Teacher Pay Rise 2026/27 — STRB Evidence Tracker

Every year, a single question dominates staffroom conversation from around autumn onward: what will the teacher pay rise actually be, and when will we find out? For 2026/27 and 2027/28, that question is now answered — see the confirmed figures above. But the process that got there, and the process that will decide 2028/29's actual (not just indicative) figure, is the same one described on this page: a formal, months-long cycle involving a government department, an independent panel, several teaching unions, and employer bodies, all submitting evidence before a recommendation is made — and even then, the recommendation still has to be accepted by a government minister before it becomes real. This page walks through exactly how that process works for England, stage by stage, using the now-confirmed 2026/27 round as a worked example throughout.

This page is kept current as genuine developments happen, rather than being replaced by a new article each time — see the update log above for what's changed and when. Anything below describing figures ahead of 2028/29's actual (not indicative) award is framed as illustrative or historical, not asserted as settled fact.

What the STRB actually is

The School Teachers' Review Body (STRB) is the independent body that recommends teacher pay for England each year. It was established in 1991 and its recommendations, once accepted by government, are given effect through the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD) — the document that sets the actual Main Pay Range, Upper Pay Range and Leadership Pay Range figures used across maintained schools (and, in practice, most academies too, even though academies aren't legally bound by it).

The STRB doesn't sit in isolation. It's one of several independent Pay Review Bodies covering large parts of the UK public sector, each shadowing a different workforce but following a broadly similar model: gather evidence from government and workforce representatives, deliberate independently, and recommend a pay award to the relevant Secretary of State. If you've researched how NHS staff pay, police officer pay or armed forces pay gets decided, the overall shape of the process will look familiar — the STRB is the education-specific equivalent of the NHS Pay Review Body, the Police Remuneration Review Body and the Armed Forces' Pay Review Body, among others.

Who sits on the STRB

The STRB is made up of independent members appointed by the Secretary of State for Education — typically people with backgrounds in areas like economics, human resources, business and public sector management, rather than serving civil servants, government ministers or union officials. It's supported by a permanent secretariat that carries out its own independent research and analysis (on things like recruitment and retention data, teacher workforce trends and school funding pressures) alongside the evidence submitted to it by other parties. The intention behind this structure is to produce a recommendation based on a genuinely independent assessment of the evidence, rather than one negotiated directly between government and unions at a bargaining table.

It recommends — the government still decides

This is the single most important nuance to understand about the whole process, and it's routinely glossed over in quick news coverage. The STRB does not set teacher pay. It recommends a pay award to the Secretary of State for Education, who then formally decides whether to accept it. Unlike a legally binding arbitration process, the government is not obliged to implement the STRB's recommendation as written — it can accept it in full, reject it, or accept a modified version, for example changing the overall percentage, altering how it's distributed across different pay points, or adjusting the implementation date. In practice, government has accepted STRB recommendations in some form in the great majority of recent years, but "in some form" is doing real work in that sentence — modifications have happened, and there is no guarantee a specific year's recommendation will be accepted completely unchanged.

The annual STRB timeline, stage by stage

The STRB process runs on an annual cycle, but it's important to be upfront about something most explainers skip: the exact calendar dates for each stage have shifted around noticeably in recent years, sometimes by months. There is a typical rhythm to the process, but it isn't rigidly fixed to specific dates the way, say, a Budget statement is. With that caveat, here's how a typical cycle has generally unfolded:

1. The remit letter

The Secretary of State for Education writes to the STRB, typically in the preceding autumn or winter, setting out the specific questions the government wants it to consider for the coming pay round. This "remit letter" defines the scope of what the STRB is being asked to look at — it might ask for a recommendation on the overall pay award, but it can also direct particular attention to specific issues, such as recruitment and retention in shortage subjects, pay progression for early-career teachers, or leadership pay. The STRB works within whatever remit it's given; it doesn't set its own agenda independently of government.

2. The evidence submission window

Once the remit is set, a formal window opens during which interested parties submit written evidence to the STRB. This is the stage where the Department for Education, the teaching unions, employer and governor representative bodies, and the STRB's own secretariat all put forward their respective cases — covered in full detail in the next section below. This window has typically run over winter and into early spring, though, as with every stage of this process, timing has varied between years.

3. STRB deliberation and its report

The STRB then considers all the evidence submitted, alongside its own independent analysis, and produces a formal report containing its pay recommendation. Historically, this report has often landed in spring, but this has not been a fixed date year to year, and reports have sometimes been delayed relative to the pattern of previous years. The report itself is generally published once the government has responded to it (see the next stage), rather than being released to the public the moment the STRB finishes writing it.

4. The government's response

The government then formally responds to the STRB's report, confirming whether it's accepting the recommendation, rejecting it, or modifying it. This is the point at which a specific pay award figure, if any, becomes public and confirmed — everything before this stage is recommendation and process, not a settled outcome. The STRB's report and the government's response are typically published close together or on the same day.

Worked example — the 2026/27 round: the STRB's 36th Report was published 1 July 2026, and the Government accepted its recommendation in full the same day: 3.5% on all pay and allowance ranges and advisory points from 1 September 2026 (5% specifically on the minimum of the unqualified teacher range, rest of England), 3% from 1 September 2027, and an indicative (not yet binding) 3% pencilled in for 2028/29. That's an unusually clean multi-year acceptance — plenty of past rounds have seen a modified or partial acceptance rather than the recommendation going through unchanged.

5. Implementation, normally from 1 September

Once confirmed, a new pay award is normally implemented from 1 September of that academic year, in line with the school funding and academic year cycle. However, because the earlier stages of the process don't always conclude quickly, confirmation has, in some recent years, come after 1 September has already passed. When that happens, the award is generally backdated to 1 September regardless, which is why a "back pay" lump sum showing up on a payslip some months after a new academic year has started is a normal, expected part of how this process plays out — not a payroll error.

The 2026/27 round is a good illustration of another timing quirk: the 3.5%/5% increase took effect from 1 September 2026 as confirmed, but the actual School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document — the formal legal document schools use to apply the new scale points — wasn't published until mid-October 2026. Schools applying the confirmed percentage from 1 September were, technically, running ahead of the document that formally sets it out, on the reasonable assumption the confirmed government response wouldn't change before formal publication.

Who submits evidence, and what they actually argue

The evidence submission stage is where the real substance of each year's pay round takes shape. Several distinct parties submit evidence, and each one tends to emphasise a fairly consistent set of arguments year after year, reflecting their different institutional priorities.

The Department for Education

DfE evidence tends to focus heavily on affordability — the overall cost of a given pay award against departmental and school budgets — alongside recruitment and retention data, such as how many trainees are entering teaching relative to targets, and how many experienced teachers are leaving the profession. Government evidence generally frames the recommendation it wants in terms of what's sustainable within the wider public finances, while still being sufficient to address specific recruitment pressure points, particularly in subjects that have historically struggled to hit recruitment targets, such as physics, computing and modern foreign languages.

The teaching unions

Several unions submit evidence, including the National Education Union (NEU), NASUWT, the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), and others representing teachers and school leaders. Union evidence typically emphasises three connected themes: real-terms pay erosion since a reference year (often 2010, marking the start of the public sector pay restraint period discussed below), workload and its effect on retention, and comparability — the argument that teacher pay has fallen behind graduate-entry professions requiring similar qualifications, making teaching a comparatively less attractive career choice than it once was for new graduates weighing their options.

Employer and governor representative bodies

Organisations representing school employers and governors — the people who actually have to balance a school budget against whatever pay award is decided — tend to focus on budget sustainability at the individual school level. Their evidence often highlights the practical difficulty of absorbing a pay award that isn't matched by an equivalent rise in per-pupil funding, since staff costs typically make up the large majority of a school's total budget, leaving little room to absorb an unfunded increase without cuts elsewhere.

The STRB's own independent analysis

Alongside the evidence submitted by these interested parties, the STRB's secretariat conducts its own independent analysis of labour market data, recruitment and retention trends, and broader economic indicators, which feeds into the final recommendation alongside — rather than simply averaging — what each party has argued for.

What "real-terms pay" actually means

This phrase gets used constantly in coverage of teacher pay, but is rarely explained properly. Real-terms pay means your pay adjusted for inflation, so you can see whether your actual spending power has gone up or down — rather than just looking at a cash percentage on its own. If your pay rises by 3% in cash terms over a year in which prices generally rose by 5% (as measured by an inflation index like CPI or RPI), your real-terms pay has fallen by roughly 2%, because the same salary now buys noticeably less than it did a year earlier. A cash pay rise can therefore still represent a real-terms pay cut, and this is precisely why unions frame their evidence around cumulative real-terms change since a reference year rather than looking at any single year's award in isolation — several years of below-inflation awards compound, and a single stronger year afterward doesn't automatically undo the accumulated loss from the years before it.

How a pay award interacts with school funding

This is arguably the most under-explained mechanic in the entire process, and it's genuinely important for understanding why a "good" headline pay award can still coincide with a difficult year for school budgets. Unlike some other public sector pay awards, an STRB-recommended teacher pay rise is not automatically funded in full by new, additional central government money handed directly to every school to cover its exact cost.

In practice, the government has in various recent years provided only partial additional funding toward the cost of a pay award through mechanisms like core schools funding grants, rather than covering 100% of the extra staff cost for every school. That leaves schools needing to find some or all of the remaining cost from their existing budget — the same budget that also has to cover everything else a school spends money on, from support staff and resources to building maintenance and energy bills. Because staff costs typically make up the majority of a school's total spending, even a modest shortfall between the funding provided and the actual cost of a pay award can force real trade-offs: fewer teaching assistant hours, reduced spending on resources, larger class sizes through natural attrition, or a smaller overall staff establishment.

This is why school leaders and their representative bodies pay extremely close attention not just to the headline STRB percentage each year, but to exactly how much of it comes with matching additional government funding attached — a distinction that rarely makes it into short news coverage, but that determines whether a given year's pay award feels, from inside an individual school's budget meeting, like genuinely good news or like a squeeze dressed up as one. For the confirmed 2026/27 award, schools are expected to fund roughly a third of the additional cost from their existing budgets rather than receiving it as fully additional funding — precisely the dynamic school leader representative bodies flagged as a concern during the evidence stage.

Scotland and Northern Ireland are not covered by the STRB

Everything described on this page relates specifically to England (and, with some structural differences, Wales, where pay is set through a parallel process advised by the Independent Welsh Pay Review Body since responsibility for teacher pay was devolved). Scotland and Northern Ireland run entirely separate processes, and neither is affected by an STRB recommendation or an England-focused government response.

Scotland: the SNCT process

Teacher pay in Scotland is negotiated through the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT), a negotiating body bringing together teaching unions and local authority employers (represented via COSLA), with the Scottish Government also involved, rather than an independent body making a recommendation to a single minister. This is a fundamentally different model — a negotiation between parties working toward an agreed settlement, rather than an independent panel weighing evidence and recommending an outcome. Scotland has, in a number of recent years, reached its settlement earlier in the year than England's STRB-based process concludes, and the two nations' headline figures have sometimes differed. See our dedicated Scotland teacher pay scales guide for the actual current figures and how the SNCT scale is structured.

Northern Ireland: its own, sometimes significantly delayed process

Northern Ireland similarly has its own separate pay-setting process for teachers, run through the Department of Education Northern Ireland in negotiation with the Northern Ireland teaching unions, independent of both the STRB and the SNCT. Northern Ireland's process has, in various recent pay rounds, taken noticeably longer to conclude than either England's or Scotland's, sometimes due to wider political circumstances affecting Northern Ireland's devolved institutions, resulting in confirmed pay awards landing considerably later than teachers elsewhere in the UK typically experience. See our dedicated Northern Ireland teacher pay guide for what's currently confirmed there.

How to read the eventual announcement properly

When a pay award is finally confirmed, the way it's reported in the news is often a simplified version of something more nuanced underneath. Three specific things are worth checking carefully once an actual figure is announced, rather than taking a single headline percentage at face value.

Is it a flat percentage, or weighted across the scale?

Some pay rounds apply a single flat percentage increase to every point on the pay scale. Others are deliberately weighted, applying a larger percentage increase at specific points — in some recent years, this has meant a bigger percentage rise at the bottom of the Main Pay Range specifically to support early-career teacher (ECT) recruitment and to keep pace with rises in the National Living Wage, with smaller percentage increases further up the scale and on leadership pay. A "3% pay rise" reported in a headline might, in practice, mean something closer to 5% for a newly qualified teacher and closer to 2% for an experienced teacher near the top of the Upper Pay Range in the same year. Always check the specific figure for your own pay point once the actual scale tables are published, rather than assuming the headline number applies to you directly.

Consolidated, or a one-off non-consolidated payment?

This distinction matters hugely and is very easy to miss in quick coverage. A consolidated pay rise is built permanently into your pay scale point going forward — it becomes your new baseline salary, and every future pay rise is calculated on top of it. A non-consolidated payment is a one-off amount paid on top of your existing salary that does not change your underlying pay scale point at all; your salary reverts to its previous level the following year unless a separate award is made.

Crucially for pension purposes, a non-consolidated payment is generally not pensionable — it doesn't count as pensionable pay under the Teachers' Pension Scheme's career-average (CARE) calculation, even though it is still subject to income tax and National Insurance as normal income. A consolidated pay rise, by contrast, does increase your pensionable pay from that point onward, building a permanently higher level of pension accrual for every year you remain in the scheme afterward. Two pay awards that look similar in cash terms in a single year can therefore have a very different long-term effect on your retirement income, depending entirely on which of these two forms they take.

When it actually reaches your payslip

As covered in the timeline above, a confirmed award is normally implemented from 1 September, but confirmation itself has, in various recent years, arrived after that date. When that happens, schools typically apply the new pay scales going forward from whenever they're confirmed, plus a backdated lump-sum "back pay" payment covering the gap since 1 September. It's entirely normal for there to be a real gap of weeks or months between "the award is announced" and "my payslip reflects it," so don't read a delay in your own pay as evidence that your school has made an error — check with payroll if a reasonable amount of time has passed with no sign of implementation at all.

A brief history: why "real-terms recovery" keeps coming up

To understand why real-terms pay is such a persistent theme in union evidence and news coverage, it helps to know a little of the recent history without needing invented precise figures for any single year. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the UK public sector went through an extended period of pay restraint — first a pay freeze, then a "pay cap" limiting annual increases to a low, fixed percentage for several years through the 2010s. Because general inflation over that period was frequently higher than the capped pay increases teachers received, teacher pay fell in real terms for much of that decade, even in years when a small cash increase was still applied.

Since that pay cap period ended, and particularly during the period of markedly higher inflation that followed the pandemic and the subsequent cost-of-living surge, pay awards for teachers — in line with much of the wider public sector — have generally been larger in cash terms than they typically were during the pre-2022 period, reflecting the broader inflationary environment rather than a change in the underlying methodology of the STRB process itself. This is the essential context behind why union evidence continues to reference a "real-terms recovery": a single above-inflation year does not, on its own, restore pay to where it would have been without the preceding decade of below-inflation increases, since the effect compounds cumulatively over many years rather than resetting each January or September. This is also why you'll see both government and union evidence frequently reference "since 2010" specifically — it functions as the shared reference point for measuring cumulative real-terms change, even though the two sides typically draw very different conclusions from the same underlying data.

Sources

• School Teachers' Review Body 36th Report: 2026 — GOV.UK
• Teacher pay: everything you need to know about the latest multi-year pay award — DfE Education Hub, July 2026
• Teacher pay to rise 3.5% from September 2026, but it's not fully funded — Schools Week