Part-Time and Job-Share Teacher Pay and Pension Explained

Roughly one in five teachers in England works part-time, and the proportion is considerably higher among experienced teachers returning after parental leave, teachers managing caring responsibilities, and teachers winding down towards retirement. Despite that, almost everything written about teacher pay quietly assumes a full-time contract. Generic pro-rata salary calculators are easy to find, but they know nothing about the STPCD pay ranges, nothing about how directed time is apportioned, and — most importantly — nothing at all about how the Teachers' Pension Scheme treats a fractional contract, which is where the real money and the real confusion sit.

This guide covers the whole picture for teachers in England — the pay figures used throughout are STPCD figures, so Welsh readers should substitute the equivalent point from our Wales pay scales guide, though the pension mechanics are identical in both nations: how your fraction is calculated in the first place, how it converts into an actual salary, exactly which salary figure determines your pension contribution tier, how a job share splits contributions between two separate employments, why TLRs no longer pro-rate by your fraction at all since 1 September 2026 while other allowances still do, and what part-time service does and doesn't do to your years of service. It ends with two fully worked numeric examples and an honest account of the one area where the published guidance is thinner than it should be.

How an FTE fraction is actually worked out

Your full-time equivalent fraction — the 0.4, 0.6 or 0.8 that appears on your contract and drives almost every other number in this guide — is not a loose estimate of how busy you are or how many days you happen to be in school. Under the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document, it is a specific calculation: the number of hours you are timetabled to work during the school's timetabled teaching week, expressed as a proportion of the total number of hours in that same school's timetabled teaching week for a full-time classroom teacher.

That definition matters more than it might sound, for two reasons. First, it is anchored to your school's timetabled teaching week, not to a national standard number of hours — so the same three-day pattern can produce a slightly different fraction at two different schools with differently structured weeks. Second, it is calculated on timetabled teaching time rather than on total time in the building, which means the fraction isn't simply "days present divided by five", even though three days out of five very often does come out close to 0.6 in practice.

The pro rata principle set out in the STPCD then does the rest of the work: that same percentage is used to determine the proportion of a full-time teacher's pay you are entitled to, and the proportion of a full-time teacher's directed time you are required to be available for. One fraction, applied consistently to both sides of the bargain. Where part-time arrangements go wrong, it is very often because a school has applied the fraction faithfully to the pay and rather less faithfully to the time.

Turning your fraction into an actual salary

Once the fraction is settled, the salary calculation itself is refreshingly simple, and it is the same calculation whether you hold a standard part-time contract or half of a job share. You are placed on a pay point on the Main Pay Range, Upper Pay Range or Leadership Pay Range in exactly the same way as a full-time teacher, based on your experience and performance — part-time teachers are not on a separate, lower scale. That scale point has a full-time-equivalent annual value. Your actual salary is that value multiplied by your fraction.

For a teacher on the National pay range in 2026/27, that produces figures like these:

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. The first is that your scale point is unaffected by going part-time. Moving from full-time to 0.6 does not move you down the range, does not reset your progression, and does not change the full-time-equivalent figure your school should quote when discussing your pay — it changes only the multiplier applied to it. If a school ever describes a part-time salary as though it were a scale point in its own right, that's a sign the arithmetic is being obscured rather than explained.

The second is that the pro-rated figure is what actually lands in payroll, and therefore what income tax, National Insurance and — crucially for the next section — pension contributions are all calculated from. This is where part-time teacher pay stops being simple multiplication and starts having genuine structural quirks in your favour.

Which salary sets your pension contribution tier

Teachers' Pension Scheme member contributions are tiered: the Scheme has six salary bands, and the rate for your band is charged on your whole pensionable salary rather than marginally on the portion above each threshold. The bands and rates this site uses for 2026/27 are:

So the obvious and entirely reasonable question for a part-time teacher is: which salary gets compared against those thresholds — the pro-rated salary I'm actually paid, or the full-time-equivalent rate for my post?

It is your actual salary. Teachers' Pensions guidance to employers is unambiguous on this: the contribution band is determined by the member's annual salary rate for that particular employment, rather than the full-time equivalent rate for it, and employers are told to derive the annual salary rate from the pensionable earnings actually paid in each pay period. A teacher paid £3,000 in a monthly pay period has an annual salary rate of £36,000 for tiering purposes, regardless of what a full-timer in the same post would earn.

This is not a technicality or an oversight — it was a deliberate design decision. Under the arrangements that preceded the career average scheme, part-time teachers' contributions were assessed against the full-time equivalent salary, which meant a 0.5 teacher could be charged the percentage appropriate to a salary they were not receiving. Moving the assessment onto actual earnings was explicitly recognised at the time as a gain for part-time employees, the large majority of whom are women.

One important caveat in the other direction: the band is a band, not a marginal rate. Crossing a threshold moves your entire salary into the higher rate. For part-time teachers this matters most when increasing your fraction — going from 0.7 to 0.8 of a well-paid post, or adding a TLR, can push your actual pensionable pay across a boundary and lift the rate charged on all of it. It's worth checking where your pro-rated salary sits relative to the nearest threshold before agreeing to a change of fraction, particularly if you'd be landing just above one.

The job-share pension split explained

This is the section that genuinely isn't documented anywhere teacher-facing, and it follows directly from the principle above. In a job share, two teachers each hold their own contract covering a share of one substantive post. For Teachers' Pension Scheme purposes, each of those contracts is a separate employment. Each is therefore tiered independently, against its own actual pensionable earnings. The two halves are never recombined to produce a single notional full-time salary for tiering, and neither teacher is charged the rate that a single full-time holder of the shared post would have paid.

Teachers' Pensions states the underlying rule directly in its employer guidance: where a teacher is a member of the Scheme in respect of more than one employment, the earnings in each employment separately determine the contribution rate paid for that particular employment. Employers are instructed to derive the pay period annual salary rate for each employment and explicitly told not to add the salaries together and average them, and to apply the appropriate contribution band to each contract against that contract's own pensionable earnings. Teachers' Pensions confirms that the same treatment applies where the two contracts happen to be held at the same school.

That employer-facing rule is written for the case of one member holding several employments, but the same logic produces the job-share result, and it does so twice over:

• The ordinary job share (two different teachers, one post). Each teacher has a single employment covering their share. Each is tiered on their own actual pay. Neither of them ever sees the full-time-equivalent value of the shared post used as their contribution band, because that figure isn't their annual salary rate for their employment.
• One teacher holding two part-time contracts. Here the explicit multiple-employment rule applies directly: each contract stands alone for tiering, even where both are with the same employer. A teacher on 0.5 and 0.5 can pay a lower blended percentage than the same teacher on a single full-time contract with identical total earnings.
• The result in both cases is the same. Tiering follows the employment, not the post and not the person. A shared post is charged at the rate appropriate to each share, not at the rate appropriate to the whole.

Note the asymmetry this creates, because it is real and it is not widely understood. Income tax has a mechanism for this — your tax code, and ultimately a year-end position, pulls all your employments together so you can't reduce your tax bill by splitting income across contracts. Teachers' Pension contributions have no such reconciliation. The tier is determined employment by employment, pay period by pay period, and there is no year-end recalculation that combines them and bills you the difference. What you pay across a split arrangement is what you pay.

Worked example: a 0.6 FTE teacher on U1 with a TLR

Take a teacher on U1 on the National pay range, working 0.6 FTE, who also holds a TLR2 with a full-time-equivalent value of £5,000 — and who holds the whole of the responsibility that TLR is attached to. They lead the entire department; they simply do it across three days rather than five. That distinction is what drives the TLR line in the table below, because since 1 September 2026 a TLR1 or TLR2 is valued on the proportion of the responsibility held, not on the holder's contracted fraction. Working the whole thing through from the top:

Now compare that with the mistake people commonly make, which is to assume the tier is set by the full-time equivalent. The full-time-equivalent total for this post is £49,134 + £5,000 = £54,134, which sits in the 9.9% band. If the tier really were assessed on that figure, this teacher would pay 9.9% of their actual £34,480.40 salary — £3,413.56 a year. The correct treatment saves them £862.01 a year, and they accrue precisely the same pension either way.

It's also worth noticing what has happened to the TLR here, because this is the part of the calculation that changed most recently. The £5,000 responsibility payment has been paid in full, not scaled to 0.6. Under the treatment that applied until 1 September 2026 this teacher would have received £3,000 — their fraction of the TLR — giving pensionable pay of £32,480.40 rather than £34,480.40. Paragraph 20.7 of the STPCD now makes the responsibility-based basis mandatory, so carrying the whole of the responsibility is worth £2,000 a year more in gross pay for identical work. Because the TLR is fully pensionable, that uplift also flows into the pension: accrual for the year rises from £569.83 to £604.92, an extra £35.09 of annual pension banked for that one year alone.

One knock-on effect to watch. Because the full TLR now lands in pensionable pay rather than a fraction of it, it pushes part-timers closer to the contribution band thresholds than the old treatment did. In this example it has not tipped the teacher over — but on a slightly higher fraction it easily could. At 0.7 FTE the same package produces £34,393.80 + £5,000 = £39,393.80, which crosses into the 8.9% band and lifts the rate charged on the whole amount. You can model your own combination of fraction, scale point and responsibility share in our part-time teacher pay calculator, which takes your FTE and the proportion of the responsibility you hold as two separate inputs for exactly this reason.

Worked example: a genuine 0.5/0.5 job share pair

Now the case this guide exists for. Two teachers, both on U3 on the National pay range, job share a single substantive post that carries a TLR2 with a full-time-equivalent value of £6,000. Each holds a 0.5 contract, and — unlike the teacher in the previous example — they genuinely share the responsibility itself, half each, so each receives 50% of the TLR. That 50% is the share of the responsibility, not the contracted fraction; it simply happens to coincide here, which is exactly why the two need to be agreed separately rather than assumed to be the same number. The full-time-equivalent value of the whole post is £52,835 + £6,000 = £58,835.

Read the bottom two rows together, because that is the whole point of this page. The job-share pair pay £1,823.88 less between them in member contributions than a single full-time holder of the identical post would pay — because each of their employments is tiered on its own £29,417.50, which sits in the bottom band, rather than on the £58,835 the post is worth. And yet the pair accrue exactly the same total annual pension, £1,032.19, because career average accrual is a flat 1/57th of pensionable earnings with no tiering in it at all.

The employer contribution follows the pay rather than the tier, so it is unchanged: at 28.68% the school pays the same total across the two contracts as it would for one full-timer. Nothing here is a loophole being exploited; it is simply the arithmetic of a banded contribution structure applied to smaller employments, and Teachers' Pensions' own employer guidance is the thing that produces it.

The same effect appears, slightly less dramatically, for a single teacher splitting their week across two contracts. A teacher holding two 0.5 contracts of an M6 National post (£46,940 full-time-equivalent) has an annual salary rate of £23,470 in each employment. Both fall in the 7.4% band, giving £3,473.56 across the year. The same teacher on one full-time M6 contract earning the identical £46,940 would be in the 8.9% band and would pay £4,177.66 — a difference of £704.10 for the same total earnings and the same total accrual.

How TLRs and other allowances work for part-timers

TLRs are the one part of a part-time teacher's package that no longer follows the pro rata principle, and this is the most important recent change on this page. Historically a Teaching and Learning Responsibility payment was scaled down by your contracted fraction in exactly the same way as base pay. That is no longer permitted. Paragraph 20.6 of the STPCD allowed relevant bodies to move to a new basis from 1 September 2025, and paragraph 20.7 makes it mandatory from 1 September 2026 that the value of all existing and new TLR1 and TLR2 payments is determined by the proportion of the TLR responsibility the teacher is undertaking — the proportion of the full-time-equivalent responsibility — rather than by the teacher's own working pattern.

In practice that produces two distinct outcomes, and which one applies to you depends on a single question: how much of the responsibility do you actually carry?

• You hold the whole responsibility. You lead the entire department, just on fewer days. You should receive the full TLR value, not your fraction of it. A 0.6 FTE head of department on a £5,000 TLR2 should be paid £5,000, where the old treatment gave them £3,000.
• You share the responsibility with someone else. You each receive the share of the TLR that matches your share of the responsibility — which might be 50/50 or 70/30, and need not match either teacher's individual FTE. The STPCD expressly contemplates a part-time TLR being awarded to a full-time teacher for exactly this reason.
• TLR3 is outside all of this. Paragraph 20.8 states that the pro rata principle does not apply to a TLR3 award at all. A TLR3 is proportioned to the duration of the project and to nothing else, so a part-time teacher leading a term-long project receives the same amount as a full-time colleague leading it.

The TLR remains fully pensionable and fully taxable at whatever value it is paid, which is why both worked examples above fold it into pensionable pay before working out the contribution tier. One consequence worth noting: paying the full TLR rather than a fraction of it pushes a part-timer's actual pensionable pay higher, so it is now rather more likely to carry you across a contribution band threshold than it used to be. Our part-time teacher pay calculator takes your fraction and your share of the responsibility as two separate inputs so you can see where that lands you.

Our TLR payments guide covers the tiers, the paragraph 20.6–20.8 rules and the negotiation side in full detail. What's worth adding here specifically for part-timers is the workload point, because the rule change does not by itself make the responsibility fit the hours. A head of department on 0.6 FTE should now be paid 100% of the TLR for carrying 100% of the accountability — but they are still accountable for the department's outcomes, its staffing, its data and its parental communication on the two days a week they aren't contracted to be there. The accompanying guidance is clear that the responsibilities agreed should be capable of being carried out within the part-time teacher's normal hours. That is a legitimate thing to raise explicitly when the role is offered, and the right time to raise it is before accepting, as part of agreeing the job description. If your September payslip still shows a TLR scaled to your contracted fraction while you carry the whole responsibility, paragraph 20.7 is the reference to put to your school in writing.

Other pensionable additions have not changed, and still follow the pro rata principle. Special educational needs allowances are pro-rated by your fraction in the ordinary way. London weighting isn't a separate allowance at all in the STPCD structure — it's built into the pay range itself, so an Inner London 0.6 teacher pro-rates the Inner London scale point rather than pro-rating a National figure and adding something on top. That distinction matters for the tiering question, because an Inner London part-timer's actual salary is higher for the same fraction and may well land in a different contribution band from an identically fractioned colleague on the National range.

How part-time service counts towards accrual and years

There are two quite different questions hiding inside "how does part-time service count", and conflating them is the source of a lot of unnecessary anxiety about going part-time.

The first is qualifying service — the length of Scheme membership that determines whether you are entitled to benefits at all. This is measured in calendar time, and part-time working does not slow it down. Teachers' Pensions is explicit: if you're working part-time, the whole period counts towards your qualifying service, including the days you don't work. Five years at 0.4 FTE is five years of qualifying service, not two. All periods of service, full-time and part-time, are added together for this purpose.

The second is accrual — how much pension you actually build up. Under the career average arrangement you bank 1/57th of your pensionable earnings for each Scheme year. Because your part-time pay is already reduced in proportion to your fraction, the accrual reduces automatically and proportionally; there is no additional part-time adjustment applied on top of that, and no separate part-time accrual rate. A teacher at 0.5 of a £57,000 full-time-equivalent post has pensionable earnings of £28,500 and accrues £500 of annual pension that year — half of the £1,000 a full-timer in the post would accrue, and no less than that.

Each Scheme year's accrual is banked as its own unit and revalued each year while you remain in service, then all the years are added together at retirement. This is genuinely important for anyone thinking about going part-time late in their career: because the career average scheme values each year on its own earnings, reducing your fraction in your final years reduces only those years' accrual. It does not reach backwards and reduce the value of the years you worked full-time.

Directed time, INSET and non-working days

The STPCD's pro rata principle cuts both ways, and this is the half that schools apply less consistently. A full-time teacher must be available for work for 1,265 hours of directed time across the school year. A part-time teacher must be available for the same proportion of those 1,265 hours as the proportion of full-time pay they receive. A 0.6 FTE teacher is therefore available for 759 directed hours, not 1,265, and not "whatever the school needs on the days they happen to be in".

That allocation has to cover everything that counts as directed time, not just timetabled teaching: staff meetings, parents' evenings, INSET days, directed cover, and any other activity the headteacher directs you to attend. The practical consequence is that if your school wants you at a parents' evening or an INSET day that falls outside your contracted pattern, that time has to come from somewhere — either accounted for within your pro-rated allocation (with a corresponding reduction elsewhere) or agreed and paid separately. It should not simply be added to a full timetable on the assumption that a part-timer has spare capacity on their non-working days.

Planning, preparation and assessment time follows the same logic. PPA is a proportion of your timetabled teaching time, so a part-time teacher is entitled to PPA in proportion to the teaching they actually do — it isn't something that can be quietly squeezed out on the grounds that a three-day timetable is already tight. If your timetable has been built so that your teaching load leaves no room for the PPA that load generates, the timetable is wrong, not your expectations.

• Being expected to attend every INSET day in full while paid for 0.6 of the year's directed time
• Parents' evenings for all your classes scheduled on days you aren't contracted to work, with no adjustment elsewhere
• A timetable that gives you a full-time teacher's contact ratio compressed into three days, leaving no proportionate PPA
• Being asked to answer departmental queries or cover decisions on non-working days as an informal expectation
• Directed time budgets published for the school with no separate pro-rated version for part-time staff

Annual leave, sick pay and family leave

Teachers don't have annual leave in the conventional sense — school holidays function as non-directed time rather than as a leave entitlement that accrues and is booked — so the usual pro-rata holiday arithmetic that applies in other professions largely doesn't arise. Part-time teachers get the same school holidays as everyone else, and their pay is annualised across the year in the normal way, which is why a 0.6 salary is paid in twelve equal monthly instalments rather than only during term time.

Occupational sick pay entitlement under the Burgundy Book operates on length of service and is pro-rated in value: a part-time teacher has the same entitlement in terms of duration, but the pay received during it reflects their contracted fraction, since it's a proportion of their actual salary. Maternity, paternity, adoption and shared parental pay work on the same principle — the occupational scheme's structure is unchanged, and the amounts follow your actual earnings. Statutory payments are calculated from average weekly earnings in the normal way, which for a part-timer means their real, pro-rated earnings.

One point worth flagging for pension purposes: periods of reduced pay due to sickness or family leave are treated differently for contribution tiering. Teachers' Pensions instructs employers that where a member is receiving reduced pay because of family leave or occupational sick leave, the tier should be determined using notional pay — what the member would have earned had their pay not been reduced — rather than the reduced amount actually paid. So a temporary dip in earnings does not automatically drop you into a cheaper contribution band, and equally does not disrupt the tier you were on.

Job share versus standard part-time

These two arrangements are often spoken about interchangeably, and for pension purposes they genuinely are equivalent — your contribution tier depends on your own actual pensionable pay in your own employment either way. Where they differ is in everything else: how the role is structured, how much coordination it demands, and how coherent it feels to do.

For a teacher weighing the two up, the financial comparison is generally a wash and the real question is about the shape of the work. A job share of a head of department post may be a far better career proposition than a standard 0.5 classroom contract at the same fraction and the same pay, precisely because the post retains its seniority. Equally, a job share that depends on two people getting on and communicating constantly is a genuine risk if the partnership isn't right — and unlike a standard part-time contract, you can't simply carry on regardless if it stops working.

Setting up a job share, step by step

Job shares that work well are usually the ones that were designed properly at the outset rather than assembled in a hurry in July. If you're proposing one — either with a named partner or as a request to convert your own full-time post — this sequence covers the ground that tends to matter.

What to check on your own payslip

Most part-time pension errors are visible on a payslip if you know what you're looking for, and they tend to be the same handful of errors. Run through this list once, ideally on the first payslip after any change of fraction:

• Your full-time-equivalent scale point is correct and matches the pay range point you'd be on full-time — part-time does not move you down the scale.
• Your contracted fraction appears on the payslip or your written statement, and matches what you actually teach.
• Your gross pay equals the full-time-equivalent figure multiplied by that fraction, plus any TLR at the value your share of the responsibility earns and any other allowance at its pro-rated value.
• Your pension contribution, divided by your pensionable pay, gives a percentage that matches the band your actual salary falls into — not the band your full-time-equivalent salary would fall into.
• If you hold two contracts, each one shows its own separate contribution tiered on its own pay, rather than one combined deduction at a blended rate.
• Any TLR1 or TLR2 reflects the proportion of the responsibility you hold, not your contracted fraction — if you carry the whole responsibility it should show the full value (STPCD para 20.7, mandatory since 1 September 2026), and any SEN allowance is shown at its pro-rated value. Both are included in the pensionable pay figure, not sitting outside it.

If the percentage doesn't match, the most likely cause is a payroll system that has been configured to tier on full-time-equivalent pay — an error that was correct under the pre-career-average rules and has occasionally survived in local configurations since. It's worth raising with payroll in writing, citing the Teachers' Pensions employer guidance that the band is set by the annual salary rate for that particular employment rather than the full-time equivalent rate for it. You can model what the contribution should be using our Teachers' Pension calculator and take-home pay calculator by entering your actual pro-rated salary rather than the full-time figure.

Where the guidance is genuinely unclear

It's worth being straightforward about the limits of what's published, because this is an area where confident answers are easier to find than well-sourced ones.

The core mechanic in this guide — that the contribution band follows the annual salary rate for each particular employment rather than the full-time equivalent, and that multiple employments are tiered separately rather than combined and averaged — is stated plainly and repeatedly in Teachers' Pensions' employer-facing guidance and its tiered contributions material. It is not restated with anything like the same clarity on the member-facing pages. Teachers' Pensions' own member pages on part-time working and multiple employment do not use the phrase "job share" at all, and do not walk a member through the tiering consequence. That gap between what employers are told and what members can easily find is exactly what this page exists to close, and it's also why a lot of teachers are surprised by their first part-time payslip in either direction.

Two further honest caveats. First, "job share" is not itself a defined term in the pension rules — the rules deal in employments and pensionable earnings, and a job share is simply a staffing arrangement that produces two employments. So the treatment described here follows from the general rules rather than from a specific job-share provision, and an unusual arrangement (for example, a single contract nominally covering a shared post) could in principle behave differently. If your arrangement isn't a clean case of two contracts, confirm the position with your employer and with Teachers' Pensions directly rather than assuming.

Second, contribution band thresholds are reviewed and uprated periodically, and the bands published by Teachers' Pensions may have moved since the figures on this site were last verified. The structure described here — six bands, assessed on actual pay per employment, applied to the whole salary rather than marginally — is stable; the specific thresholds are not. Always check the current tiers at teacherspensions.co.uk before making a decision that turns on being just above or just below a boundary.