Skilled Worker Visa Salary Threshold for Teachers (2026)
Teaching occupations are not subject to the £41,700 Skilled Worker salary threshold — they use a £25,000 floor plus a going rate taken from the national teacher pay scale. The real figures, checked against England's 2026/27 STPCD, and why the Immigration Salary List claim is wrong.
Independent guidance, not affiliated with the DfE, Teachers' Pensions or any teaching union.
Short answer
General guidance, not immigration advice
If you search for the Skilled Worker salary threshold, you will be told — confidently, repeatedly, and by a great many sites that rank well — that you need £41,700. If you then search specifically for teachers, you will find a second layer of confident claims: that teachers are on the Immigration Salary List, that they qualify for an £33,400 discounted rate, that secondary teaching is code 2314 with a threshold of £31,650, and various combinations of the above. Almost all of it is wrong, and the errors compound, because each site copies the last.
The actual position is both simpler and more favourable than most of that suggests, and it is set out in a place almost nobody looks: the salary options table in the Immigration Rules Appendix Skilled Worker, and a short gov.uk publication called National pay scales for eligible teaching and education leadership occupation codes. This guide works through what those documents actually say, checks the numbers against England's confirmed 2026/27 pay scales, and is explicit about the one place where the official figures are visibly behind.
The threshold that does not apply to you
The general Skilled Worker salary threshold really is £41,700. It rose to that level in July 2025, and for the overwhelming majority of sponsored occupations it is the binding constraint: a sponsored worker must be paid at least £41,700 and at least the going rate for their occupation code, whichever is higher.
That threshold is what makes the Skilled Worker route impossible for large parts of the UK labour market. It is also, for a teacher, completely beside the point. A classroom teacher on England's main pay range does not earn £41,700 until roughly M4, and a newly qualified teacher earns nothing like it. If £41,700 applied to teaching, the route would be closed to early-career overseas teachers entirely, and international recruitment into shortage subjects — which the DfE actively encourages — would not function.
It does not apply, because the Immigration Rules carve teaching out. Understanding how they do that is worth the five minutes, because it explains every other quirk on this page: why there are no discounts, why part-time is awkward, and why the published going rate does not match your payslip.
£25,000
The flat salary floor that applies to listed education occupations, instead of £41,700
How the salary rules are actually built
Appendix Skilled Worker awards 20 points for salary, and it offers a menu of ways to earn those points. Each option pairs a flat floor — an absolute amount of money — with a going rate requirement, and you have to satisfy both halves of whichever option you are using. The options run from A to K:
| Option | Who it is for | Flat floor | Going rate required |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | The standard case | £41,700 | 100% |
| B | PhD in a relevant subject | £37,500 | 90% |
| C | PhD in a relevant STEM subject | £33,400 | 80% |
| D | Job on the Immigration Salary List | £33,400 | 100% |
| E | New entrant to the labour market | £33,400 | 70% |
| F | Health or care job on survey-based rates | £31,300 | 100% |
| G | PhD + health or care | £28,200 | 90% |
| H | STEM PhD + health or care | £25,000 | 80% |
| I | Immigration Salary List + health or care | £25,000 | 100% |
| J | New entrant + health or care | £25,000 | 70% |
| K | Listed health or education occupation | £25,000 | 100% of the national pay scale rate |
Two structural points follow, and they explain most of what is confusing about this area.
First, the going rate and the flat floor are different kinds of number. The going rate is occupation-specific and, for most codes, derived from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings — a statistical measure of what people in that occupation actually earn in the UK. The flat floor is a policy decision about the minimum the Government is prepared to see a sponsored worker paid at all. You clear both or you fail.
Second, the discounts in options B, C and E apply only to survey-derived going rates. Where an occupation's going rate comes from a national pay scale, gov.uk is explicit that no discounts to the going rate are available. There is no new-entrant teacher rate at 70% and no PhD teacher rate at 90%. The pay scale figure is the figure.
Option K: the route teachers actually use
Option K is where teaching lives. It applies to applicants being sponsored in what the Rules call a listed health or education occupation — occupations set out in Tables 3 and 3a of Appendix Skilled Occupations, whose going rates are then found in Tables 4 and 5 rather than in the main survey-based tables. Table 4 holds the NHS pay scale rates; Table 5 holds the teaching rates.
The test under Option K is: your salary must be at least £25,000 a year, and at least 100% of the going rate for your occupation code as published in the relevant national pay scale. Whichever is higher binds. For every qualified teaching post in Great Britain the going rate is higher than £25,000, so in practice the going rate is your real threshold — but the £25,000 floor is not decorative, and it becomes the binding constraint in one specific situation covered further down this page.
GOV.UK describes this arrangement in plain language on its going rates page: "There are different salary rules if you work in some healthcare or education jobs. The 'going rates' for these jobs are based on the national pay scales set by the relevant independent body, for example the NHS." For teachers, the relevant independent bodies are the School Teachers' Review Body in England, the Independent Welsh Pay Review Body in Wales, and the equivalent negotiating machinery in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Why this is a genuinely good deal, not a loophole
The going rates for teaching, in full
These are the figures gov.uk publishes in National pay scales for eligible teaching and education leadership occupation codes, described there as the "minimum annual salary ('going rate') for education jobs on the list of eligible health and education public sector jobs". They cover occupation codes 2313, 2314, 2315, 2316 and 2321.
| Role band | England (excl. London & Fringe) | London Fringe | Outer London | Inner London |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unqualified teachers and probationers | £21,731 | £23,140 | £25,758 | £27,252 |
| Qualified teachers | £31,650 | £33,075 | £36,413 | £38,766 |
| Leadership group | £49,781 | £51,151 | £53,731 | £59,186 |
| Leading practitioner | £50,025 | £51,403 | £53,994 | £59,478 |
| Head teacher | £56,316 | £57,693 | £60,266 | £65,731 |
And the same table across the four UK nations, which matters a great deal if you are comparing offers from different parts of the UK:
| Role band | England (excl. London) | Wales | Scotland | Northern Ireland |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unqualified teachers and probationers | £21,731 | £21,812 | £33,594 | n/a |
| Qualified teachers | £31,650 | £32,433 | £40,305 | £30,000 |
| Chartered teachers | n/a | n/a | £52,158 | n/a |
| Principal teachers | n/a | n/a | £55,155 | n/a |
| Leadership group | £49,781 | £50,653 | n/a | £47,241 |
| Head teacher | £56,316 | £57,304 | £62,556 | £53,309 |
The Scottish figure stands out immediately: £40,305 for a qualified teacher, nearly £9,000 above the England rate and more than £10,000 above Northern Ireland's £30,000. That is not the Home Office treating Scotland differently; it is the Scottish teacher pay scale genuinely being structured differently, with a shorter, higher main grade and probationers on a separately negotiated salary. Scotland's probationer rate of £33,594 is itself higher than England's qualified teacher going rate. If you are weighing a Scottish offer against an English one, the going rate table is a reasonable first-order signal of the underlying pay difference — though the cost of living, the pension arrangements and the professional registration requirements all differ too.
The document also covers further education teaching professionals at code 2312, with qualified lecturers at £27,786 in England and Scotland, £30,619.64 in Wales and £30,000 in Northern Ireland, and teaching assistant codes 3231, 6112 and 6113 at £23,656 across all regions, or £25,147 for SEN variants. Those TA figures are, however, largely academic now — see the section on support staff below.
Does the 2026/27 pay scale clear the going rate?
This is the question that actually matters if you have an offer in front of you. The answer, for England, is yes — at every point on the scale, with room to spare.
| Pay point (England, outside London) | 2026/27 STPCD salary | Going rate to beat | Headroom |
|---|---|---|---|
| M1 (ECT) | £34,069 | £31,650 | £2,419 |
| M2 | £36,042 | £31,650 | £4,392 |
| M3 | £38,400 | £31,650 | £6,750 |
| M4 | £40,941 | £31,650 | £9,291 |
| M5 | £43,529 | £31,650 | £11,879 |
| M6 | £46,940 | £31,650 | £15,290 |
| U1 | £49,134 | £31,650 | £17,484 |
| U2 | £50,956 | £31,650 | £19,306 |
| U3 | £52,835 | £31,650 | £21,185 |
£2,419
Headroom between England's 2026/27 M1 of £34,069 and the published going rate of £31,650
Even the very bottom of the qualified scale — M1, an early career teacher in their first year, outside London — clears the going rate by £2,419. By M6 at £46,940 the margin is over £15,000, and at the top of the Upper Pay Range at £52,835 it is over £21,000. The London picture is the same: Inner London M1 of £41,729 clears the Inner London going rate of £38,766 by £2,963.
So the practical answer to "will my salary be high enough?" for a qualified classroom teacher in England is essentially always yes, provided the school is genuinely paying you on the STPCD. That is a much more reassuring answer than the £41,700 figure implies, and it is why the misinformation about this matters — teachers talk themselves out of applying for UK jobs on the basis of a threshold that was never going to apply to them.
Academy trusts are not bound by the STPCD — check the actual figure
The Immigration Salary List myth
This deserves its own section because it is the single most common factual error written about teacher sponsorship, and because acting on it produces bad decisions.
The claim, in its various forms, is that teaching occupations appear on the Immigration Salary List — the successor to the old Shortage Occupation List — and therefore qualify for a reduced salary threshold of £33,400 and a discounted visa fee. Some versions specifically name "secondary education teaching professionals" and "primary education teaching professionals" as listed. Some add that shortage subjects such as physics and maths give "additional flexibility" on salary.
None of that is correct. We checked the published Immigration Salary List directly. No teaching occupation appears on it. The occupation codes on the list are concentrated in healthcare, laboratory and engineering technician roles, construction and building trades, the creative industries, agriculture and fishing. There is no teaching entry, no shortage-subject carve-out, and no subject-specific salary flexibility anywhere in the Immigration Rules — physics and maths teachers are sponsored on exactly the same salary basis as history and PE teachers.
What the aggregators say
"Secondary education teaching professionals (2314) and primary education teaching professionals (2315) have been included in recent versions of the Immigration Salary List, which may allow a lower salary threshold than the standard £41,700. Shortage subjects — maths, physics, chemistry, computing, MFL — have additional flexibility." This is a real composite of claims currently published on teacher-facing recruitment sites. Three separate errors: the occupation codes are misnumbered, the Immigration Salary List claim is false, and there is no subject-based flexibility in the Rules at all.
What the Immigration Rules say
Teaching occupations 2313, 2314, 2315, 2316 and 2321 are listed health and education occupations under Option K. The floor is £25,000, not £33,400, and the going rate comes from the national teacher pay scale, not from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. No discounts to that going rate are available for any reason — not for PhDs, not for new entrants, and not for shortage subjects. Teachers are better off than the Immigration Salary List would make them, which is precisely why they are not on it.
Why does the error matter practically, if the real position is more favourable? Three reasons. It leads applicants to expect a reduced visa fee of £628 that they will not get — the full fee of £819 applies. It leads schools to budget wrongly. And, most damagingly, it leads people to search for an "Immigration Salary List teacher route" that does not exist, rather than checking the one document that actually governs their salary. If you take one thing from this page, make it that the relevant document is National pay scales for eligible teaching and education leadership occupation codes, not the Immigration Salary List.
A related note on the Temporary Shortage List, which was introduced in July 2025 alongside the move to an RQF 6 skill threshold, to give time-limited access to the route for mid-skilled occupations at RQF 3 to 5. Teaching is not on that either, and does not need to be: teaching professional occupations are already at RQF 6 and so were unaffected by the skill threshold change. Both the Immigration Salary List and the Temporary Shortage List currently carry an expiry date of 31 December 2026, so both are due to be revisited — but nothing published suggests teaching being added to either, and adding it would not help.
How current are these figures, really?
Here is the part that nobody else will tell you, and it is important enough to be worth being blunt about.
GOV.UK's National pay scales for eligible teaching and education leadership occupation codes page was last updated on 9 April 2025. That update is described in its own change log as a spring rules change uplifting salary thresholds and going rates on the Skilled Worker route. Nothing has been published on that page since. The qualified teacher going rate of £31,650 for England outside London corresponds to the STPCD main pay range minimum as it stood at that point — before the September 2025 award and before the 3.5% uplift that took effect on 1 September 2026.
So, as at the date this page was last updated, the Home Office's published teaching going rate is roughly 18 months behind the pay scale it is supposed to track.
What that staleness does and does not mean
There is a genuine limitation in our verification worth stating honestly. Tables 3, 3a, 4 and 5 of Appendix Skilled Occupations are the legally operative source, and that Appendix is an extremely long document that we were not able to retrieve in full. The figures above come from the gov.uk publication that the Home Office's own going rates page directs employers to for education occupations, and they are consistent with everything else we could verify — but if you find a discrepancy between the two, the Immigration Rules themselves prevail, and you should take advice.
What counts as salary, and what does not
Meeting the going rate depends not just on the headline number but on which parts of your package the Rules actually let the sponsor count. Appendix Skilled Worker defines salary as guaranteed basic gross pay before income tax and including employee pension and National Insurance contributions, plus other guaranteed payments treated exactly the same as basic gross pay for tax, pension and National Insurance purposes.
It then excludes a specific list:
- Pay that cannot be guaranteed because the nature of the job means hours fluctuate — which is why supply teaching and casual cover cannot support sponsorship.
- Shift, overtime and bonus pay.
- Employer pension and employer National Insurance contributions — note that employee contributions are included, so your gross salary is what counts, not your take-home.
- Allowances, such as accommodation or cost-of-living allowances.
- In-kind benefits, such as health insurance, school or university fees for your children, a car, or food.
- One-off payments, such as golden hellos — which means a recruitment or retention bonus cannot be used to lift you over the going rate.
- Any payments relating to immigration costs, such as the visa fee or the Immigration Health Surcharge, if a school reimburses them.
- Payments to cover business expenses, including relocation travel, equipment, clothing or subsistence.
For teachers, the important inclusions are the permanent, contractual, pensionable elements of STPCD pay. A TLR payment is a permanent addition to salary, paid monthly, pensionable and taxed as ordinary pay, and on the face of the definition it is a guaranteed payment treated exactly like basic pay — so it would ordinarily count. The same reasoning applies to an SEN allowance for a designated SEN post. A fixed-term TLR3 is a harder case, since it is time-limited by design. In every instance the person who decides what goes on the Certificate of Sponsorship is the sponsor, so if your salary depends on one of these elements to clear the going rate, get the school to confirm in writing how it has certified it.
Money you pay back to the school is subtracted from your salary
Part-time teaching and the flat floor problem
This is where the £25,000 floor stops being decorative, and it is the most under-discussed issue in sponsored teaching.
The two halves of the salary test behave differently when you work less than full time. Appendix Skilled Worker provides for going rates to be pro-rated to the applicant's working pattern, and gov.uk states specifically that the teaching going rates are annual figures based on the definition of a full-time teacher used when determining those pay scales, to be pro-rated using the weekly working hours the sponsor states. So a 0.6 teacher is measured against 60% of the going rate. So far so sensible.
The flat floor, however, is an absolute amount of actual salary. It does not pro-rate. That asymmetry means a part-time sponsored role can comfortably clear its pro-rated going rate and still fail the flat floor.
Run the arithmetic on England's 2026/27 M1 of £34,069. A 0.6 contract pays £20,441 — well above 60% of the £31,650 going rate, which is £18,990, but well below £25,000. On the face of the rules that post cannot be sponsored. The break-even point is £25,000 ÷ £34,069, or roughly 73.4% of full time — a little under a 0.75 contract. A teacher further up the scale has more room: on M6 at £46,940 the same calculation gives about 53.3%.
~73.4% FTE
Approximate minimum part-time fraction for a sponsored M1 teacher to clear the £25,000 flat floor
Verify this one before you rely on it
There is a corollary that matters mid-visa as well as at application. If you are sponsored and you reduce your hours — after parental leave, for flexible working, or as part of a phased return — you may be changing the facts your visa was granted on. Your sponsor has reporting duties, and a reduction that takes you below either half of the test is a serious problem for both of you. Raise it before you agree to it, not afterwards. The same is true of unpaid leave and of any arrangement that reduces your contractual salary rather than your hours.
Unqualified teachers and support staff
Two groups sit awkwardly in these rules and deserve a clear answer.
Unqualified teachers. The going rate table includes a band for "unqualified teachers and probationers" at £21,731 in England outside London, and England's STPCD unqualified scale starts at £23,732 — so the pay side clears. The binding constraint is the flat floor again: £25,000 is above the bottom of the unqualified scale, so a sponsored unqualified teacher on UQ1 at £23,732 would fall short of Option K's floor on a full-time contract, and would need to be on a higher unqualified point. This is a real consideration for an overseas-trained teacher placed on the unqualified scale while working towards QTS under the four-year rule — the pay point you are given is not just a pay question, it is potentially an immigration one. Check it explicitly.
Teaching assistants, cover supervisors and HLTAs. The national pay scales document still lists teaching assistant codes 3231, 6112 and 6113 at £23,656, or £25,147 for SEN variants. But on 22 July 2025 the Skilled Worker route's skill threshold rose from RQF 3 to RQF 6 — degree level — with exceptions only for the Immigration Salary List and the Temporary Shortage List. Teaching assistant occupations are not at RQF 6 and are not on either list. In practice that closes the Skilled Worker route to school support staff posts, notwithstanding their continued appearance in the pay scales table. If you are being offered a UK teaching assistant or cover supervisor job "with sponsorship", that is a claim to check very carefully indeed. Our cover supervisor pay guide explains what those roles pay and where they sit.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
Immigration is reserved to Westminster, so the Skilled Worker rules are identical across the UK. Teacher pay is devolved, so the going rate is not — which produces the striking divergence in the table above.
Scotland has by far the highest teaching going rate at £40,305 for a qualified teacher, reflecting a pay structure with a shorter main grade that reaches a higher maximum, plus separately listed Chartered Teacher (£52,158) and Principal Teacher (£55,155) grades that have no English equivalent. Scotland's probationer rate of £33,594 alone exceeds England's qualified rate. Note also that teaching in Scotland requires registration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland, which is a separate and mandatory hurdle on top of anything immigration requires.
Wales sets its own pay through the Independent Welsh Pay Review Body and its own statutory document, with a going rate of £32,433 for qualified teachers — slightly above England's, with no regional weighting bands because Wales does not operate them. Our Wales teacher pay scales page has the current Welsh figures, which like England's have moved on since the going rate table was last refreshed.
Northern Ireland has the lowest going rate of the four nations at £30,000 for a qualified teacher and £53,309 for a head teacher, and — unusually — no published rate at all for unqualified teachers or probationers, which reflects how the Northern Ireland pay structure is organised rather than any immigration policy. Teaching in Northern Ireland requires registration with the General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland.
Checking your own offer
Five checks, in order, that will tell you within ten minutes whether a sponsored teaching offer stacks up on salary.
Find the occupation code on the offer or certificate
It should be 2313 for secondary, 2314 for primary, 2315 for nursery, 2316 for special and additional needs, or 2321 for a headship. If it is 2311, 2317 or 2319, the job is being sponsored under survey-based going rates rather than the national pay scale — which is correct for a university lecturer or an EFL teacher, and wrong for a school classroom post. Query it.
Identify the right going rate band and region
Qualified or unqualified; England outside London, Fringe, Outer London, Inner London, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. The Fringe, Outer and Inner London boundaries follow the STPCD's own area definitions, so a school on the edge of a boundary is worth checking rather than assuming.
Compare the guaranteed gross salary, not the package
Strip out anything the Rules exclude: allowances, in-kind benefits, one-off payments, and any relocation or immigration cost reimbursement. What is left is what counts. Then compare it against both £25,000 and the going rate for your band, and satisfy yourself that it clears the higher of the two.
Pro-rate if the post is not full time
Apply your fraction to the going rate, but not to the £25,000 floor. If the actual salary is under £25,000, stop and get advice before going any further.
Check nothing is being deducted or clawed back
Any repayment you make to the school — including repayment of visa costs under a clawback clause — is subtracted from your salary for threshold purposes, averaged across the sponsorship period. If there is a repayment clause in your contract, work out what it does to the figures before you sign.
Sources and accuracy
The salary options table, the definition of salary and the treatment of deductions come from the Immigration Rules Appendix Skilled Worker, which is published on gov.uk and is the operative law. The going rates for teaching come from gov.uk's National pay scales for eligible teaching and education leadership occupation codes, last updated 9 April 2025. The statement that education going rates come from national pay scales rather than survey data, and that no discounts are available against them, comes from gov.uk's Skilled Worker visa going rates page. The absence of teaching from the Immigration Salary List was verified against the published list itself. The settlement position comes from gov.uk's indefinite leave to remain salary requirements page. The skill-level change to RQF 6 on 22 July 2025 and the creation of the Temporary Shortage List are documented in the Government's published immigration policy papers.
The teacher pay scale figures used for comparison are the confirmed 2026/27 STPCD values for England that took effect on 1 September 2026, following the Government's acceptance of the STRB's 36th Report on 1 July 2026, as set out on our pay scales page. Two things on this page are our own arithmetic rather than published figures and are flagged as such in the text: the headroom calculations between STPCD points and the going rate, and the minimum part-time fraction implied by the £25,000 flat floor.
Immigration fees, thresholds and going rates change several times a year, and the going rate table for teaching is visibly overdue a refresh. Nothing here is regulated immigration advice, and TeacherPay is not affiliated with the Home Office, UK Visas and Immigration, the Department for Education or any school or trust. Check gov.uk on the day you need the figure, and take advice from an OISC-regulated adviser or immigration solicitor before acting.
Frequently asked questions
Do teachers have to earn £41,700 to get a Skilled Worker visa? +
No. The £41,700 general salary threshold is Option A in the Immigration Rules, and school teaching occupations do not use it. Teaching sits in a separate category of listed health and education occupations, using what the Rules call Option K: a flat floor of £25,000 a year, plus the 'going rate' for the occupation taken from the relevant national teacher pay scale rather than from earnings survey data. You must meet whichever of those two is higher. For a qualified teacher in England outside London the published going rate is £31,650, so that is the effective minimum — well below £41,700 and comfortably below the £34,069 that England's 2026/27 M1 actually pays.
Which occupation codes are exempt from the general threshold? +
The school teaching codes on gov.uk's published national pay scales document are 2313 (secondary education teaching professionals), 2314 (primary education teaching professionals), 2315 (nursery education teaching professionals), 2316 (special and additional needs education teaching professionals) and 2321 (head teachers and principals). Further education teaching professionals at 2312 are also covered, as are teaching assistant codes 3231, 6112 and 6113 — though those sit below the RQF 6 skill threshold introduced in July 2025 and so are not sponsorable in practice. Higher education teaching professionals at 2311 are a different case entirely: they are on the ordinary survey-based going rate list, not the national pay scale list.
Are teachers on the Immigration Salary List? +
No. We checked the published Immigration Salary List directly and no teaching occupation appears on it — the list is concentrated in healthcare, construction, engineering, the sciences, arts, agriculture and fishing. This is one of the most commonly repeated errors on recruitment and aggregator sites, and it matters because it changes the arithmetic: an Immigration Salary List job attracts a reduced visa application fee of £628 rather than £819, and an £33,400 salary option. Teachers get neither. What teachers get instead is Option K, which is structurally more favourable than anything the Immigration Salary List offers.
Does the going rate get pro-rated if I work part-time? +
The going rate does, but the flat floor does not — and that asymmetry is the single biggest trap in the teacher salary rules. Appendix Skilled Worker provides for going rates to be pro-rated to the applicant's working pattern, and gov.uk states that the teaching going rates are per year based on the definition of a full-time teacher used when setting those pay scales, pro-rated using the weekly hours the sponsor states. The £25,000 Option K floor, by contrast, is a flat figure your actual salary has to reach. On England's 2026/27 M1 of £34,069, that puts the practical minimum somewhere around a 0.74 full-time equivalent contract. Take specific advice before agreeing a part-time sponsored contract.
What if my school pays above the STPCD, or adds a TLR? +
Guaranteed basic gross pay counts, and so do other guaranteed payments treated exactly like basic pay for tax, pension and National Insurance purposes. A TLR payment, which is a permanent, contractual, pensionable addition to salary, will ordinarily count on that basis — but it is the sponsor that certifies the salary on the Certificate of Sponsorship, so confirm how they have treated it. What definitely does not count is anything the Rules exclude: allowances such as accommodation or cost-of-living payments, in-kind benefits, one-off payments such as golden hellos, overtime and bonus pay, and employer pension or National Insurance contributions.
Why is the published going rate lower than the actual teacher pay scale? +
Because gov.uk's national pay scales document for teaching occupations was last updated on 9 April 2025 and therefore reflects the teacher pay scales in force at that point, not the 2026/27 ones. Its qualified teacher figure of £31,650 for England outside London matches the STPCD M1 as it stood before the September 2025 and September 2026 uplifts. The practical effect is entirely in teachers' favour — a teacher paid on the current scale clears a going rate set against an older, lower scale — but it does mean that if you compare the published going rate with your actual salary and find a gap, the gap is the pay award, not an error in your offer.
Can my school pay me less than the going rate if the job is only part of a role? +
No. Unlike most other occupations, there are no discounts available against a national-pay-scale going rate. The reductions that exist elsewhere in the Rules — 90% for PhD holders, 80% for STEM PhDs, 70% for new entrants — cannot be applied to occupations whose going rate comes from a national pay scale. A new-entrant teacher does not get a 30% discount off the teaching going rate. That cuts both ways: teachers have a lower and more achievable rate to meet, but it is a hard floor with no flexibility built into it.
Does the same salary rule apply when I apply for settlement? +
Yes, on the currently published rules. GOV.UK's indefinite leave to remain guidance for Skilled Workers states that you usually need to be paid the higher of £41,700 or the standard going rate, but that for eligible healthcare and education roles the requirement is the higher of £25,000 and the going rate based on national pay scales. That consistency matters, because it removes the risk that a teacher qualifies for the visa and is then blocked at settlement by a threshold designed for a different labour market. Note separately that the settlement framework itself is under review following the earned settlement consultation, which closed in February 2026 without a published response at the time of writing.
Related guides
Teacher Visa Sponsorship Explained
The whole process end to end — sponsor licences, Certificates of Sponsorship, QTS, the health surcharge and dependants.
Teacher Visa Costs: Who Pays What
Every fee, who is legally liable for it, and why a clawback clause can push your immigration salary below the going rate.
Teacher Pay Scales 2026/27
The confirmed England figures your Certificate of Sponsorship salary is measured against, point by point.
Part-Time and Job Share Teacher Pay
How a part-time fraction is calculated — the pay side of the part-time sponsorship problem.