Teacher Pay Scales 2026/27 — Main, Upper & Leadership Pay Ranges

What the STPCD actually is, and who it binds

Every English and Welsh 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 (once officially confirmed) 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. This lag is precisely why estimate pages like this one exist and are useful during the recruitment season, provided they're clearly flagged as estimates rather than passed off as confirmed fact.

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 & Wales 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.

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.

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.

It's also worth knowing that the Upper Pay Range is a genuine ceiling for a classroom teacher who isn't taking on a formal additional responsibility. Beyond U3, further pay increases for a teacher who wants to stay primarily in the classroom generally come from taking on a TLR (covered below) rather than from any higher classroom-only scale point — the STPCD doesn't provide a "U4" or equivalent. This is one of the more common points of confusion for experienced teachers comparing their pay trajectory against colleagues who've taken on middle leadership roles.

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.

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 leadership pay band.

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 also paid somewhere within their school's group range, but conventionally below the headteacher's own point, with the exact figure 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, £33,900 a year, with no TLR. Their total gross pay for the year is £33,900.

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

A mid-career teacher on M5 Outer London (£46,900) leading a smaller department or coordinating a curriculum area receives a TLR2 of, say, £5,000 for that responsibility. Their total gross pay is £46,900 + £5,000 = £51,900 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 (£55,100) with a TLR1 of £8,500 for running a large department receives total gross pay of £55,100 + £8,500 = £63,600 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 £45,700, while the same M6 point in Inner London is £52,000 — a gap of £6,300 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. Because the weighting is a fixed cash addition rather than a percentage of salary, it applies the same regardless of a teacher's scale point, which means it represents a proportionally larger boost at the bottom of the Main Pay Range than at the top of the Leadership Pay Range. A newly qualified Inner London teacher receives a much larger percentage uplift over the National rate than an Inner London headteacher does, even though the cash amount involved can look similar in absolute terms.

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.

Scotland and Northern Ireland use different pay structures entirely

Everything on this page describes the STPCD, which applies to England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland each run their own, separately negotiated teacher pay systems, and the figures above simply don't apply north of the border or across the Irish Sea.

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 & Wales 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.