Exam Marking Pay for Teachers: What Examiners Actually Earn

Exam marking is the second job most secondary teachers have considered and comparatively few have actually costed. It arrives every spring as an email from a head of department, or a poster in the staffroom, or a colleague mentioning that they did GCSE Geography last year and it paid for a holiday. What almost never accompanies the suggestion is a number you can rely on, because the awarding organisations themselves are strikingly inconsistent about publishing one.

That inconsistency is the real story here, and it is worth stating plainly at the outset. Four organisations mark almost every GCSE and A-level script in England and Wales. One of them publishes a single headline range on its recruitment page. One publishes a detailed breakdown including senior roles in a marketing article. One publishes an allocation size but leaves the fee to the contract. And one publishes essentially nothing current at all. A teacher trying to decide whether this work is worth their June is therefore comparing figures that were produced for different purposes, on different bases, at different times — which is precisely why this page sets out what each board says in its own words rather than blending them into a single misleading average.

This guide covers what the work pays and what it costs you in hours. The separate question of how that money is taxed — which is genuinely strange, because the boards deduct income tax at source from people they simultaneously classify as self-employed — is dealt with in our companion guide on tax on exam marking income for teachers. If you are weighing marking against the other obvious second income for a teacher, our guides on the rules on private tutoring and tax on tutoring income cover that side.

Nobody sets these rates nationally

Teachers arrive at this question carrying an assumption formed by their own pay: that somewhere there is a document, published by somebody official, setting out what the work pays. For your salary that assumption is correct — the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document is made under statute, revised annually after a pay review body recommendation, and published on GOV.UK where anyone can read it. Our 2026/27 pay scales page tracks it.

For examining, the assumption is completely wrong, and understanding why changes how you read every figure below.

• AQA is an independent education charity — registered charity number 1073334, a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales. It describes itself as the largest provider of academic qualifications taught in UK schools and colleges, setting and marking papers for around half of all GCSEs and A-levels taken each year.
• OCR operates within Cambridge University Press and Assessment, part of the University of Cambridge, and recruits its assessors through Cambridge's own recruitment systems.
• Pearson Edexcel is a division of Pearson plc, a publicly listed company with shareholders, which is a materially different kind of organisation from a charity or a university department and has no particular reason to publish its cost base.
• WJEC/CBAC is a Welsh awarding body, originally established by Welsh local authorities, offering qualifications across Wales and England, the latter largely through its Eduqas brand.
• Ofqual regulates all of them, and the JCQ coordinates common rules between them — but neither has any role in setting what an examiner is paid.

Each of these bodies sets examiner fees as a commercial decision, balancing the need to recruit enough qualified markers against its own cost base. There is no negotiating machinery, no collective agreement, no pay review body and no union-agreed scale. The clearest statement of what that means in practice sits in AQA's own examiner terms of appointment, at clause 8.7:

"AQA reserves the right to make adjustments to the level of fees payable, during the period of the contract without the express agreement of the Contractor."

That is not a criticism of AQA — it is a standard contractor clause, and the practical risk of a mid-series fee cut is negligible. But it captures the legal reality exactly. You are a contractor accepting a fee that the other party may vary, not an employee on a published scale with a negotiated uplift. Treat every number below as a snapshot of what a particular organisation chose to say at a particular moment.

What each board actually publishes

Here is the disclosure landscape, board by board, quoted rather than summarised. The variation in how much each one is willing to say is itself informative.

AQA: one headline range, and a very specific hours commitment

AQA's "Become an examiner" page carries a single figure, stated without qualification beyond the paper type:

"Earn between £500 and £1000 depending on the type and volume of paper you mark."

That is the whole of AQA's public disclosure on its main recruitment page. Its associate recruitment pack is more explicit about the absence: "Information about fees payable for work, such as writing a question paper, will be available at the interview stage. An outline of all other fees payable to you as part of your role will be sent to you with your contract."

Where AQA is genuinely more forthcoming than its rivals is on hours, and this is the number that should shape your decision far more than the fee does. AQA's own job adverts — placed on Tes and on the DfE's Find a Job service for subjects including English, Geography, Business, Sociology and Religious Studies — state that examiners commit "an average of 15 to 20 hours a week to marking during the exam period", completed over approximately one month, online and from home alongside a full-time teaching role.

Some AQA adverts quote a specific upper earnings figure for the particular vacancy — an English examiner advert closing in May 2026 carried an earnings ceiling of £1,400, above the headline £1,000 range, with the note that "Earnings will be confirmed when you receive your contract". That is worth knowing: the £500 to £1,000 range is a general indication rather than a cap, and individual components can pay more.

WJEC: the most useful published numbers in the sector

WJEC publishes the single most informative page on examiner pay that we could find from any awarding body, in an article titled "Is becoming an examiner worth it?". It gives a range for ordinary marking:

"around £240 to £1,500 for a full marking allocation, depending on the paper and subject"

And, unusually, a separate figure for senior roles — the only board-published senior figure we could locate:

"£1,000 to £2,000+ per exam series" for team leaders or principal examiners

The bottom of WJEC's range matters more than it looks. A £240 allocation is not a typo and not a bad deal: it is a short paper, a small entry, or a first series where the board is deliberately giving a new examiner a manageable load. Boards that only publish a range starting at £500 are quietly excluding that reality, and a teacher who accepts a first allocation expecting £500 and receives a contract for £300 has been misled by the absence rather than by any statement.

OCR: allocation size published, fee left to the contract

OCR takes the opposite approach to AQA: it publishes the workload but not the money. Its examiner vacancies indicate allocations typically in the region of 200 to 450 scripts, with fees paid per script and varying according to the complexity and level of the paper, across a marking window of roughly two to three weeks falling between May and July. Its own assessor recruitment material confirms only the mechanism — that "marking fees are paid relative to the number of papers you mark or coursework samples moderated" — along with two practical requirements worth noting before you apply: a valid UK address to receive assessment materials, and a UK bank account for payment of fees and expenses.

The Pearson disclosure problem

Pearson Edexcel is the largest awarding organisation covered here that does not publish a current examiner fee, and the way it fails to is genuinely unusual, so it deserves setting out precisely rather than glossed.

Pearson's public-facing Assessment Associate vacancies page describes sixteen different assessment roles in detail — Examiner, Moderator, Principal Examiner, Chair of Examiners, Standards Verifier, End Point Assessor and others — with eligibility requirements for each. It contains no pay information of any kind. The detailed Assessment Associate FAQ documents hosted on the associate gateway do contain a figure, under the heading "How much will I get paid?":

"Although the fees differ across units, based on complexity to mark as well as time and effort required, an average payment to an Assessment Associate will be in the region of £500-£800."

That looks like exactly the disclosure the other boards decline to make — until you read the rest of the document. The same FAQ explains that to use Pearson's ePen marking software you will need "Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows Vista and Windows 7", together with "Internet Explorer version 6 or 7", and states that Apple Macintosh computers are not supported. Windows XP left mainstream support in 2009 and extended support in 2014. Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001. The file's own metadata dates a related version to December 2016.

What Pearson's FAQ does establish, and what remains useful regardless of the date, is the structure of the engagement — and on that it is more forthcoming than any other board:

• Appointment lasts two years. "Your appointment as an Assessment Associate will be valid for two years, if we are unable to offer you a contract during this two year period you will need to reapply for the role." Being on the register is not the same as being contracted.
• Contracts are per series. "Pearson Edexcel contracts Assessment Associates for one exam series at a time." The number contracted depends on candidate entries for the qualification.
• New associates get a guaranteed minimum share. Pearson states it endeavours "to offer a minimum of 10% of available contracts to new AAs each year", on a first come first served basis — a genuinely useful fact if you are wondering whether a first application is realistic.
• You can lapse off the register. Existing associates "will only need to reapply if you haven't marked for us in two years."
• Time commitment is quantified. "An average allocation should take between 35 and 45 hours to mark", across two to three weeks after standardisation.
• Standardisation is paid. "Before marking you must attend a standardisation event held either face-to-face or online, for which you will receive payment."
• Your school can be compensated. "If you do need to take time off work to attend a meeting, Pearson will offer a Teacher Release payment to your school to cover any supply costs incurred."

What actually determines the size of your allocation

Teachers often assume allocation size reflects the board's judgement of them. In a first series it very rarely does. The variables that actually drive it are mostly structural.

The hourly rate nobody quotes

No awarding body publishes an hourly rate for examining, and the reason is not sinister: they pay for output, not time, and speed varies enormously between a first-series examiner and someone marking their tenth June. But you cannot make a sensible decision about your own June without doing the division, so here it is using each board's own published numbers.

Two comparisons make that land. A teacher at the top of the Main Pay Range works out at roughly £24 an hour against directed time alone, before you count any of the additional hours the STPCD requires — so examining at £10 to £12 an hour is not, in pure hourly terms, a better use of an evening than almost anything else you could be paid for. And private tutoring in most of England is priced somewhere between £30 and £45 an hour, which is two to four times the examining rate for work that is arguably less demanding. Our take-home pay calculator will give you your own effective rate to compare against.

Nobody should do exam marking purely for the hourly rate. The people who do it repeatedly do it for the assessment literacy, for the progression into senior roles where the economics genuinely improve, or because a defined lump sum landing in July suits them better than an irregular tutoring income. Those are all good reasons. "It pays well per hour" is not one of them, and any recruitment material implying otherwise is selling.

How examiner recruitment really works

The process is more standardised across boards than the pay is, and knowing the shape of it removes most of the uncertainty.

The shape of a marking season

The calendar matters as much as the money, and it is the part teachers underestimate. An examining year is not a June commitment — it is a December-to-July commitment with the intensity concentrated at the end.

Team leader, principal examiner, and what progression pays

This is where the money genuinely changes, and where the case for examining as a long-term proposition actually sits. WJEC's published figure — "£1,000 to £2,000+ per exam series" for a team leader or principal examiner — is roughly double to quadruple the mid-point of the ordinary marking range, for work that is a step up in responsibility rather than simply more of the same.

AQA publishes the full hierarchy for exam delivery in its associate recruitment pack, and it is worth knowing because the job titles are not self-explanatory:

• Examiner / Moderator. Completes standardisation and marks or moderates an allocation to the required standard. This is where everyone starts.
• Team Leader. Leads a team of examiners through standardisation and ensures they mark to the standard set by the Lead Examiner — and marks their own allocation on top. The dual load is the thing to understand about this role: it is a supervisory job plus the original job.
• Assistant Lead Examiner / Moderator. Appointed where entries for a specification are large, monitoring the team leaders on a component, and again marking their own allocation.
• Lead Examiner / Moderator. Responsible at individual component level for delivering consistent marking standards and expert guidance to the examining teams. This is the role usually meant by "principal examiner" in general conversation.
• Chief Examiner. Implements the subject strategy at specification level, and may also act as Lead Assessment Writer or Lead Examiner for at least one component.
• Chair of Examiners. Maintains standards across all contracted specifications and contributes to subject strategy.

There is a parallel hierarchy for question paper production — Lead Assessment Writer, Item Writer, Item Assessor, Reviser, Scrutineer — which is paid separately and which AQA explicitly says is discussed at interview stage rather than published.

How you get promoted is the genuinely useful and rarely stated part. Team leader and lead examiner posts are largely filled by recommendation from the existing pool, not by open advertisement, which is why marking accurately and hitting deadlines in your first two series matters more than any application you could write. Boards do advertise some senior associate vacancies openly — AQA maintains a senior associate vacancy page — but the normal route upwards is being noticed by the team leader who has been sampling your marking.

Teacher release, standardisation fees and the hidden extras

The headline marking fee is not the whole of the money, and the extras are easy to miss because no board puts them on the recruitment page.

• Standardisation attendance is paid separately. Pearson: "We also pay a fee for attendance at the training/standardisation meeting, be it face to face or online". AQA: "You will be paid to attend meetings and events at the request of AQA. These can be during term-time, school holidays and at weekends."
• Teacher release goes to your school, not to you. Both AQA and Pearson operate release payments that reimburse your school or college for letting you out during term time. AQA describes it as a voucher claimable for meetings or events attended during term time, made under its Memorandum for Contract for the Release of Teachers. This is worth raising with your line manager, because it turns your absence from a cost into a neutral.
• Travel and subsistence are reimbursed where authorised. AQA reimburses authorised travel and subsistence at current AQA rates. Most marking is now online, so this mainly bites for senior associates attending meetings at AQA offices in Guildford, Manchester, Harrogate, London and Bath.
• The kit is your problem. AQA's terms make possession of suitable IT "a pre-condition of appointment" — a private PC or laptop running a currently supported Windows operating system, broadband and a printer. Mac support is limited to certain subjects. The board does not supply equipment, and the contractor warrants that electronic marking will not be done in a public place or over a public network.
• Payment timing is fixed and slow-ish. AQA states script and meeting fees are usually paid automatically without a claim, other claims are paid within 30 days of a valid claim form, and it reserves the right to refuse a claim received more than 90 days after entitlement arose. Payment is by BACS to a UK bank account, and a National Insurance number must be supplied.

The rules that come attached to the money

Examining brings contractual obligations that are stricter than most teachers expect, and two of them have real consequences for the other things a teacher might do for money. Both are set out in AQA's examiner terms of appointment, and equivalents exist at the other boards.

You cannot market yourself as an examiner. Clause 6.5.2 prohibits the contractor from making use of their association with AQA for commercial purposes, "including (without limitation) by identifying themselves as an AQA examiner in text or on the internet or in advertising tutorial services or involvement in courses organised outside of AQA". If you tutor, you cannot put "AQA examiner" on your tutoring profile. That is a direct and frequently ignored collision between two of the commonest teacher side incomes, and it is worth reading alongside our guide to private tutoring rules.

You cannot casually mark for two boards. Clause 6.4 requires the contractor to have informed AQA of any other current commitments to other awarding organisations, and provides that they "will not, during the period of this contract, take up additional work with another awarding organisation without prior written permission from AQA".

Beyond those, the standard obligations are substantial: strict confidentiality over question papers and mark schemes both before and after the exam, a prohibition on discussing the work on social media or with the press, a requirement to declare any personal interest in a candidate or professional interest in a centre, an obligation to adhere to the JCQ policy on suspected malpractice, an assignment of all intellectual property in anything you produce to the board, and a ban on communicating directly with centres or candidates except as instructed. Clause 12.2 permits immediate termination for breach of confidentiality, unsatisfactory performance, bringing the board into disrepute, or being convicted of or investigated for a criminal offence.

Is it worth it? An honest assessment

Setting the marketing aside, here is the case on both sides using only the figures verified on this page.

The pattern that emerges from the boards' own material is that examining is badly paid as a one-off and reasonably paid as a career. A teacher who marks for a single summer, finds it grinding and stops has, on the numbers, done about sixty hours of evening work for somewhere near the National Living Wage. A teacher who marks for three or four series, becomes fast, is recommended for team leader and then moves into lead examiner or question paper production has built a second professional identity that pays materially better and lasts well past the end of a classroom career — AQA's own recruitment pack profiles a senior associate who started as an assistant examiner over twenty years ago and now chairs a subject.

The decision, in other words, is not really "is £500 to £1,000 worth a month of evenings". It is "am I prepared to do this badly-paid first series in order to reach the reasonably-paid roles above it". Answer that honestly and the rest follows.

Sources, and what we could not verify

The AQA figures are from AQA's own "Become an examiner" recruitment page, its published examiner vacancies on Tes and the DfE Find a Job service, its associate recruitment pack, and its published Examiner Terms of Appointment for Examiners, Team Leaders and Assistant Principal Examiners. The WJEC figures are from WJEC's own article "Is becoming an examiner worth it?" on wjec.co.uk. The OCR material is from OCR's assessor recruitment pages and published examiner vacancies through Cambridge University Press and Assessment. The Pearson material is from the Pearson Edexcel Assessment Associate vacancies page and the Assessment Associate FAQ documents hosted on home.edexcelgateway.com.

Five honest limitations, in descending order of importance.

• The Pearson fee figure is not current. The £500-£800 average appears in an FAQ that also specifies Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 as system requirements, with related file metadata dating to December 2016. We have quoted it for transparency and told you not to rely on it.
• The AQA terms of appointment we quote are dated August 2014. We searched for a more recent published version of AQA's examiner contract terms and could not find one in the public filestore. The clauses quoted — self-employed status, tax deducted at source, auto-enrolment, fee variation, conflict of interest — are quoted accurately from that document, but you should read whatever terms accompany your own contract offer rather than assuming these are unchanged.
• Senior role fees are published by one board only. WJEC's "£1,000 to £2,000+ per exam series" is the sole board-published senior figure we found. We have not extrapolated it to AQA, OCR or Pearson.
• Hourly rates on this page are our arithmetic, not any board's. No awarding organisation publishes an hourly rate. The table divides published fees by published hours, and the two are measured on different bases by different boards, so treat the output as an order of magnitude.
• Allocation sizes vary far more than any published range suggests. Entry numbers, recruitment success in your subject and your own stated availability move the figure substantially, and none of them is visible to you before you are offered a contract.

Nothing on this page is financial advice, and it is not a substitute for the contract you are actually offered. Before committing a June to this work, get the fee, the allocation size and the deadline in writing from the board, and check them against the hours you can realistically find.