Do Teachers Get Paid Overtime? The STPCD Answer

What a teacher's salary actually buys

The reason there is no teacher overtime is structural rather than mean-spirited. Overtime as a concept requires an hourly rate: a contracted number of hours, a rate per hour, and a multiplier for hours beyond the contract. Teachers do not have one. The STPCD sets an annual salary attached to a pay point, and the working time framework it sits alongside is expressed in days and in a total hours budget, not in a weekly figure with a rate behind it.

That framework has three layers, and almost every argument about teacher workload is really an argument about which layer something belongs in.

Everything below unpacks that table. If you take one thing from this page, take the third row: the layer that consumes the most of a teacher's life is the one the employer has no power to direct.

1,265 hours: what directed time is, and what it covers

Paragraph 51.2 requires a full-time teacher to be available for work for 195 days, of which 190 must be days on which the teacher may be required to teach pupils and perform other duties, and 5 must be days on which the teacher may only be required to perform other duties — the INSET days. Those 195 days are specified by the employer, or by the headteacher if the employer so directs.

Paragraph 51.5 then sets the hours. In full:

"A teacher employed full-time must be available to perform such duties at such times and such places as may be specified by the headteacher (or, where the teacher is not assigned to any one school, by the employer or the headteacher of any school in which the teacher may be required to work) for 1265 hours, those hours to be allocated reasonably throughout those days in the school year on which the teacher is required to be available for work."

Two phrases in that carry weight. "Such duties at such times and such places as may be specified by the headteacher" is a broad power — within the budget, the head decides. And "allocated reasonably throughout those days" is the constraint on it: the hours cannot be dumped into a few weeks or loaded disproportionately onto particular days. Reasonableness is doing real work in that sentence, and it is the hook most directed time disputes hang on.

Paragraph 51.6 applies the same rule pro rata to part-time teachers: the number of hours must be that proportion of 1,265 which corresponds to the proportion of total remuneration the teacher is entitled to under paragraphs 40 and 41. A 0.6 teacher has 759 directed hours, not 1,265.

Directed time legitimately covers teaching, registration, assemblies, break duties, staff meetings, parents' evenings, INSET days, briefings, and any other activity the headteacher specifies. It also includes your guaranteed Planning, Preparation and Assessment time: paragraph 52.5 entitles every teacher who participates in the teaching of pupils to reasonable PPA time as part of the 1,265 hours, in units of not less than half an hour during the timetabled teaching week, amounting to not less than 10% of timetabled teaching time. PPA is not an addition to the budget; it is a protected slice of it.

Paragraph 51.12 excludes two things from counting towards the 1,265: the daily break required by paragraph 52.3, and travelling time to or from your place of work.

Paragraph 51.7: the hours with no ceiling

If the framework stopped at 1,265 hours, teaching would be a 1,265-hour job. It does not. Paragraph 51.7 reads:

"In addition to the hours a teacher is required to be available for work under paragraph 51.5 or 51.6, a teacher must work such reasonable additional hours as may be necessary to enable the effective discharge of the teacher's professional duties, including in particular planning and preparing courses and lessons; and assessing, monitoring, recording and reporting on the learning needs, progress and achievements of assigned pupils."

This is where the real hours go. Planning, resource-making, marking, assessment, reports, data entry, emails to parents — the bulk of the work that does not fit inside a timetabled day sits in paragraph 51.7. It has no cap. It is not separately paid. And "reasonable" is the only limit on the quantity.

It is worth being honest that this is the provision that makes unpaid overtime structurally inevitable in teaching. A teacher cannot discharge their professional duties within 1,265 hours, everyone in the system knows it, and the STPCD's answer is to require whatever additional hours are necessary without paying for them. That is a policy choice embedded in the document, not an accident of drafting.

Paragraph 51.8: one sentence, and it changes the picture

Immediately after creating an uncapped obligation, the STPCD constrains who controls it:

"The employer must not determine how many of the additional hours referred to in paragraph 51.7 must be worked or when these hours must be worked."

That is the entire paragraph. Twenty-eight words. It does two things at once, and both are prohibitions on the employer rather than obligations on the teacher: the employer must not determine how many additional hours are worked, and must not determine when they are worked.

The practical meaning is that the additional hours are professional time under your own control. You must do enough to discharge your duties effectively — that is the 51.7 obligation and it is real — but how long that takes, and whether you do it at 6am on a Tuesday or on Sunday afternoon or in a free period on Thursday, is not your employer's decision to make.

What paragraph 51.8 does and does not mean in practice

It is easy to over-read 51.8 into a general right to refuse work, and equally easy to under-read it into nothing. Neither is right, so here is the line as precisely as the document supports.

The distinction that does most of the work is between directing time and setting deadlines. Requiring reports to be submitted by a particular Friday is legitimate: it specifies an output. Requiring staff to stay until 5.30pm on Thursdays to write them is not: it specifies when additional hours are worked, which is exactly what 51.8 prohibits. Many workload disputes turn out, on inspection, to be about a school that has drifted from the first into the second.

Paragraph 52.4 adds a further obligation that sits alongside this: governing bodies and headteachers must have regard to the need for teachers to be able to achieve a satisfactory balance between the time required to discharge their professional duties — including, expressly, their duties under paragraph 51.7 — and the time required to pursue their personal interests outside work, and should ensure adherence to the limits in the Working Time Regulations 1998. It is a softer duty than 51.8, but it is a duty, and it names 51.7 specifically.

Two further overarching rights are worth knowing because they are absolute rather than balanced. Paragraph 52.1: no teacher may be required to work on any Saturday, Sunday or public holiday unless their contract of employment expressly provides for it, as it might for a residential establishment. Paragraph 52.2: no teacher may be required under their contract as a teacher to undertake midday supervision.

Leaders have no hours limit at all

This is the part of the framework that gets least attention and matters most to the people it affects. Paragraph 51.4 disapplies paragraphs 51.2 to 51.12 — the whole working time framework, including the 195 days, the 1,265 hours and the 51.8 protection — for:

• headteachers, deputy headteachers and assistant headteachers;
• teachers on the pay range for leading practitioners;
• teachers in receipt of an acting allowance for carrying out the duties of a headteacher, deputy headteacher or assistant headteacher under paragraph 23;
• unattached teachers in charge of pupil referral units whose remuneration is determined under the headteacher provisions in paragraph 39;
• other unattached teachers whose remuneration is determined in accordance with the provisions applicable to a member of the leadership group under paragraph 39.

For that group there is no directed time budget to point at, no cap on days, and no paragraph 51.8. The remaining protections are the general work/life balance duty at paragraph 52.4 and the Working Time Regulations 1998 — and the latter's 48-hour average weekly limit can be individually opted out of. That is why leadership workload arguments look so different from classroom workload arguments: one side has a hard number to cite and the other does not.

There is a live development here. The draft School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document 2026, consulted on over the summer of 2026 with the consultation closing at midday on 23 September 2026, proposes additional protections for school leaders' working hours, alongside changes to Upper Pay Range progression, greater flexibility around INSET days, and simplified salary safeguarding. The final document was expected around mid-October 2026. Anyone in a leadership post should read the working time section of the new document when it lands rather than assuming the position above is unchanged. Everything cited on this page is from the STPCD 2025, which was the document in force at the time of writing.

Paragraph 26: the four things a school may pay a teacher extra for

The STPCD does contain a route to additional payments, and it is narrower than most teachers realise. Paragraph 26 provides:

"The relevant body may make such payments as it sees fit to a teacher, other than a headteacher, in respect of: (a) continuing professional development undertaken outside the school day; (b) activities relating to the provision of initial teacher training as part of the ordinary conduct of the school; (c) participation in out-of-school hours learning activity agreed between the teacher and the headteacher; (d) additional responsibilities and activities due to, or in respect of, the provision of services relating to the raising of educational standards to one or more additional schools."

Three features of that provision matter more than the list itself:

• "May", not "must". This is a discretionary power given to the relevant body — the governing board or trust. Nothing in paragraph 26 entitles any individual teacher to any payment. Whether your school uses the power, for which activities, and at what rate, should be set out in its pay policy.
• "Other than a headteacher". Headteachers are expressly excluded from paragraph 26 payments. Separate provisions in the guidance deal with a headteacher providing services to another school.
• It is a list, not a principle. Paragraph 26 does not authorise payment for extra work generally. Running an after-school club agreed with your head fits under (c). Covering an absent colleague's lesson, writing a scheme of work over half term, or attending a weekend open day does not fit any of the four limbs.

The conditions the guidance attaches to paragraph 26

The second half of the STPCD — the statutory guidance — sets out how paragraph 26 is meant to operate, and the conditions are where the useful protections live.

CPD: outside directed time, voluntary, and cannot be directed

Guidance paragraph 61 provides that relevant bodies should decide which CPD activities teachers may be paid for and set an appropriate level of payment in their pay policy, and then adds two constraints. Payments to classroom teachers "should only be made in respect of those activities undertaken outside of either the 1265 hours of directed time for full-time teachers; or the appropriate proportion of the 1265 hours of directed time for part-time teachers". And: "Participation in CPD outside of directed time is voluntary and cannot be directed."

Read those together and the logic is clean. CPD inside directed time is part of what your salary already covers and can be required. CPD outside directed time cannot be required at all, and is the only kind that may be paid for. A school that schedules a compulsory twilight training session has either used directed time — in which case it comes out of the 1,265 budget and should show on the directed time calendar — or has directed something it is not permitted to direct.

ITT: voluntary, except for leading practitioners

Guidance paragraph 62 lets relevant bodies decide whether to make additional payments for ITT activities, and provides that such payments may be made only for ITT provided "as an ordinary incident in the conduct of the school", with the level set in the pay policy.

Paragraph 63 is the important one: "Except for those employed on the pay range for leading practitioners, who may be required to carry out this duty, teachers undertaking school-based ITT activities do so on an entirely voluntary basis." It then lists what it has in mind — supervising and observing teaching practice, giving feedback to students on their performance and acting as professional mentors, running seminars or tutorials on aspects of the course, and formally assessing students' competence.

Paragraphs 64 and 65 then draw a boundary around what counts as an ordinary incident of the school at all. Additional School Centred ITT requirements, where the school leads on providing courses, are not; nor are planning and preparing materials for an ITT course, or taking responsibility for the welfare and tuition of ITT students. For those, separate non-teaching contracts of employment should be issued. And paragraph 65 closes with a line worth quoting to anyone who has been handed a pile of trainee paperwork: "No teacher should routinely carry out administrative and clerical ITT-related activities."

Service to other schools

Guidance paragraphs 66 to 68 deal with the fourth limb of paragraph 26, where a school provides improvement services to another school. Where a headteacher is providing a service to another school — the example given is a National Leader of Education — the relevant body whose headteacher is providing it should determine how much, if any, additional payment is due, in line with the Document and the school's pay policy, for example where the contract requires work outside school sessions.

Paragraph 67 adds a point that often gets forgotten in the school left behind: consideration should be given to the remuneration of other teachers who, as a result of the headteacher's additional role, take on additional responsibilities. That should be based on responsibilities attached to the post rather than to the person, should be recorded, and is explicitly "not automatic". Paragraph 68 notes that where the headteacher's arrangement is temporary, any adjustment to other teachers' pay is temporary too, safeguarding will not apply when it ceases, and acting allowances or other temporary payments may be the appropriate mechanism.

The one clear case of paid extra hours for teachers

If there is a single provision that comes closest to paid overtime for teachers, it is guidance paragraph 41, which deals with part-time teachers and non-pupil days:

"Part-time teachers cannot be required to work or attend non-pupil days, or parts of days, on days they do not normally work, but it should be open to the teacher to attend by mutual agreement with the headteacher and the pay calculation in paragraph 43 below should be applied to any resultant additional hours worked."

Two separate rights sit in that sentence. You cannot be required to attend an INSET day that falls on a day you do not work. And if you agree to attend anyway, the additional hours should be paid, using the same proportional calculation the STPCD uses for setting part-time remuneration. Paragraph 51.9 reinforces the first half: subject to narrow exceptions, no part-time teacher may be required to be available for work on any day or part of a day on which they are not normally required to be available under their contract.

In practice, an enormous number of part-time teachers attend INSET days on non-working days without payment, without being told they had a choice, and without ever raising paragraph 41. It is worth raising — politely, in writing, in advance of the day rather than after it. Our guide to part-time and job-share pay covers the proportional calculation itself.

Support staff genuinely do get overtime, and the contrast is stark

Most school support staff — teaching assistants, HLTAs, cover supervisors, office and finance staff, technicians, site staff — are employed on NJC Green Book terms rather than the STPCD. The Green Book works the way most employment contracts work: contracted hours, a rate, and enhancements for hours beyond them.

Part 2, paragraph 6.1 sets the standard working week for full-time employees at 37 hours (36 in London). Part 3, Section 2, paragraph 2.6 then provides that employees in receipt of basic pay at or below spinal column point 28 who are required to work beyond the full-time equivalent hours for the week in question, or on a Saturday or Sunday, or at night, or on public holidays, or on sleeping-in duty, or under other non-standard working arrangements, are entitled to compensation. For additional hours specifically, paragraph 2.6(a) sets the enhancements:

Two caveats keep this honest. The entitlement in 2.6 applies to employees at or below spinal column point 28 — above that there is no national entitlement, and many senior support staff are in the same unpaid-extra-hours position teachers are. And the Green Book expressly allows an inclusive rate of pay to be negotiated locally as an alternative, and permits local modification of Part 3 provisions, so the exact rates in your authority or trust may differ. Part-time employees are entitled to the enhancements only at times and in circumstances in which full-time employees at the establishment would qualify; otherwise a full working week has to be worked first.

Even with those caveats, the comparison is a real one. A teaching assistant asked to staff a parents' evening beyond their contracted hours has a contractual claim to time and a half. A teacher at the same parents' evening is either inside their 1,265 hours or doing 51.7 additional hours, and is paid nothing extra either way.

Where extra money for teachers actually exists

Since overtime is not an option, it is worth being clear about what is. These are the real routes, roughly in order of how much money is typically involved.

• A TLR. Teaching and Learning Responsibility payments are the main mechanism by which additional responsibility is paid for, ranging from a TLR3 of a few hundred pounds to a TLR1 well into five figures. They are pensionable and permanent for as long as you hold the responsibility. See our TLR guide and which responsibilities attract one.
• An SEN allowance, where you are in a designated special educational needs post. See our SENCO pay guide.
• Recruitment and retention payments under STPCD paragraph 27, which are discretionary, must be formally reviewed, and should have a stated expected duration. See our guide to R&R payments.
• Paragraph 26 payments for CPD outside the school day, ITT activity within the ordinary conduct of the school, agreed out-of-school-hours learning activity, or school-to-school improvement work — if your school's pay policy provides for them.
• Exam marking, which is a separate contract with an awarding body rather than with your school, with its own tax consequences. See our guides on exam marking pay and tax on exam marking income.
• Private tutoring, subject to your school's rules on it. See private tutoring rules for teachers and tax on tutoring income.

What none of these are is compensation for the additional hours in paragraph 51.7. That work is, by design, part of what the annual salary buys. Whether that design is defensible is a policy argument; that it is the design is not in doubt.

Sources

• School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document 2025 and guidance — GOV.UK — paragraphs 26, 27, 51.2, 51.4, 51.5, 51.6, 51.7, 51.8, 51.9, 51.12, 52.1, 52.2, 52.4 and 52.5, and guidance paragraphs 41, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67 and 68. All quotations above are taken verbatim from this document.
• School teachers' pay and conditions — GOV.UK collection page, where the final STPCD 2026 will appear.
• NJC for Local Government Services National Agreement on Pay and Conditions of Service (the "Green Book") — Part 2 paragraph 6.1 (37-hour standard week) and Part 3 Section 2 paragraph 2.6(a) (overtime enhancements).
• Updated "Green Book" Part 4.12: Term-Time Only employees — NJC circular, 13 March 2024 — paragraphs 4.6 (INSET days) and 11.1 (overtime premium rates for TTO staff).

What we could not verify. The Green Book is not published in full as a single free public document by the LGA; the version cited above is a local authority's published copy of the national agreement, and Part 3 provisions are expressly capable of local modification, so your own authority's or trust's rates may differ. We have also not been able to review the final STPCD 2026, which had not been published at the time of writing — all paragraph numbers on this page are from the STPCD 2025.