Do Teachers Get Paid During the Summer? Yes, Every Month in the UK

The actual mechanism, in one paragraph

A teacher employed on a continuing contract in a maintained school in England or Wales has an annual salary set by the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD). That annual figure is paid in twelve equal monthly instalments. It is not converted from a daily rate, it is not calculated from the number of teaching days in a given month, and it does not pause when the school closes. August contains no teaching days and no directed time, and an August payslip nonetheless shows the same gross figure as a March one — because the payment is one twelfth of an annual salary, not payment for the days in that particular month. There is nothing clever going on. The complexity people expect to find here simply is not there.

Where it gets more interesting — and where this page earns its length — is in the three places the simple answer breaks down: the boundary conditions when you start, the boundary conditions when you leave, and the three groups of people working in schools for whom a completely different set of rules applies. Those are the parts that actually cost people money, and they are the parts almost never explained properly.

The Burgundy Book term definitions, and why 31 August matters so much

The document that governs this is not the STPCD. The STPCD sets what you are paid and the conditions of your working time; it does not deal with when in the year salary is payable, and it contains no provision setting a pay date or a pay schedule at all. The relevant document is the Burgundy Book — formally, Conditions of Service for School Teachers in England and Wales, in its revised edition published June 2023 by the National Employers' Organisation for School Teachers together with the five teacher organisations. It is a national collective agreement, incorporated into the contracts of teachers in maintained schools, and Section 3 is where the summer question is actually answered.

Section 3, paragraph 1.1 does two things in a single sentence. First, it establishes the payment mechanism: teachers are paid salary in accordance with the STPCD "by monthly instalments and should receive not less than one third of a year's salary for each full term's service". Second, it defines what a term is for that purpose, and the definitions are not the ones a parent or a pupil would recognise:

Read those three rows again, because the whole answer is in them. The three "terms" are not teaching periods. They are four-month blocks that between them cover every day of the calendar year with no gaps. The summer holiday does not fall between the summer term and the autumn term. It falls inside the summer term, which does not end until 31 August, the day before the autumn term begins. There is no unpaid interval in the year for a teacher on a continuing contract, because the contractual year has been carved up so that no such interval exists.

The "not less than one third of a year's salary for each full term's service" wording then does the rest of the work. Serve a full summer term — which, by definition, means being employed from 1 May to 31 August — and you are entitled to at least a third of the annual salary for it. Four monthly instalments of one twelfth is exactly a third. The arithmetic is deliberately self-consistent.

What that looks like in real 2026/27 numbers

Taking the confirmed 2026/27 STPCD rates for the rest of England, outside the London and fringe areas, the conversion is simply a division by twelve. The August payslip and the February payslip carry the same gross figure.

Those are gross figures before income tax, National Insurance, Teachers' Pension contributions and any student loan repayment. The deductions are calculated on the August payslip exactly as they are on every other one — the Teachers' Pension contribution still comes off before tax, National Insurance is still assessed on the month's gross, and a student loan repayment is still taken if the month's pay clears the monthly threshold. If you want the net figure rather than the gross one, put your salary into our teacher take-home pay calculator, which applies the 2026/27 tax bands and the correct pension contribution tier automatically.

One practical consequence worth flagging: because every month is identical, a mid-year pay rise shows up as a permanent change to that monthly figure rather than as a seasonal fluctuation. When the 3.5% award took effect from 1 September 2026, the monthly instalment changed from that point forward and any period between the effective date and the payroll actually applying it came through as a separate arrears line. That is covered in detail in our guide to backdated pay and arrears.

"Paid for the holidays" versus "195 days, spread out" — the argument, settled

There is a long-running and slightly tedious argument, usually conducted in newspaper comment sections, about whether teachers are "paid for the holidays" or merely "paid for 195 days, with the money spread across twelve months". Both framings have a real basis in the documents, and the argument is mostly about connotation rather than about anything that changes what lands in a bank account.

The reason the argument does not matter much in practice is that both readings produce the same twelve payments of the same size. But there is one place where the distinction becomes real money, and it is not the one people expect. When salary has to be deducted for a day — most commonly for strike action or authorised unpaid leave — the Burgundy Book, at Section 3 paragraph 3.2, specifies that the deduction is calculated at a daily rate "based on the day's salary being 1/365th of a year for each day of the period of absence". Not 1/195th. Not 1/260th. One three hundred and sixty-fifth.

That choice of divisor is only coherent if the salary is understood as an annual sum payable across a 365-day year rather than as payment for 195 working days. It is, in other words, the contractual documents quietly siding with the second framing at the precise moment where it costs an employer money to do so. If you want a worked figure for what a single day's deduction actually costs at your pay point, our strike pay calculator applies exactly this 1/365th method.

September starters: the gap nobody warns you about

This is the single most commonly missed point on the whole topic, and it catches a large number of people every single year, because it is the exact inverse of the reassuring headline answer. Teachers are paid over the summer — but only for summers during which they are already employed.

Burgundy Book Section 3, paragraph 1.2(a) deals with teachers taking up work on first appointment, on re-appointment, or on transfer from another employer, at the commencement of a school term. Where that is after the summer vacation, they are paid "from September 1, or from the first school day of the Autumn term if this shall be earlier than September 1". Paragraph 1.2(b) covers someone starting mid-term, who is paid from the first school day they actually work.

Note what is absent. There is no provision making a new teacher's pay run from anything earlier than 1 September. An ECT who finishes a PGCE in June and starts their first post on 1 September is not employed by the school during July or August, is therefore not paid for July or August, and receives nothing at all from that employer until their first payday — which, depending on the employer's payroll cut-off and how promptly the appointment was processed, may be the end of September or may slip to the end of October.

There is a second, related sting. Your first payslip is very likely to be lower than the monthly figure in the table above, for reasons that have nothing to do with the summer and everything to do with tax codes, pension enrolment and student loan timing. A September starter is five months into the tax year with five months of unused Personal Allowance, and an emergency tax code ignores all of it. Teachers' Pension contributions start on day one with no waiting period. Student loan repayments begin from the April after you leave your course, so they can start immediately. Rather than duplicating that here, our take-home pay calculator has a detailed section on exactly these first-payslip surprises, including the emergency codes to look for and what to check line by line.

Resigning at the end of the summer term: paid to 31 August, usually

The mirror image of the September-starter rule sits at Section 3, paragraph 2.1, which governs what a resigning teacher is paid to. The headline is generous: a teacher resigning at the end of the Summer term is paid to 31 August. You do not stop being paid when the school breaks up in July.

But there is an exception written into the same sub-paragraph, and it exists specifically to prevent double payment. Where the teacher is resigning to take up an appointment with another employer, they are paid to the day preceding the day on which the school under the new employer opens for the Autumn term, if that is earlier than 1 September. So if your new school opens on 28 August for an INSET day, your old employer pays you to 27 August and your new one picks you up from 28 August. You are not paid twice, and you are not left with a gap.

The equivalent provisions for the other two terms are worth knowing because they are considerably less generous, and because the asymmetry is the whole reason the summer resignation date is the one people choose:

• End of the Summer term — paid to 31 August, or to the day before the new employer's school opens for the Autumn term if earlier. Four months of the summer term's pay including the six-week holiday.
• End of the Autumn term — paid to 31 December. The Christmas holiday is covered, but nothing beyond it.
• End of the Spring term — paid to 30 April, or to the day before the new employer's school opens for the Summer term if earlier. The Burgundy Book adds that a teacher resigning from the end of the Spring term to join another employer should not be required by the former employer to attend the first days of the Summer term where that term commences earlier than 1 May.

Resignation deadlines are the other half of this. Burgundy Book Section 3 paragraph 4.1 places all teachers under a minimum of two months' notice, and three months in the Summer term, terminating at the end of a school term as defined above. Headteachers are under three months, and four in the Summer term, under paragraph 4.2. The practical effect is the familiar 31 May deadline for an August departure: three months' notice, expiring at the end of the Summer term. Missing it by a day is the difference between leaving on 31 August and leaving on 31 December.

Supply teachers: the honest answer is usually no

Everything above depends on one thing: a continuing contract of employment with a school or local authority that subsists across the summer. Most agency supply teachers do not have one, and for them the summer answer is fundamentally different.

In the typical agency arrangement, the school is the end client, the agency is the recruiter, and the legal employer is an umbrella company that invoices the agency and pays you as its worker. You are paid for days actually worked. There is no annual salary to divide by twelve, so there is nothing to pay in August. Whether you see any money at all in August depends entirely on how holiday pay has been structured in your arrangement, and there are two broad models:

• Accrued holiday pay held in a pot. Holiday pay accrues on what you earn and is retained, to be released when you request leave or at defined points in the year. Some workers deliberately leave it to accrue through the year and draw it in August, which is a reasonable strategy — but it is your own earlier earnings being released, not a payment for August.
• Rolled-up holiday pay. An uplift, commonly 12.07%, is added to each payment and itemised separately on the payslip. This became lawful for irregular-hours and part-year workers for holiday years starting on or after 1 April 2024. If your pay is rolled up, you have already been paid your holiday pay by the time August arrives, and nothing further is due.

Neither model produces the salaried teacher's experience of an ordinary payslip arriving at the end of August. The practical advice is blunt: find out in writing, before you accept a booking, which model your umbrella company uses, what percentage it applies, and how and when you can access accrued pay. A compliant umbrella must give you a key information document setting out how your pay is calculated, and reluctance to provide one in writing is a warning sign. Our supply teacher pay guide works through the whole deduction waterfall — assignment rate, employer National Insurance, Apprenticeship Levy, umbrella margin, then your own deductions — which is where the gap between an advertised day rate and actual take-home comes from.

Two further points are worth knowing. First, long-term or direct supply — where the school itself employs you, often on a fixed-term contract — can put you back inside the salaried world, in which case the Burgundy Book position may apply to you after all. Check whose payroll you are actually on. Second, the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 give an agency worker the right to equal basic pay and conditions with a comparable directly-employed employee after twelve continuous calendar weeks in the same role with the same hirer, which can change the arithmetic for someone doing a long placement at one school.

Term-time-only support staff: paid in August, but calculated completely differently

Teaching assistants, office staff, technicians and most other school support staff are not on the STPCD or the Burgundy Book. They are usually on NJC Green Book terms — the National Joint Council for Local Government Services agreement — and a large proportion are employed term-time only (TTO).

The good news, and it is genuinely good news that is often reported wrongly, is that TTO support staff normally do receive money in August. The NJC's Part 4.12 guidance on term-time-only employees, updated 13 March 2024, notes at paragraph 4.7 that most organisations pay TTO employees in twelve equal instalments over the year, because that gives regular pay throughout the year and makes average weekly pay easier to calculate for Statutory Sick Pay and Statutory Maternity Pay purposes. So the payslip arrives. What differs is what figure is on it.

A TTO employee is paid a proportion of the full-time-equivalent annual salary, and that proportion has to reflect both the weeks actually worked and the paid annual leave, public holidays and extra-statutory days those weeks accrue. The NJC's advisory model calculation works it in days rather than weeks, and it is worth setting out in full because the intermediate steps are where employers go wrong:

The NJC notes that 226.239 days is equivalent to 45.25 weeks, which is the same result expressed the other way round: weeks worked plus pro-rated paid leave, over the 52.14 weeks in a year (260.71 ÷ 5 = 52.14). That is the "52.14" figure you will see quoted in local authority guidance, and it is correct — provided the numerator includes the accrued leave.

The NJC guidance is explicit that the method must be fair, accurate and consistent, must be explained in the statement of particulars, and must be able to withstand scrutiny on contractual, sex discrimination and part-time-worker discrimination grounds. It also stresses that the calculation is advisory and should not displace more favourable local arrangements — so a figure higher than 86.778% is perfectly possible, and a surprising number of local authorities do use a more generous leave entitlement than the NJC minimum. What is not acceptable is a figure that silently omits the leave accrual.

Two related points. For school-based TTO staff, the NJC guidance provides that staff must be paid, or granted time off in lieu, if they are required to attend INSET days falling outside their contracted hours. And TTO employees have continuity of employment — periods of school closure are not a break in service. For the wider picture on support staff pay bands and roles, see our guides on cover supervisor pay and the school business manager salary.

Academies and free schools: probably the same, but check your contract

Roughly half of England's pupils are educated in academies, and academies are not legally bound by either the STPCD or the Burgundy Book. An academy trust sets its own terms and conditions of employment. That means the honest answer to "does the 1 May to 31 August summer term definition apply to me?" for an academy teacher is: it depends on your contract, not on a national document.

In practice, the great majority of academy trusts do follow both documents closely, for three reasons. Many expressly incorporate the STPCD and Burgundy Book into their contracts of employment. Many staff transferred into the trust on conversion and carry the terms across under TUPE, so those terms continue to bind for that cohort regardless of what the trust would prefer. And the labour market does the rest — a trust offering visibly worse holiday-pay terms than the school down the road has a recruitment problem. So the twelve-equal-instalments position is the normal one across the sector, and a teacher moving from a maintained school to an academy is unlikely to notice a difference in how their August pay works.

Unlikely is not the same as guaranteed, though, and it would be dishonest to tell you otherwise. Trusts have genuine freedom here, including on contract end dates for fixed-term staff, on how part-time fractions are expressed, and on whether the Burgundy Book's resignation-date provisions apply at all. If you are on a fixed-term or part-time academy contract, read the actual document rather than assuming the national position.

This picture is starting to change, but more slowly and more narrowly than the headlines suggested. The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 creates a power to set a statutory minimum level of remuneration for academy teachers by reference to the STPCD pay ranges, and a duty on academy proprietors to have regard to the STPCD. Neither of those imports the Burgundy Book, and neither of them is about when in the year salary is paid. Our guide to the academy pay floor sets out what has actually commenced and what has not, because the timing is widely misreported.

Edge cases worth checking on your own contract

Fixed-term contracts that end on 31 July

This is where real money goes missing. The Burgundy Book's resignation provisions in paragraph 2.1 are about teachers resigning. A fixed-term contract that simply expires does so on whatever date it says. A contract expressed to end on 31 August carries the summer; one expressed to end "at the end of the summer term" or on 31 July may not. If you are offered a fixed-term post, treat the end date as a pay negotiation, and ask for 31 August explicitly. It is a normal thing to ask and often granted, because the alternative simply shifts the cost onto you.

Part-time teachers

A part-time teacher is paid a percentage of the full-time-equivalent salary, determined under the STPCD by the proportion of the school's timetabled teaching week for which they are employed. That pro-rata annual salary is then paid across twelve monthly instalments in exactly the same way. Working three days a week does not mean being paid only during teaching weeks. See our guide on part-time and job-share pay and pension for how the fraction itself is calculated and the pension consequences.

Starting mid-term rather than in September

Paragraph 1.2(b) pays a teacher starting during a school term from the first school day they actually work. If you start on, say, 4 November, your first month is a part month, your pension contribution is taken on the pay actually received rather than a full month's salary, and your annual figure for that tax year will be well below your annual salary — which often produces a tax refund after the following April.

Maternity, sickness and unpaid leave

All three interact with the summer differently and none of them is covered here. The Burgundy Book has its own sick pay scheme and its own maternity scheme in later sections, with their own service-based entitlements. Our guide to teacher maternity pay and pension covers the maternity position, including how the summer interacts with the maternity pay period.

Moving from a maintained school to an independent school

Independent schools are outside both the STPCD and the Burgundy Book entirely, and set their own contracts. Twelve-instalment payment is common, but nothing requires it and the term-date definitions certainly do not apply. See our guide to moving between state and independent schools.

Sources

• Conditions of Service for School Teachers in England and Wales (the "Burgundy Book"), revised edition published June 2023 — Section 3 paragraphs 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 3.2 and 4.1, quoted above.
• School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document 2025 and guidance — GOV.UK — paragraphs 51.2 (195 days) and 51.5 (1,265 hours), and paragraphs 40 to 43 on part-time remuneration.
• Updated "Green Book" Part 4.12: Term-Time Only employees — NJC circular, 13 March 2024 — paragraphs 4.7, 5.2 and section 6 advisory model calculation.
• Rolled-up holiday pay for irregular hours and part-year workers — Acas — the 12.07% method, lawful for holiday years beginning on or after 1 April 2024.
• Supply Teachers' Holidays and Holiday Pay (England and Wales) — NASUWT.

What we could not verify. There is no single national source stating how many academy trusts contractually incorporate the Burgundy Book, so the statement that "most" do is drawn from legal commentary on academy conversions rather than from a survey, and is flagged as such rather than presented as a measured figure.