NI Teacher Pay Rise 2026/27: TNC Tracker

Ask a teacher in England when their pay rise lands and you'll usually get a rough answer involving the STRB and a government minister. Ask a teacher in Northern Ireland the same question and you're as likely to get a shrug, because the honest answer right now is that nobody has said yet. This page exists to explain, properly, how a Northern Ireland teacher pay award actually gets decided — not through a review body publishing a recommendation, but through a direct negotiation called the Teachers' Negotiating Committee — and to track the 2026/27 round as it unfolds, using the two most recently completed rounds as the clearest evidence of how the process behaves in practice.

This is a genuine snapshot, not a finished story. Nothing on this page should be read as predicting what the 2026/27 award will actually be, or when it will land. It will be updated as real developments happen, with the update log above showing exactly what changed and when — the same discipline our England STRB tracker applies to a very differently structured process.

How NI teacher pay is actually set: the TNC

Teacher pay in Northern Ireland is not recommended by an independent body and then accepted or rejected by a minister, as in England. It is negotiated directly between two sides sitting at the same table. Management side consists of the Department of Education (DE) and the employing authorities. The teachers' side is the Northern Ireland Teachers' Council (NITC), which brings together the five recognised teaching unions: NASUWT, INTO, UTU, NEU and NAHT(NI). Together, this standing arrangement is known as the Teachers' Negotiating Committee — formally the Teachers' Salaries and Conditions of Service Committee (Schools), but referred to everywhere in practice, including in Department of Education correspondence, simply as the TNC.

A TNC negotiation produces an agreement between the two sides, not a recommendation to a third party. But agreement alone doesn't change anyone's pay. Under Article 69(1) and (6) of the Education and Libraries (Northern Ireland) Order 1986, it is the Department of Education that must then issue a formal Determination — published as a numbered DE circular — specifying the actual salaries and allowances teachers are legally entitled to. Until that circular is issued, the previous determination remains the law, regardless of what has been agreed in principle at the negotiating table. That gap between "agreed" and "legally in force" is the single most important thing to understand about how this process actually behaves, and it's covered in detail in the funding section below.

Not a review body: how the TNC differs from the STRB and SNCT

It's worth being precise about this because the three processes are genuinely different models, not just different names for the same thing running on different calendars.

Scotland's Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT) is actually the closer cousin of Northern Ireland's model — a negotiation between unions and employers (via COSLA) rather than a review body — though the SNCT operates its own settled machinery and has, in most recent years, reached agreement considerably faster than the TNC. Wales runs a review-body model like England's, through the Independent Welsh Pay Review Body. Of the four UK nations, Northern Ireland and Scotland negotiate; England and Wales receive a recommendation. See our England STRB tracker for the full detail on how that model works, including why it isn't automatically binding on government either.

The annual cycle, stage by stage

Unlike the STRB's roughly fixed rhythm of remit letter, evidence window, report and government response, the TNC process has no statutory timetable at all. The stages below are a description of how recent rounds have actually unfolded, not a fixed calendar the two sides are bound to follow.

The last three rounds, in order

The clearest way to see how this process actually behaves is to line up the last three completed rounds against each other, because the pattern of claim, offer, dispute and eventual circular repeats with real consistency.

Two things stand out. First, the 5.5% eventually agreed for 2024/25 only arrived after the union executives' recommended offer was rejected once and industrial action followed — the process can genuinely stall on a specific number, not just on process or budget. Second, the 2025/26 round shows the fastest possible version of this process: once the Executive cleared the budget cover, offer, acceptance and circular all happened within about five weeks. The speed of a round depends heavily on how quickly the Executive-level funding question gets resolved, which is a structural feature this page returns to in the funding section below.

Where the 2026/27 round actually stands

As at 30 September 2026, there is no public evidence of a 2026/27 pay claim having been submitted by NITC, no management offer, and — as confirmed directly from the Department of Education's own pay circulars page — no circular covering pay from 1 September 2026. That means Northern Ireland teachers are, right now, three weeks into the 2026/27 academic year and still being paid on the 2025/26 scale.

On the pattern of the last two rounds — where the gap between England's confirmation and Northern Ireland's ran to roughly seven and eight months respectively — a Northern Ireland determination arriving sometime between late 2026 and spring 2027 would be broadly consistent with recent history. That is a pattern-based expectation, not a forecast we're willing to put a date on, and it should not be read as this page predicting an outcome. We are not aware of a published NITC pay claim for 2026/27 at all yet, which means the process may currently be at an earlier stage than either of the last two rounds had reached by this point in the year.

NI against England's STRB award, round by round

This comparison only works when it's done round by round rather than headline to headline, because a Northern Ireland figure reported today is very often the answer to last year's question in England.

The most useful finding here cuts against the assumption that Northern Ireland simply falls behind England on every measure. On percentage, it hasn't: the last two completed rounds landed on exactly the same headline figure as England's STRB award for the same academic year. On timing, the gap is real, current and consistent — not a relic of years past. Both things are true at once, and reporting only one of them gives a misleading picture of where Northern Ireland teacher pay actually stands against England's right now.

Why NI awards used to fall years behind — and whether that's still true

Northern Ireland teacher pay has a genuinely troubled recent history on timing, and it deserves an honest accounting rather than either exaggerating it or waving it away. The worst period was the settlement covering 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24, which wasn't agreed until 9 April 2024 — meaning the first of those three awards arrived roughly three years after the school year it was meant to apply to had already ended. That scale of delay coincided with the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive not functioning: Stormont was suspended for extended periods between January 2017 and January 2020, and again from February 2022 until its restoration in February 2024, over the DUP's objections to the Northern Ireland Protocol. With no functioning Executive, there was no minister able to approve the budget cover a pay determination needs, and a TNC negotiation could conclude in principle while the instrument that makes it law waited on the wider machinery of devolved government to restart entirely.

That specific cause is no longer in play. The Assembly and Executive have functioned continuously since February 2024, through every pay round covered on this page, and the lag has shrunk accordingly — from years, to the seven-to-eight-month pattern seen in the 2024/25 and 2025/26 rounds. That's still slower than England by a wide margin, and it's still a real cost to teachers waiting for a settlement, but it's a different and less severe problem than the one the 2021-24 saga describes. The honest summary: Stormont's collapse used to be the dominant cause of NI pay delay, and it no longer is, but a structural lag driven by the ordinary TNC negotiation and Executive budget process has persisted in its place.

Budgets, Ministerial Directions and why affordability dominates

A TNC agreement is not automatically funded from existing Department of Education money — it has to be found from somewhere in the Executive's wider budget, and that step has repeatedly been the actual bottleneck rather than the negotiation itself. In the run-up to the 2025/26 offer, the Education Minister sought budget cover through the Executive's December Monitoring Round and did not receive the full amount bid for, against a Department of Education projected to be running a significant in-year deficit. The formal 4% offer to NITC on 6 January 2026 was only possible after the Executive approved a Ministerial Direction on 18 December 2025 — a mechanism that allows a minister to proceed with spending that goes beyond what has been formally agreed by the Executive as a whole, used here specifically to unblock the pay offer.

This is a materially different funding mechanic from England's. The STRB's recommendation is costed against DfE's own departmental budget and a Secretary of State's decision, with schools separately expected to fund part of the cost from existing budgets. In Northern Ireland, a teacher pay award additionally has to clear the Executive's own collective budget process — a process that itself depends on every Executive party agreeing a monitoring round allocation — before the Department of Education can put a number to NITC at all. That extra layer of collective government decision-making, on top of the negotiation itself, is a recurring reason TNC rounds take as long as they do even with Stormont sitting throughout.

Industrial action: what has actually happened

The most recent completed round shows what happens when a TNC negotiation doesn't resolve smoothly. After NITC's 13.5% claim for 2024/25 was met with a 5.5% offer on 31 January 2025 — an offer union executives recommended members accept — a membership ballot rejected it. Four unions, NASUWT, NEU, INTO and UTU, began action short of strike action (ASOS) from 10 February 2025, with the Education Minister describing the 13.5% claim as "completely unaffordable" while committing management side to set out a clearer timetable for the following round. The dispute was resolved when the same 5.5% offer was formally accepted on 4 April 2025 — the identical figure that had been rejected in the earlier ballot, now accepted roughly ten weeks later once the industrial action had run its course.

By contrast, we found no evidence of industrial action tied specifically to the 2025/26 round: NASUWT reported 87% of its members voting in favour of the 4% offer in a consultative ballot, and the round concluded without a dispute stage. As at 30 September 2026, there is no evidence of a 2026/27 pay claim having been submitted yet, which means the dispute-or-no-dispute question for this round simply hasn't been reached.

What to do while you're waiting for a determination

• Budget on the scale actually in payment — DE Circular 2026/07's 4% award effective 1 September 2025 — not on a rate that has merely been claimed, discussed or predicted.
• Check your union's Northern Ireland pages (NASUWT, INTO, UTU or NEU NI) directly for the current stage of the 2026/27 round, rather than relying on England-focused pay coverage.
• When a determination does land, ask payroll for a breakdown of which months an arrears payment covers, so pension contributions can be checked against the right period.
• Don't use an assumed 2026/27 percentage in a mortgage or loan affordability conversation — lenders work from your current payslip, which reflects the 2025/26 scale until a new circular changes that.
• Bookmark this page and our Northern Ireland pay scales guide rather than a single news article — this page is updated as the round actually progresses, not replaced each time something happens.

Sources, and what we could not verify

Dates and figures for the 2024/25 and 2025/26 rounds are drawn from the Department of Education (NI)'s own news releases and pay circulars page, cross-checked against union reporting from NASUWT and INTO and against contemporary NI press coverage. England comparison figures are drawn from the Government's own confirmations of the STRB's 34th, 35th and 36th Reports, and match the figures used on our own England STRB tracker.

Primary sources: Department of Education (NI), Pay Circulars; Teachers' Pay Agreement 2025/26, Department of Education (NI); 2025/2026 Teachers' Pay Offer — Department of Education (NI), January 2026; Givan welcomes agreement on teachers' pay — Department of Education (NI), April 2025; Written Ministerial Statement: Industrial Action to be Taken by Teachers — NI Assembly, 7 February 2025; NASUWT welcomes 4% pay offer for members; Government confirms above-inflation pay award for teachers — GOV.UK, 29 July 2024; School Teachers' Review Body 35th Report: 2025 — GOV.UK.

What we could not verify. Three things, stated plainly rather than glossed over. First, whether a 2026/27 NITC pay claim has been submitted privately but not yet made public — we can only report what is publicly available, and nothing about a 2026/27 claim has surfaced in Department of Education, union or press sources as at 30 September 2026. Second, the precise date the 2025/26 STRB-equivalent English figure would need to be matched or diverge from for 2026/27, since that depends on an NI agreement that doesn't yet exist. Third, whether the seven-to-eight-month lag pattern of the last two rounds will hold, shorten or lengthen for 2026/27 — two data points is a pattern worth reporting, not a rule reliable enough to forecast from. We will update every one of these the moment verifiable information exists.