Teacher Pay Scale 2026/27: Main, Upper & Leadership (England)

Teacher pay scale 2026/27 at a glance

Gross salaries for a full-time teacher. London Fringe, unqualified, TLR and leadership figures are in the sections below.

What the STPCD actually is, and who it binds

Every English teacher's pay ultimately traces back to one document: the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document, universally shortened to the STPCD. It's produced each year by the Department for Education, following a recommendation from the School Teachers' Review Body (STRB) — an independent body that gathers evidence from unions, employers and government before recommending a pay award — which the Secretary of State for Education then formally accepts, amends or rejects. Whatever emerges from that process becomes the legally binding pay framework for the coming academic year, effective from 1 September.

The STPCD sets out four things that matter to almost every classroom teacher: the minimum and maximum salary points on the Main Pay Range and Upper Pay Range, the rules governing how and when a teacher can progress between points, the structure of additional payments like TLRs and SEN allowances, and the framework for the Leadership Pay Range that headteachers and other senior leaders sit within. It also sets statutory working time and conditions of service provisions that go well beyond pay.

Maintained schools versus academies: who has to follow it

Local-authority-maintained schools are legally required to pay their teachers in line with the STPCD — there's no discretion here. If you teach at a maintained community, voluntary-controlled or voluntary-aided school, the figures in this guide are your legal minimum and maximum entitlement for your pay range and region, full stop.

Academies and free schools sit in a genuinely different legal position. Because academies operate outside local authority control under their own funding agreement, they are not bound by the STPCD and are, in principle, free to design their own pay and progression policy entirely from scratch. In practice, the overwhelming majority of academy trusts choose to broadly mirror the STPCD's structure — the same pay ranges, similar progression rules — because deviating significantly makes recruitment harder in a national jobs market where candidates routinely compare offers against the national scale. But "broadly follows" isn't the same as "legally bound by", and some trusts do use their freedom to vary progression criteria, offer their own TLR-equivalent allowances, or occasionally set slightly different pay points. Always check your specific trust's published pay policy rather than assuming automatic national parity.

This distinction matters more than it might first appear, and not only for pay. Because academy trusts set their own policy, they can also vary things adjacent to pay that a maintained school cannot — for example, how quickly a newly qualified teacher can progress, whether additional allowances are offered for scarce subjects like physics or computing, and how generously previous experience from outside the state sector is recognised on appointment. A large multi-academy trust (MAT) with dozens of schools will typically publish one central pay policy that applies consistently across every school in the trust, which can actually make pay more predictable and transparent than at a single maintained school relying solely on the national document. A smaller, single-academy trust may have more informally documented arrangements, which is exactly the scenario where it's worth asking direct questions at interview or offer stage rather than assuming the national scale applies unmodified.

It's also worth understanding briefly how the STRB's recommendation becomes a binding document each year, since it explains why the "confirmed" figure can lag so far behind the start of the recruitment season. The STRB collects written and oral evidence from the DfE, teaching unions, employer representative bodies and other interested parties over the spring, usually reports in late spring or early summer, and the Secretary of State then responds formally — sometimes accepting the recommendation in full, sometimes only in part, occasionally after a delay of several weeks or months. Only once that response is published does the STPCD get formally revised and the new figures become legally binding from the following 1 September. The 2026 round is a good illustration of both halves of that: the STRB reported and the Government accepted in full on the same day, 1 July 2026, but the revised STPCD giving the figures legal effect did not appear until mid-October, months into a school year in which schools were already paying the confirmed rate.

Main Pay Range 2026/27 (M1–M6)

The Main Pay Range is the scale that every qualified teacher starts on, from their first day as an Early Career Teacher (ECT) at M1 through to the top of the main scale at M6. It has four regional columns — National (the rate for the rest of England outside London), Fringe (a band of areas just outside Outer London), Outer London and Inner London — reflecting the fact that London weighting is applied as genuinely different pay points, not a simple percentage top-up calculated at payroll time.

M1 — the ECT year, and the only point with statutory strings attached

M1 is where every qualified teacher without prior experience starts, at £34,069 National and £41,729 in Inner London. It's the one main-range point that comes with legal entitlements attached to it beyond the cash, because an M1 teacher is normally in the first year of the two-year statutory induction. That carries a 10% reduction to your timetable in year one (falling to 5% in year two), on top of your ordinary PPA time, plus a named mentor and a structured Early Career Framework training programme. Those are statutory entitlements, not favours a school grants — worth knowing, because they're the most commonly eroded part of an ECT's contract. M1 is also the point where non-salary money is most likely to be in play: a tax-free training bursary or scholarship may already have been paid during your training year, and eligible chemistry, computing, maths and physics teachers in eligible schools can claim a Targeted Retention Incentive worth up to £6,000 a year in their first five years. See our ECT pay explained guide for the full picture.

M2

£36,042 National. Usually the second induction year, with the reduced timetable dropping from 10% to 5%. In pay terms the STPCD treats M2 as an ordinary appraisal-linked step, with no distinct rules of its own — induction status and pay progression run on separate tracks.

M3

£38,400 National. The first point at which induction is normally behind you and progression is purely appraisal-linked. Nothing in the STPCD distinguishes M3 from its neighbours — it is one ordinary step in a six-point range.

M4

£40,941 National. A mid-range appraisal-linked step with no separate statutory treatment. In practice this is roughly where teachers start picking up a TLR3 or a first small responsibility, but that is a school-level pattern, not a rule of the pay document.

M5

£43,529 National. The last point before the top of the range, and otherwise an ordinary step. Its only real significance is proximity: schools' pay policies often expect a period at or near the top of the range before a threshold application.

M6 — the ceiling of the Main Pay Range, and the threshold decision

M6 is the top of the Main Pay Range at £46,940 National, rising to £54,131 in Inner London. Unlike every point below it, reaching M6 does not set up another appraisal-linked step the following year: there is nowhere further to go on this range at all. The only route to a higher classroom base salary is a successful threshold assessment application to move onto the Upper Pay Range at U1 — a substantive process requiring evidence that your teaching is "good" and that your achievements and contribution to the school are "substantial and sustained", assessed against the Teachers' Standards, not a reward for time served. This makes M6 the single most consequential point on the range to sit on passively. Schools set their own eligibility timing and application windows in their pay policy, applications are usually annual, and a decline can be appealed. Our upper pay scale threshold guide covers the evidence, the process and the appeal route in full.

How movement up the Main Pay Range actually works

Progression from one point to the next is often described casually as "annual increments", which makes it sound automatic — it isn't, or at least not any more. Since reforms removed automatic pay progression from the STPCD, movement up the Main Pay Range is explicitly linked to the outcome of your annual performance appraisal (also called a performance management review). To progress, a teacher generally needs to have met the objectives set at the start of their appraisal cycle and to be assessed as meeting the relevant Teachers' Standards consistently across the year.

In practice, the overwhelming majority of teachers who are performing to an ordinary, satisfactory standard do progress each year without difficulty — genuine progression refusals are relatively uncommon and are usually tied to a formal capability or support process rather than routine appraisal outcomes. But the legal mechanism that makes this possible is real, and it means a school does technically have discretion to withhold progression where performance genuinely hasn't met the required standard, which is different from the pre-reform system where moving up a point was close to automatic with time served.

It's also worth knowing that schools have some discretion over pace, not just the pass/fail decision — a small number of schools allow accelerated progression for exceptional performance, skipping a point in a single year, though this is far from universal and depends entirely on your individual school's pay policy rather than any national entitlement.

Where you land within the Main Pay Range on joining a new school also isn't purely mechanical. A school can, at its discretion, place an incoming teacher anywhere within the range that reflects their relevant prior experience — not necessarily the exact point they held at their previous school. For a teacher with several years of prior experience in an independent school, overseas, or in a non-teaching but relevant role, this discretion can matter a great deal, and it's a genuinely negotiable part of any job offer rather than a fixed formula. Equally, a school facing budget pressure has some incentive to place new joiners conservatively, which is one of several reasons two equally experienced teachers can end up on different points at different schools purely because of how each school chose to exercise its discretion at the point of hire.

Finally, it's worth separating pay progression from pay uplift. Moving from M3 to M4 is progression — moving up the existing scale. A pay uplift is what happens when the whole scale moves upward following a new STPCD (for example, if M4 National rises from one September to the next). A teacher can experience both in the same year: their appraisal outcome moves them up a point, and the point itself is also worth more than it was the previous year because the underlying scale has been uplifted. This is why year-on-year payslip comparisons for an individual teacher can look like a larger jump than the headline national pay award alone would suggest.

Upper Pay Range 2026/27 (U1–U3)

Once a teacher has spent time at the top of the Main Pay Range, they can apply to cross onto the Upper Pay Range (UPR) via a process generally known as "threshold assessment" or "crossing the threshold". The Upper Pay Range has three points, U1 to U3, and — like the Main Pay Range — is set out here with National, Fringe, Outer London and Inner London columns.

U1

£49,134 National — the point you land on immediately after a successful threshold assessment. The step up from M6 is the one genuinely earned by an application rather than an appraisal; from here on, the STPCD treats movement as ordinary appraisal-linked progression again.

U2

£50,956 National. An ordinary appraisal-linked step with no separate statutory test — there is no second threshold to cross. A meaningful number of teachers spend years here without moving further, which is a normal career shape rather than a stalled one.

U3 — the classroom pay ceiling, and where the decision changes shape

U3 is £52,835 National and £64,684 in Inner London, and it is the end of the road for classroom base pay. There is no U4. The STPCD provides no higher pay range for a teacher who wants to remain primarily a classroom practitioner, so once you are at the top of U3 your base salary only moves when the whole scale is uplifted nationally. This surprises experienced teachers more than any other feature of the pay structure, and it is why the question at U3 is a different kind of question from the one at M6 — not "how do I progress?" but "which of two genuinely different routes do I want?".

The first route keeps you in the classroom and adds a TLR on top of U3 for a defined additional responsibility — a subject, a key stage, a whole-school area. It is additional pay for additional work, fully taxable and fully pensionable, and it is attached to the post rather than to you, so it stops if the responsibility does. The second route leaves the classroom pay structure altogether for the Leadership Pay Range, which is a change of job rather than a promotion within the same one; our pathway to headship guide sets out what that route actually involves.

What threshold assessment actually requires

Crossing onto the Upper Pay Range is deliberately not automatic, and it isn't simply a reward for years of service. The core requirement is that a teacher demonstrates they are consistently operating at a substantially higher level of practice than is expected at the top of the Main Pay Range — in practice, this means sustained, high-quality teaching assessed directly against the Teachers' Standards, evidenced across a reasonable period rather than a single lesson observation or a single good year.

Most teachers apply for threshold assessment once they've spent meaningful time at or near M6, though there's no single fixed national rule requiring a specific number of years at the top of the main scale before applying — schools set their own eligibility timing within their pay policy, and some allow application earlier than others. The assessment itself typically draws on evidence a teacher has already been building through normal appraisal cycles: lesson observations, pupil outcome data, evidence of wider contribution to the school, and their line manager's professional judgement, usually collated into a structured application that a headteacher (or a panel, in larger schools) reviews and either approves or declines.

A decline isn't necessarily permanent — a teacher can typically reapply in a future cycle once they've had the chance to build further evidence — but it's a genuine, substantive hurdle rather than a formality, and it's worth treating a threshold application with the same seriousness as any other high-stakes professional review, including preparing a clear written case rather than assuming years of experience alone will carry it.

Once a teacher has successfully crossed the threshold onto U1, progression from U1 to U2 and U2 to U3 follows the same broad principle as Main Pay Range progression: it's linked to a further successful appraisal outcome each year rather than happening automatically with time served, though schools generally treat continued strong performance at Upper Pay Range level as the baseline expectation rather than requiring an entirely fresh threshold-style case at every single point. There's no requirement to reach U3 by any fixed point in a career, and a meaningful number of teachers spend long stretches of their career on U1 or U2 without ever moving further, which isn't a sign of anything having gone wrong — it simply reflects that Upper Pay Range progression, unlike the initial threshold crossing, is treated as routine appraisal-linked movement in most schools' pay policies.

Every point against the frozen £50,270 higher rate threshold

There's a question the tables above can't answer on their own, and it's one of the most common things teachers get wrong about their own pay: at which scale point do you start paying 40% income tax? The instinctive answer is to compare the gross salary column against the £50,270 higher rate threshold, which would put U2 and U3 over the line. That answer is wrong, and the reason is worth understanding, because it's worth real money.

The Teachers' Pension Scheme operates a net pay arrangement: your member contribution comes out of your pensionable pay before income tax is calculated. So the figure that decides your tax band isn't the salary in your contract — it's your salary minus your pension contribution. Contribution rates are tiered (on the bands in force from 1 April 2026: 7.4%, 8.9%, 9.9%, 10.5%, 11.6% and 12%), and the rate applies to your whole salary rather than only the slice above each boundary. The table below applies that calculation to every point on both ranges, at the National rate.

No point on either range crosses the threshold in 2026/27 at the National rate. Even U3, the tightest case, produces taxable pay of about £47,604 and sits roughly £2,666 clear. Put differently, it takes around £55,790 of gross pensionable salary before any of a TPS member's income is taxed at 40% at all — so anyone telling teachers that 40% tax starts at £50,270 of salary is about £5,500 out.

Two caveats matter, and both cut the other way. First, the headroom figures above are for the National column only. Run the same calculation down the London columns and the picture changes: taxable pay first crosses £50,270 at U2 in Outer London and at U1 in Inner London, while no Fringe point crosses at all. So London weighting carries a consequence that job adverts never mention — it can move you into the 40% band at a scale point where a colleague outside London is still comfortably clear. Second, a TLR changes the picture everywhere: a TLR2 at its statutory minimum of £3,651 is enough to wipe out the remaining headroom at U1, U2 and U3 on the National rate immediately. For a large number of experienced teachers, the allowance is what moves them across the line, not the pay award.

The reason this is worth tracking rather than checking once is that the £50,270 threshold is frozen in cash terms until 5 April 2031 while teacher pay is not — a confirmed 3.5% from September 2026 and a further confirmed 3% from September 2027, on top of any scale progression. The headroom in the final column shrinks every year by design. Our fiscal drag calculator runs your own point forward through the frozen period and tells you the year, if any, in which you become a 40% taxpayer, and what share of each award actually reaches your take-home pay. For a single current-year net figure, the take-home pay calculator is the quicker route.

Unqualified Teacher scale 2026/27 (UQ1–UQ6)

Separate from the Main and Upper Pay Ranges, the Unqualified Teacher scale applies to staff who are teaching without Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). This includes instructors employed specifically to teach a subject where a fully qualified teacher isn't available, some overseas-trained teachers whose qualification hasn't yet been (or won't be) formally recognised as equivalent to QTS in England, and staff in certain independent-sector or international-recruitment contexts where QTS isn't a contractual requirement.

The Unqualified Teacher scale sits meaningfully below the equivalent points on the Main Pay Range — UQ1 pays noticeably less than M1, for example — reflecting that QTS itself is treated as a distinct, additionally remunerated qualification rather than a formality. Movement up the unqualified scale works on broadly similar appraisal-linked principles to the Main Pay Range, and many teachers on this scale are actively working towards gaining QTS (for example, via an Assessment Only route or a School Direct-style employment-based training route), at which point they'd move onto the Main Pay Range at an appropriate point rather than continuing up the unqualified scale indefinitely.

TLR (Teaching and Learning Responsibility) payments

On top of a teacher's base scale point, many teachers with additional responsibility receive a TLR — a Teaching and Learning Responsibility payment — set within one of three nationally defined ranges rather than fixed at a single amount, giving schools flexibility to set the specific figure within each band.

All three TLR bands, like the SEN allowance (£2,885 to £5,690 for teachers in designated special educational needs posts), are the same cash amounts everywhere in England — unlike the scale points above, they aren't uprated for London.

TLRs are added on top of your base salary point, not paid separately from it — they're fully taxable and fully pensionable income that counts towards your Teachers' Pension Scheme contribution tier exactly like your scale salary does. For the full detail on eligibility, how schools decide the specific figure within each range, and how much of a TLR you actually keep after tax, National Insurance and pension deductions, see our dedicated TLR payments explained guide and run your own numbers through the TLR calculator rather than us re-explaining the full mechanics here.

Leadership Pay Range 2026/27

Headteachers, deputy headteachers and assistant headteachers are paid on the Leadership Pay Range, which works quite differently from the Main and Upper Pay Ranges. Rather than every school sharing one national scale, each school is placed into a "group" — broadly reflecting the school's size (pupil numbers) and the complexity of the headteacher's responsibilities — using a unit-total scoring system set out in the STPCD's statutory guidance. A larger, more complex school scores more units, lands in a higher group, and consequently has access to a higher headteacher pay band.

Two related but distinct figures are worth keeping apart here, because they're routinely conflated. The leadership group pay range is the single wide statutory band that every leadership post must sit within — for 2026/27 that runs from £53,586 to £148,829 outside the London areas. The headteacher group pay ranges below are narrower bands carved out of that, one per school group, and they apply specifically to the headteacher's own pay range.

Within a school's group range, the headteacher's exact salary point is a decision for the governing body (or academy trust board), taking into account factors like the specific demands of the post, local labour market conditions and the outgoing or incoming postholder's experience — it isn't automatically the top, middle or bottom of the range. Deputy headteachers and assistant headteachers are paid on their own individual ranges set from within the wider leadership group pay range, conventionally below the headteacher's own range rather than inside the group band shown above, with the exact figures again a matter for local governing body decision rather than a fixed national sub-scale. This is why two assistant headteachers at similarly sized schools in the same group can legitimately be paid quite differently.

The unit-total scoring system that determines a school's group is based primarily on pupil numbers, weighted by key stage (older pupils generally attract more units than younger ones, reflecting the greater complexity typically involved in secondary provision), with further units added for specific factors such as a sixth form, specialist SEN provision, or other recognised forms of additional organisational complexity. A large secondary school with a sixth form will typically land in one of the higher groups, while a small rural primary school will typically sit in Group 1 or 2. Because the scoring is formulaic rather than discretionary at the group-assignment stage, it's generally possible for a governing body to calculate a school's group with reasonable confidence, even though the exact point chosen within that group's range remains a local decision.

School growth or falling rolls can, over time, move a school between groups — a rapidly expanding academy or a primary school growing into a larger through-school can see its unit total rise enough to shift up a group at the point of a headteacher's appointment or reappointment, which is one of the less well understood mechanisms by which a headteacher's pay ceiling can change even without an explicit renegotiation of their individual contract.

Worked examples: what teachers at different career stages actually earn

Scale points on their own can be hard to translate into a real annual income, especially once TLRs and regional weighting are added in. Here are three realistic examples across different career stages and locations, showing gross scale pay plus any TLR to reach total gross pay. For the net, after-tax figure in each case, run the total gross through our take-home pay calculator.

Example 1: a new M1 ECT, outside London

A newly qualified teacher starting their first post on the National scale earns M1 National, £34,069 a year, with no TLR. Their total gross pay for the year is £34,069.

Example 2: a mid-career M5 teacher with a TLR2, Outer London

A mid-career teacher on M5 Outer London (£48,438) leading a smaller department or coordinating a curriculum area receives a TLR2 of, say, £5,000 for that responsibility. Their total gross pay is £48,438 + £5,000 = £53,438 a year.

Example 3: an Upper Pay Range U2 Head of Department with a TLR1, Inner London

An experienced Head of Department on U2 Inner London (£62,581) with a TLR1 of £14,000 for running a large department receives total gross pay of £62,581 + £14,000 = £76,581 a year.

These three teachers are on genuinely very different total incomes despite all being experienced, capable classroom practitioners — the gap is driven almost entirely by career stage, region and responsibility payments stacking on top of one another, rather than any one factor alone. Put each figure through the take-home pay calculator to see the actual monthly net figure once tax, National Insurance and Teachers' Pension Scheme contributions are accounted for.

How London weighting actually works

It's tempting to think of London weighting as a simple "in London or not" switch, but the reality is more precise — and it matters far more to real take-home pay than most job adverts make obvious. The STPCD defines four geographic pay bands: National (everywhere else), Fringe, Outer London and Inner London, each corresponding to a defined set of local authority areas and, at the edges, specific postcode-based boundaries rather than a loose regional description.

Because the boundary is postcode-based rather than a simple "London or not London" distinction, two schools that feel like they're in a similar area — even a short bus ride apart — can technically sit in different weighting bands if they fall either side of the defined boundary line. This guide won't attempt to list the exact postcode boundaries here (they're set out precisely in the STPCD itself and are worth checking directly for your specific school), but the concept is the important part to understand: weighting band is a matter of where your school is physically located, not where you personally live, and not a judgement call about how "London-ish" the area feels.

The financial stakes are substantial. Comparing M6, the top of the Main Pay Range: the National rate is £46,940, while the same M6 point in Inner London is £54,131 — a gap of £7,191 a year for what is, on paper, "the same scale point". This is precisely why comparing two teaching jobs by scale point alone, without checking which weighting band each school sits in, can be seriously misleading — and why London weighting deserves just as much attention as the headline point (M4, U2, and so on) when comparing two real job offers.

London weighting also isn't just about the headline salary — it's meant to reflect a genuinely different cost of living, particularly housing costs, which rise sharply and unevenly across the Fringe, Outer London and Inner London bands. It's worth noticing how the gap behaves along the scale rather than assuming it's a flat percentage top-up: the Inner London premium is worth £7,660 at M1 but £7,191 at M6 — slightly smaller in cash, and much smaller as a proportion of salary, at the top of the Main Pay Range than at the bottom. A newly qualified Inner London teacher therefore receives a considerably larger percentage uplift over the National rate than an experienced Inner London colleague does, even though the cash amounts involved look broadly similar.

Teachers considering a move between weighting bands — for example, relocating from an Outer London school to a National-rate school outside the capital, or the reverse — should treat the change in weighting as a genuinely separate financial factor from any change in scale point itself, and ideally model both changes together using the take-home pay calculator rather than assuming the two effects simply cancel out or combine in an obvious way.

Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland use different pay structures entirely

Everything on this page describes the STPCD, which applies to England only. The other three UK nations each run their own, separately made pay documents, and the figures above simply don't apply in any of them.

Wales is the one most often got wrong, because the phrase "England & Wales pay scale" is still in wide circulation. It has been out of date since teachers' pay and conditions were devolved to the Welsh Ministers on 30 September 2018. Wales now has its own pay review body, the Independent Welsh Pay Review Body (IWPRB), and its own statutory document, the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions (Wales) Document — STPC(W)D — with a differently shaped scale (five main-range points starting at M2, no London weighting, a 43-point leadership spine) and different cash figures at every point. For 2026/27 the IWPRB recommended 4.25% and the Welsh Government went below it, consulting on 3.5% instead; Welsh national points nonetheless remain above England's national rates at every equivalent stage. See our Wales teacher pay scales guide for the full figures.

Scotland's teacher pay is set through the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT), using its own scale structure and its own progression rules, agreed separately from the STPCD process described on this page. Northern Ireland has its own scale set by the Department of Education Northern Ireland, which has historically tracked somewhat differently from England in cash terms during some recent pay rounds, even though Northern Ireland uses the same UK-wide income tax bands as England and Wales (unlike Scotland, which also has its own separate income tax bands on top of its separate pay scale). See our dedicated Scotland teacher pay scales guide and Northern Ireland teacher pay guide for the full point-by-point figures for each nation.

Sources

• School Teachers' Review Body 36th Report: 2026 — GOV.UK (Appendix F, "Recommended pay levels from 1 September 2026", is the source of every figure in the tables above)
• Teacher Workforce — Written Ministerial Statement HCWS171, 1 July 2026 (the Government's acceptance of the recommendations in full)
• Teacher pay: everything you need to know about the latest multi-year pay award — DfE Education Hub, July 2026