Early Years Teachers Pay Grant 2026/27: Do Teachers Get It?

Early years pay policy has a habit of producing headlines that sound like good news for an individual teacher and turn out, on inspection, to be aimed somewhere else entirely. The Early Years Teachers Pay Grant is a clean example of that pattern. It has "teachers pay" in its name, it is genuinely new government money, and it genuinely exists because of a teachers' pay award — and none of that means an early years teacher personally receives any of it.

This page is a focused explainer on what the EYTPG is, who can claim it, how the £18 million figure is worked out, and — because this is the part most coverage glosses over — who actually benefits from it in practice. For the wider picture of how early years pay works, including the structural divide between maintained nursery schools and private, voluntary and independent (PVI) settings that this grant sits inside, see our early years and nursery teacher pay guide, which this page deliberately does not repeat.

What the EYTPG actually is

The Early Years Teachers Pay Grant for 2026 to 2027 is a Department for Education grant of £18 million, announced in guidance published in July 2026. Its stated purpose, in the DfE's own wording, is to support eligible public sector early years settings with the costs of the schools teachers' pay award from September 2026 — the 3.5% uplift to the Main and Upper Pay Ranges that followed the Government's acceptance of the School Teachers' Review Body's 36th report.

Read that purpose carefully, because it explains everything else on this page. The grant does not exist because the Government has decided early years teachers deserve extra recognition or additional reward. It exists because a specific group of employers — schools, academies and maintained nursery schools that already employ teachers on statutory School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD) terms — have just been required to pay those teachers more, and the DfE is contributing toward that extra cost so it does not simply have to be absorbed from elsewhere in a stretched early years budget.

Which settings can actually claim it

The published guidance is specific and, importantly, narrower than "early years settings" as a phrase might suggest. Eligibility for 2026/27 is limited to public sector provision:

• Schools — both maintained schools and academies — with nursery classes or early years provision.
• Governor-run academies delivering early years provision.
• Maintained nursery schools — the roughly 376 standalone MNS settings in England.

What is not on that list matters as much as what is. Private, voluntary and independent (PVI) nurseries and childminders are not eligible. The guidance frames eligibility explicitly around public sector settings, and PVI providers are excluded by that framing rather than mentioned and carved out — there is no ambiguity here to caveat.

That exclusion lines up with a point our early years and nursery teacher pay guide covers in depth: a qualified teacher with QTS in a maintained nursery school is on full STPCD terms and in the Teachers' Pension Scheme, while an Early Years Teacher holding EYTS in a PVI nursery has no STPCD coverage and no statutory pay scale at all. The STPCD pay award the EYTPG is designed to help fund only applies to the first group in the first place, so it makes internal sense that the grant covering its cost is limited to the same group. The practical consequence, though, is that a large share of the early years workforce — everyone employed in a PVI setting — is entirely outside this funding stream, regardless of whether they hold EYTS, EYPS or even QTS.

How the £18 million is calculated

The DfE has published a methodology document alongside a calculator tool so that local authorities can work out their own allocation, and the mechanics are consistent with how other early years grants are calculated.

How the money reaches a setting

The payment route runs through local authorities, not directly from the DfE to individual settings.

• DfE calculates and publishes local authority allocations — published in October 2026, using the base rates, ACA factors and PTE data described above.
• DfE pays each local authority once — a single payment made in October 2026, covering the whole September 2026 to March 2027 period in one transfer rather than in instalments.
• The local authority distributes the funding to eligible providers in its area — using local PTE data in conjunction with the rates DfE has published, under conditions set out in a published conditions-of-grant document.
• Providers receive the funding as part of their early years income — it arrives as institutional grant income, in the same broad category as other early years funding streams a school or academy receives, not as a payment earmarked for a named individual.

The conditions of grant are explicit about some restrictions and silent on others in a way that is itself informative. They state plainly what the money cannot be used for: it must not be used for contingency funding, and it must not be used for local authority central or administration costs. What they do not do is mandate that the funding must be spent on teacher salaries specifically, or require a local authority or setting to pass any of it through to individual members of staff. The grant is aimed at settings' overall cost of meeting the pay award, and how a setting's finance function actually absorbs that cost — into the staff cost line specifically, or into the budget more generally — is left to the setting.

Will you personally see any of this money?

This is the section that matters most if you are an individual early years teacher reading a page with "teachers pay grant" in the title, and the honest answer is: almost certainly not directly, and not guaranteed indirectly either.

Follow the money one more step and the reason becomes clear. The STPCD pay award this grant is designed to help fund is not optional for an eligible employer — a maintained school, academy or maintained nursery school employing a qualified teacher on STPCD terms was already required to pay the September 2026 uplift whether or not the EYTPG existed. The grant does not create your pay rise; the pay rise already happened under the ordinary statutory pay-setting process, and you should have seen it on your payslip regardless. What the EYTPG changes is how much of the cost of that already-mandatory pay rise your employer has to find from elsewhere in its own budget, versus how much arrives as a central government contribution.

EYTPG vs the Early Years Teacher Recognition Payment

The scheme most likely to be confused with the EYTPG — and the one worth deliberately distinguishing, because the confusion runs in the direction of false hope — is the separate Early Years Teacher Recognition Payment. It is a genuinely different kind of scheme, and the difference is the whole point.

In other words, if what you actually want is a scheme that pays money to you as an individual, the Recognition Payment is the one to read about, not the EYTPG. Our dedicated guide to the Early Years Teacher Recognition Payment covers the £4,500 figure, the phase-one eligible local authority areas, the qualification and working-time tests, and how to apply through the claims service — and it is worth reading in full precisely because it is the scheme that behaves the way a headline about "early years teacher pay" implies this one does.

How the funding level has changed over time

The EYTPG has a short history, and tracking it honestly means admitting that the grant has changed its name, its scope and sometimes its eligibility wording almost every year, which makes a clean trend line harder to draw than it should be.

Comparing only the figure that is unambiguously the teachers'-pay-specific portion in each of the two years we can isolate cleanly — £15 million within the 2025/26 EY NTPG, rising to £18 million as the standalone 2026/27 EYTPG — gives a nominal increase of roughly 20%. That is a real rise, and it happens against a pay award of 3.5%, so the grant is growing faster in percentage terms than the award it is meant to help cover, at least for this one year-on-year comparison.

What to do with this information

• If you are job-hunting in early years, do not treat the EYTPG as a reason a role will pay more. It is a grant to an employer to help offset a cost that employer already had to bear. It tells you nothing about what any individual post will actually pay — check the advertised pay range and the pension arrangements directly, as our early years and nursery teacher pay guide sets out.
• If you want a scheme that pays you directly, look at the Recognition Payment instead. The £4,500 Early Years Teacher Recognition Payment is the scheme built to reach individuals, subject to its own eligibility rules on qualification, working time and location.
• If you work in a maintained nursery school, academy or school with early years provision, this grant is background context for your setting's budget, not a personal entitlement. If pay progression, TLR creation or recruitment feels constrained despite this funding arriving, that is consistent with £18 million nationally being a genuine but partial contribution toward a cost that is larger than the grant covers, not evidence that the money has gone missing.
• If you work in a PVI setting, this grant is simply not relevant to your employer. PVI nurseries are not eligible for the EYTPG under the 2026/27 rules, and your setting's early years funding runs through the ordinary early years national funding formula hourly rates instead.

Sources and accuracy

The core facts on this page — the £18 million total, the description of the grant's purpose as supporting eligible public sector early years settings with the costs of the schools teachers' pay award from September 2026, the eligible settings (schools, governor-run academies and maintained nursery schools), the base rates of £106 for under-2s, £79 for 2-year-olds and £60 for 3-and-4-year-olds, the area cost adjustment step, the 25/38ths pro-ration, the October 2026 publication and payment of local authority allocations, and the conditions of grant restricting use for contingency funding or local authority central or administration costs — come from the Department for Education's published guidance, "Early Years Teachers Pay Grant (EYTPG) for 2026 to 2027," and its accompanying methodology and conditions-of-grant documents on gov.uk, first published 8 July 2026 with a minor update on 29 July 2026.

The historical figures — the 2025/26 Early Years National Insurance Contributions and Teachers Pay Grant (EY NTPG) at £40 million total, split as £25 million for National Insurance costs and £15 million for the teachers' pay award portion; the 2024/25 Early Years Budget Grant (EYBG) at £34 million alongside £22.5 million rolled into core early years funding; and the 2023/24 Early Years Teachers Pay Additional Grant (EY TPAG) — come from the corresponding DfE guidance and methodology documents published for each of those years, several of which have since been withdrawn and superseded. Where we could not verify a precise, unambiguous headline total or a consistent eligibility description across years, that is flagged directly in the funding-history section above rather than smoothed over.

The description of the Early Years Teacher Recognition Payment — the £4,500 after-tax amount, eligibility for holders of QTS, EYTS or EYPS working as an early years teacher for at least half their time, the phase-one eligible local authority areas, and the application route through a government claims service — comes from the DfE's published guidance for that scheme. It is a separate policy from the EYTPG and is covered in full on our dedicated Early Years Teacher Recognition Payment guide.

The 3.5% September 2026 teachers' pay award referenced as the cost driver behind the EYTPG follows the Government's acceptance of the School Teachers' Review Body's 36th report, as set out on this site's 2026/27 pay scales page. The structural distinction between maintained-sector early years teachers on STPCD terms and PVI-sector Early Years Teacher Status holders outside it, referenced throughout this page, is covered in full in our early years and nursery teacher pay guide, which this page deliberately avoids repeating.

This is independent guidance for orientation, not legal, financial or careers advice, and it is not affiliated with the Department for Education or any local authority. If your setting's income or your own pay is affected by this grant, your school's or trust's finance team and your own contract of employment are the documents that determine your position, not this page.