Jury Service Pay for Teachers

Jury service is one of the few things that can remove a teacher from a classroom for two weeks at no notice and with no discretion available to anybody in the school. It arrives by post, it is compulsory, and the school's only real options are to support a deferral application or to arrange cover. For the teacher, the immediate question is almost always financial: will I be paid, and if the court pays me something as well, do I keep it?

The answers are more interesting than the question suggests, because the entitlement is built out of a cross-reference rather than a rule. Understanding how that cross-reference works explains several things that otherwise look arbitrary — why academy teachers can get a different answer from maintained school teachers, why supply teachers keep a right they have lost in almost every other context, and why the court's allowance so often ends up in the school's bank account rather than yours.

The one paragraph that governs it

The Burgundy Book — formally Conditions of Service for School Teachers in England and Wales, current revised edition published June 2023 — deals with jury service in Section 6, headed "Other Leave". Paragraph 2 of that section is headed "Leave for jury and other public service", and paragraph 2.1 reads in full:

That is the entire teacher-specific provision. It is worth dwelling on how little it does on its own. It does not say teachers are paid during jury service. It does not say how much. It does not say what happens to any allowance the court pays. What it does is import somebody else's terms — those of local authority officers — and make them the benchmark.

Two consequences follow immediately. The first is that to know what a teacher gets, you have to go and read the local government conditions of service, which is the next section of this guide. The second is that the strength of the entitlement depends entirely on whether your contract incorporates the Burgundy Book at all.

What the Green Book actually says

The conditions of service for local authority officers are in the NJC for Local Government Services National Agreement on Pay and Conditions of Service — universally called the Green Book. The current version dates from May 2024. Part 2, paragraph 7.5, headed "Public Duties", is the benchmark the Burgundy Book points at:

Two sentences, and each does something different. The first establishes that jury service is paid leave — not unpaid leave, not annual leave, not a period you have to make up. The second establishes what happens to the court's money, and it is the sentence almost nobody knows about until it is quoted at them.

This wording has been stable for a very long time; the same provision appears in editions going back at least two decades. For school support staff the Green Book applies directly rather than by cross-reference, and there is a useful related provision for term-time-only staff at Part 4.12, paragraph 15.1, which confirms that paragraph 7.5 applies to term-time-only employees on the appropriate pro rata basis.

The offset mechanic, explained

The arrangement that falls out of those two documents surprises people, so it is worth setting out slowly.

The court does not pay jurors a wage. It reimburses loss — loss of earnings, loss of benefits, childcare and care costs, travel, and a contribution to food. The loss of earnings allowance exists because most jurors are not paid by their employer while they serve, and without it jury service would fall hardest on people who can least afford it.

If your school continues to pay you in full, you have not lost any earnings. There is, on the face of it, nothing for the allowance to compensate. The Green Book resolves the position by directing that where an allowance is claimable, the employee claims it and passes it to the employer — so the public purse still bears part of the cost, and the employee is neither out of pocket nor in profit.

Travel, food and childcare allowances are a different matter. Those reimburse costs you have genuinely incurred by attending court, and you would incur them whether or not your salary continued. The Green Book's offset sentence is directed at the allowance "claimable for loss of earnings", which those are not. Most employers treat expenses as yours to keep, but this is one of the places where local policy varies and it is a fair question to ask.

Supply teachers keep this right

This is the most distinctive point in the whole subject, and it runs against the grain of almost everything else about supply teaching.

Section 2 of the Burgundy Book defines who counts as a "Teacher" for the purposes of the agreement, and paragraph 1.1 excludes two groups: those employed on a day-to-day or other short-notice basis, meaning teachers paid at a daily or hourly rate; and those employed on a temporary basis for a term or less, or as substitutes for permanently appointed teachers who are absent.

Paragraph 1.2 then does something important. Rather than leaving the first group with nothing, it lists the provisions that apply to them anyway: paragraphs 5 and 6 of Section 3, paragraphs 1, 2 and 4 of Section 6, Section 7, and paragraphs 1 and 2 of Section 8. Paragraph 2 of Section 6 is the jury and public service provision.

So a day-to-day supply teacher, who has no entitlement at all under the Section 4 sick pay scheme and none under the Section 5 maternity scheme, does retain the Section 6 public service entitlement. That is unusual enough to be worth raising explicitly if you are in that position, because it is not what most people — including some school business managers — would expect.

Teachers in the second category, employed on a temporary basis for a term or less or covering an absence, are covered by paragraph 1.3, which applies all sections of the agreement except paragraph 4 of Section 3. They are in a stronger position still.

Teachers are deferred, not excused

Jurors are summoned by the Jury Central Summoning Bureau, and applications to move or avoid service are decided by a summoning officer. How they exercise that discretion is governed by published guidance — Guidance for summoning officers when considering deferral and excusal applications, presented to Parliament under section 9AA of the Juries Act 1974. The current version dates from March 2023.

The guidance sets a general expectation at paragraph 4 that everyone summoned will serve at the time for which they are summoned, that the summoning officer should exercise discretion to defer where good reason is shown, and that only in exceptional circumstances should a person be excused. Paragraph 2 adds that excusal should be reserved for cases where it would be unreasonable to require service at any time within the following twelve months.

Teachers then get their own paragraph:

This is genuinely useful and not widely known. It means that a teacher who applies during term time — and especially during an exam series — is applying into a category the guidance has already decided the answer for. The expected outcome is a deferral to a more suitable date, which for a teacher usually means a school holiday or a less pressured point in the year. It is not an excusal, and applying for one is likely to produce a deferral anyway.

Three practical constraints go with that. Deferral can normally be exercised only once in relation to a particular summons, so the date you ask for matters — think about the whole of the next twelve months rather than simply escaping the current term. Paragraph 20 confirms that work commitments generally should be deferred in the first instance unless excusal is clearly necessary. And, critically:

What you can actually claim

The figures below are what gov.uk displayed when this page was checked on 18 September 2026. They are worth treating with a degree of care, because stale jury allowance figures circulate widely and several commercial pages present them as though they had been uprated when they have not.

Alongside that, food and drink is reimbursed at up to £5.71 a day, rising to £12.17 where you are at court for more than 10 hours. Travel is separate again: 31.4p a mile by car or motorcycle, 9.6p a mile by bicycle, the cost of a standard class ticket by train, or the ticket price on bus and underground. Carrying another juror adds 4.2p a mile, and each further passenger 3.2p. Taxi fares are reimbursed only with the court's prior permission. There is no accommodation allowance and no reimbursement for travel from outside England and Wales.

• The daily figure is a cap covering more than just earnings. gov.uk describes it as covering loss of earnings and childcare or care costs together, not a separate earnings allowance with childcare on top. This is regularly misreported.
• It is a maximum, not a rate. You are reimbursed your actual net loss up to the cap, based on what your employer certifies. A teacher whose net daily pay is below the cap gets their net daily pay, not £64.95.
• Weekends and bank holidays do not count. The court is closed and those days are not reimbursed.
• Claims must be made within 12 months of the date your jury service started, and payment usually follows 7 to 10 working days after the claim form is submitted.
• Ask about hardship if the trial is long. The court may be able to pay expenses during a trial rather than at the end where it is likely to run for a long time or where you are facing financial hardship. Ask jury staff.

The Certificate of Loss of Earnings

If your employer is not paying you, the mechanism for recovering something is HMCTS form 5223D, the Certificate of Loss of Earnings for employees. A companion form, 5223C, covers loss of benefits where service runs beyond eight weeks, and there are separate forms for the self-employed and for childcare and care costs.

HMCTS also publishes an online expenses estimator through its jury summons reply service, which is the quickest way to sanity-check a figure before you commit to a claim.

Your legal protections

Two provisions of the Employment Rights Act 1996 protect jurors, and they do different jobs.

There is no duty to pay your salary

It is worth being blunt about this, because the protections above are strong enough that people assume payment must be part of the package. It is not.

Section 43M(3) addresses the point directly: for the purposes of the detriment right, an employee is not to be regarded as having been subjected to a detriment by a failure to pay remuneration in respect of a relevant period unless, under the contract of employment, they are entitled to be paid that remuneration. Subsection (4) defines the relevant period as any period of absence because of attending in pursuance of a jury summons.

In other words, non-payment is only a detriment if your contract says you should be paid. gov.uk states the position in a single sentence: your employer can choose whether or not to pay you during your service. There is no statutory jury service pay in the United Kingdom, for teachers or for anyone else.

Which brings the whole subject back to where it started. For teachers, the entitlement to be paid is contractual, and it arrives through a chain: your contract incorporates the Burgundy Book; Section 6 paragraph 2.1 of the Burgundy Book gives you entitlements comparable with LA officers; and the LA officers' benchmark, the Green Book at paragraph 7.5, provides paid leave of absence with the allowance offset. Break any link in that chain — most obviously by working for an academy trust with its own leave policy, or through an agency — and the answer can be different.

Pension, and other knock-ons

A fortnight is short enough that the secondary effects are usually minor, but they are worth checking rather than assuming.

• Pension. Where your school continues to pay you in full as paid leave of absence, you are receiving normal pensionable pay and your Teachers' Pension Scheme accrual is unaffected. The position only becomes a question if you are not being paid, which for a Burgundy Book teacher should not arise. If you are in that situation, raise it with your employer and with Teachers' Pensions before the absence rather than afterwards.
• Directed time. Jury service is paid leave of absence, not a failure to fulfil directed time. It should not be recorded as absence in a way that counts against you, and it is not a capability or attendance matter.
• Performance management. Objectives set before a jury summons arrived may need adjusting if a long trial genuinely prevents part of the year's work. Raise it at the time rather than at the review point.
• Cover and timetable. How your classes are covered is a matter for the school, and the cost of that cover is not something you can be asked to bear. It is, however, the practical reason schools press for deferrals, and engaging constructively with that is usually in everyone's interest.
• Part-time teachers. If your working pattern means you would not have been at school on a given day, you have lost no earnings for that day and there is nothing to claim or offset. The Green Book's term-time-only provision at Part 4.12 paragraph 15.1 applies the pro rata principle for support staff and the same logic reads across.

A practical sequence

• Reply to the summons within seven days. Responding is compulsory and separate from any deferral application. Non-response can lead to a fine.
• Tell your school immediately, with the dates and the juror number, and ask two specific questions in writing: will I be paid in full, and do you want me to claim the loss of earnings allowance?
• Decide with your school whether to seek a deferral — and if so, ask for a supporting letter explaining the impact. Remember the school cannot apply for you.
• Choose your deferral date carefully. You normally get one deferral per summons, so pick a genuinely better window across the next twelve months rather than simply pushing it out of this term.
• If you are being paid in full, do not submit a loss of earnings claim without confirming the position first — there is no loss for your employer to certify.
• If you are not being paid, get form 5223D completed by payroll before your first day and take it with you to court.
• Keep travel receipts and mileage records from day one, including parking.
• Check your payslip for the month after you return, particularly if any allowance was offset — the arithmetic should leave you on exactly your normal pay.
• Academy or agency staff: get the policy in writing before the first day, because the Burgundy Book chain described on this page may not apply to you at all.

Sources and accuracy

The teacher-specific provision is Section 6, paragraph 2.1 of the Burgundy Book, Conditions of Service for School Teachers in England and Wales, revised edition published June 2023. The supply teacher position is from Section 2, paragraphs 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 of the same document. The local government benchmark is Part 2, paragraph 7.5 of the NJC for Local Government Services National Agreement on Pay and Conditions of Service, May 2024 version, with the term-time-only application at Part 4.12, paragraph 15.1.

Deferral and excusal material is from Guidance for summoning officers when considering deferral and excusal applications, March 2023, presented to Parliament under section 9AA of the Juries Act 1974 as inserted by Schedule 33, paragraph 12 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 — specifically paragraphs 2, 4, 14 and 20. Allowance rates, the claim process and the 12-month deadline are from gov.uk's jury service pages and HMCTS form 5223D, and the employer-side points are from gov.uk's guidance on giving staff time off for jury service.

Statutory protections are from the Employment Rights Act 1996: section 98B including the subsection (2) defence, section 108(3)(aa), and section 43M including subsections (2), (3) and (4).

Three honest limitations. First, the allowance figures above were what gov.uk showed on 18 September 2026 and we found no announcement of any 2025 or 2026 uprating — but several commercial pages present these same figures under a "2026/27 rates" heading in a way that implies an uprating that has not happened, so check gov.uk directly rather than any secondary source, including this one, before relying on a number. Second, we have not repeated the day-201 rate that circulates in secondary sources because it does not appear on gov.uk. Third, the position of agency-engaged supply teachers is genuinely unresolved: the statutory protections attach to employees, the Burgundy Book does not apply, and whether the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 equal treatment right extends to paid jury service leave is not something we could establish either way.

One forward-looking note. Section 25 of and Schedule 3 to the Employment Rights Act 2025 reduce the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal from two years to six months with effect from 1 January 2027. That does not change anything on this page — jury service dismissal is already a day-one right under section 108(3)(aa) — but it narrows the gap between the two, which is worth knowing if you are reading older commentary that emphasised how unusual the day-one protection was.

This page is independent guidance for orientation and is not legal advice, nor is it affiliated with HMCTS, the Ministry of Justice, the DfE, any local authority or any teaching union. The decisive documents for your own situation are your contract of employment and your employer's leave policy. If your school's answer does not match what is set out here, your union is the right next call — and it is a quick conversation, because the whole entitlement rests on two short paragraphs you can point them straight at.