of that space is filled by local judgement. So instead of inventing a benchmark, the rest of this page reports what schools have actually published.

What the adverts actually say

Here is a selection of current and recent curriculum-leadership adverts that published an explicit TLR cash value, ordered from the highest to the lowest. The salary wording is as the advert gave it.

Look at the extremes rather than the middle, because the extremes are the point. A head of English at a comprehensive in Suffolk is advertised at £17,819, the very top of the statutory TLR1 band. A curriculum manager at a special school in Newcastle is advertised at £3,651, the very bottom of the statutory TLR2 band. Both are department-level curriculum leadership roles. The gap between them is £14,168 a year — more than a quarter of a top-of-scale classroom teacher's entire national salary.

Some of that variation is genuine and defensible. A whole-school literacy remit attached to headship of English in a large school is a bigger job than leading a small curriculum area, and the Newcastle post carries an SEN allowance of £2,885 on top, which closes part of the gap. But a great deal of the variation is simply that two governing bodies, applying the same criteria to comparable jobs, reached very different conclusions — which is exactly what a framework that grants complete local freedom over relative weight will produce.

Sub-tier labels carry no national meaning whatsoever

This is the single most useful practical finding on this page, and it is one almost nobody tells applicants.

The STPCD defines three TLR bands: TLR1, TLR2 and TLR3. It defines no sub-tiers, no letters, no numbered subdivisions, and no ordering convention within a band. Every "TLR1a", "TLR1C", "TLR2b", "TLR2C" or "TLR 2.1" you have ever seen in a job advert is a label a particular school invented for its own internal pay structure. Two schools using the same label are not using the same word.

The proof is in the adverts. Look at what "TLR1a" — spelled identically, in the same tier — actually means:

Two schools use "a" to denote their lowest TLR1; two use it to denote their highest. The same label spans a 75% difference in cash. A candidate who applies for a "TLR1a post" believing they know roughly what that means could be out by more than £7,000 a year.

Nor is the lettering reliably ordered even across schools that use it descending. Robert Clack's TLR1C is worth £14,030 — more than every TLR1B in our sample, at £12,521, £12,523 and £12,952. Swanshurst's TLR1c at £12,963 sits level with Cockshut Hill's TLR1B. "C" is not below "B"; it is simply a different school's filing system.

There is also a structural reason those labels exist that is worth understanding sympathetically. Since 2014 the STPCD has contained no prescribed minimum differential between levels of TLR within a school, so schools build their own internal ladders to create defensible differentials between posts. That is legitimate — the DfE's guidance positively requires "sufficient differentiation between responsibilities and accountabilities for allowances of different values to avoid equal pay issues". The problem is not that schools have internal tiers. It is that they publish the tier label instead of the number.

The transparency gap: roughly two-thirds of adverts tell you nothing

We read 80 consecutive adverts in the "head of department and curriculum" category on the DfE's Teaching Vacancies service, discarded three that were not curriculum leadership posts, and categorised the remaining 77 by what they told a candidate about the responsibility payment.

Forty-nine of 77 adverts — roughly two in three — gave a candidate no way of knowing what the responsibility was worth before applying. Thirty-four of them made no reference to a responsibility payment at all, listing only "MPS/UPS" for a post explicitly titled as departmental leadership.

That last category deserves care, because it is genuinely ambiguous and reading it wrong cuts both ways. An advert stating only "MPS/UPS" for a head of department post might mean any of three quite different things: that a TLR exists and the school did not publish it; that the school intends to determine the TLR after appointment; or that there is genuinely no responsibility payment attached to the post at all. The third possibility is not hypothetical — our snapshot contained head of maths, head of science and head of PE posts advertised on a bare classroom teacher band with no allowance mentioned anywhere in the listing.

We want to be careful about how strongly to state this. It is one job board, on one day, weighted towards adverts closing in late September and early October 2026, and it is entirely possible that a school with an unpublished TLR would disclose it on request. It is not a national percentage and we are not presenting it as one. But as a practical warning to applicants it is robust enough: assume nothing from an advert's silence, and ask.

The strongest finding: some faculty leads are not TLR posts at all

Fourteen per cent of the adverts in our snapshot were not offering a TLR because they were not classroom teacher posts. They were leadership group posts, advertised in L-points on the Leadership Pay Range, for jobs with ordinary middle leadership titles.

This is a genuinely different pay mechanism, not a more generous version of the same one. A TLR sits on top of a Main or Upper Pay Range salary under STPCD Part 4. A leadership group post has its own individual pay range determined under STPCD paragraph 9, positioned by the governing body relative to the headteacher's range, and it carries no TLR at all — paragraph 20.1 provides that TLRs are for classroom teachers, and leadership group members are not classroom teachers for that purpose. Our assistant and deputy headteacher pay guide explains how those leadership ranges are actually constructed.

One advert in our sample made the choice explicit in a way that is almost too neat. St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive advertised its Faculty Lead for Communications as "MPS/UPS + TLR1a (£17,216) or Lead Practitioner 12 (£68,233) depending on skills and experience" — the same post, offered under two entirely different STPCD mechanisms, with the candidate's experience determining which. Harris City Academy Crystal Palace did something similar with a "Head or Lead Practitioner of Art" advert offering either a classroom salary plus a TLR or a Lead Practitioner range.

Same job title, two mechanisms, twelve thousand pounds

Putting the TLR-paid and leadership-paid adverts side by side produces the comparison that best captures what this page is about. Take one job title — head of the maths department — in September 2026:

Two 11-16 secondaries outside London, both advertising for someone to run the maths department. One treats the job as a classroom teacher post and publishes a ceiling of £52,835. The other treats it as a leadership group post and publishes a ceiling of £64,691. The work is recognisably the same work. The difference is which part of the STPCD the school decided the post belongs in.

The pattern repeats across subjects. Head of science ranged from adverts offering "MPS to UPS" with nothing stated, through a TLR1A of £10,174, to a TLR1B of £12,952. Head of PE ranged from a bare "TMS – UPS3" through a TLR2 of £5,820 to a TLR2C of £8,611. And within a single school, St Cuthbert's RC High in Rochdale ran three departmental headship adverts simultaneously at three different bands — mathematics on TLR1c, technology on TLR2b, geography on TLR2c — with no cash values published for any of them.

Which of these is better depends on more than the number. The leadership route pays more and positions you explicitly on a senior leadership trajectory — our pathway to headship guide sets out where that leads. The TLR route keeps a genuine contractual ceiling on directed time that the leadership route may not, and keeps you unambiguously a classroom teacher, which matters if a return to full-time teaching is something you want to keep open. Neither is the obviously correct answer, but they should be an informed choice rather than an accident of which school you happened to apply to.

What actually drives which tier a post lands in

Since no national mapping exists, the honest account of what determines a post's tier is a mixture of one statutory rule and several school-level realities.

• Line management is the one hard rule. STPCD paragraph 20.5 requires a TLR1 to involve line management responsibility for a significant number of people. This is the clearest single predictor: a post with a team reporting into it can be a TLR1; a sole-specialist subject lead with nobody reporting to them cannot properly be one, however demanding the subject is.
• The school's existing structure, not the job's merits. Most schools have a fixed number of posts at each internal tier, set in their staffing structure and pay policy. A vacancy is usually advertised at the tier the post already sits in, because moving it requires a staffing structure review under statutory guidance paragraph 49. This is why negotiating the tier is much harder than negotiating a starting salary.
• Budget headroom, honestly. TLR values are a direct call on a school's staffing budget with no additional funding attached. Schools under financial pressure hold posts at lower tiers, and this shows in the data as variation that has nothing to do with job weight.
• Whether the post is bundled with a whole-school remit. The highest advertised value in our snapshot attached to a post combining departmental headship with whole-school literacy. Bundling a cross-curricular responsibility onto a subject headship is the most common route to the top of the TLR1 band.
• What it is emphatically not: recruitment difficulty. Statutory guidance paragraph 49 states that in determining TLR values, relevant bodies 'should not take into account recruitment or retention issues'. A school paying its head of maths more than its head of history because maths is hard to staff is using the wrong mechanism, and creating an equal pay exposure while doing it.

That last point is worth dwelling on, because it cuts directly against what most people assume the shortage-subject premium is. The STPCD's answer to a hard-to-fill subject is a recruitment and retention payment under paragraph 27, which must be reviewed regularly and must not be made "for carrying out specific responsibilities". The responsibility payment and the market payment are designed to be separate instruments, and blurring them is how schools end up with TLR differentials they cannot defend on job weight.

The regional trap in comparing TLRs

TLR values are flat national figures. The same £8,913 TLR2 is worth exactly that in Cornwall and in Camden — there is no London weighting on a TLR. The salary underneath it, however, varies substantially by pay area.

That produces a comparison trap worth avoiding. An Inner London head of department on a TLR2 can have a materially larger total package than a National head of department on a TLR1, despite holding the lower tier:

The two land within a few thousand pounds of each other despite one being a full tier above the other, and once London housing costs enter the picture the comparison inverts again. If you are weighing up a move across pay areas, compare total packages against local costs rather than TLR tier against TLR tier — and remember that the TLR is the part that does not scale.

What changed for part-time middle leaders in September 2026

One genuinely significant change landed at the start of this academic year and has been very lightly reported.

STPCD paragraph 20.6 allowed relevant bodies, from 1 September 2025, to determine the value of a TLR1 or TLR2 based on the proportion of the full-time-equivalent responsibility the teacher is actually undertaking, rather than mechanically pro-rating against contracted hours. Paragraph 20.7 turns that discretion into a requirement: "From 1st September 2026, it will become a requirement that relevant bodies determine the value of all existing and new TLR1 and TLR2 payments based on the proportion of the TLR the teacher is undertaking."

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Under strict pro-rating, a 0.6 FTE head of department received 60% of the TLR regardless of how much of the responsibility they actually carried — which, for a department head genuinely accountable for the whole department, was routinely an undervaluation. Under the responsibility-based calculation, a part-time teacher carrying the full responsibility should be paid the full TLR value.

Paragraph 20.8 confirms the pro-rata principle does not apply to TLR3 awards at all, and statutory guidance paragraph 50 asks schools advertising a TLR1 or TLR2 to be open-minded about splitting duties so posts can be held part-time, with particular attention to teachers returning from maternity leave or long-term sickness who previously held the post full-time.

Questions to ask before you apply

Everything above reduces to a short list of things worth establishing before you spend an evening on an application, let alone before you accept an offer.

• What is the cash value, in pounds per year? Not the tier label. The number. A compliant pay policy has it written down.
• Is this a TLR post or a leadership group post? They are different mechanisms with different conditions of service. An advert quoting L-points is the latter; an advert quoting MPS/UPS plus an allowance is the former.
• How many staff will report to me? Directly relevant to whether a TLR1 is even lawful under paragraph 20.5, and the best single proxy for the real scope of the job.
• Where does this post sit in the school's staffing structure, and what else is at that tier? This tells you the internal comparators. 'Posts of equal weight should be allocated equal value' is the DfE's own guidance, and an internal comparator is the strongest argument you will ever have.
• When was the staffing structure last reviewed? Under statutory guidance paragraph 49, a structure review is the formal route by which a post's value can change. If it was five years ago and the department has doubled, that is a conversation worth having.
• If part-time: how has the school implemented paragraph 20.7? The responsibility-proportion basis has been mandatory since 1 September 2026 and applies to existing payments.
• Is any part of this payment time-limited? A TLR3 ends with its project. Establish whether what you are being offered is ongoing or fixed-term, and get the end date in writing if it is the latter.

How to read a middle leadership advert properly

A last practical point about interpretation. Job adverts are written to attract applicants, and the salary line is the part most often written optimistically. Three specific habits will protect you.

Read the bottom of the range, not the top. "M1 – UPS3 plus TLR" describes a span of nearly £18,766 in base pay before the allowance. Unless you already hold UPS3, the number that will appear on your first payslip is nearer the bottom. The same applies to leadership-scale adverts quoting L1 – L8: appointments are typically made in the lower portion of an advertised range, with the upper part representing progression over a tenure.

Check whether the figure quoted is the current year's. Several adverts in our snapshot still quoted 2025/26 allowance values — £10,174, £17,216, £8,611 — after the 3.5% uplift took effect on 1 September 2026. That is not necessarily a school underpaying; it is often an advert written before the uplift and not refreshed. But it is worth asking whether the figure you have been quoted is the uprated one.

Treat "commensurate with experience" as an unanswered question. For a TLR, it is close to meaningless — statutory guidance paragraph 50 requires TLR1s and TLR2s to be awarded to the cash value set out in the pay policy, and paragraph 49 requires the value to be determined by job weight rather than by the postholder's experience. A TLR that varies by candidate for the same post is not how the mechanism is meant to work, and is precisely the kind of decision that statutory guidance paragraph 47 warns "may lead to claims being made to employment tribunals" where it is not made on objective criteria.

Once you have a figure, our TLR calculator will show what it is actually worth after income tax, National Insurance and Teachers' Pension contributions — which for a higher-rate taxpayer is a good deal less than the headline, and is the number that should drive the decision about whether the role is worth taking on.