Wales Teacher Pay Rise 2026/27: 3.5% Confirmed, Backdated to September
Wales confirmed a 3.5% teacher pay rise for 2026/27 on 14 October 2026 (5% unqualified), backdated to 1 September. What it means, back pay, and how it compares with England.
Independent guidance, not affiliated with the DfE, Teachers' Pensions or any teaching union.
Short answer
CONFIRMED 14 October 2026: 3.5% (5% unqualified), backdated to 1 September
Update log
Welsh Government confirms 3.5% for teachers and leaders, 5% for unqualified teachers and 3.5% for FE lecturers, backdated to 1 September 2026. Revised STPC(W)D due the following week.
Page published, covering the IWPRB's Seventh Report, the Welsh Government's response, and how the process compares with England's STRB round for the same year.
IWPRB's Seventh Report published, recommending 4.25% from September 2026. The Welsh Government responds the same day, announcing a consultation on 3.5% (5% unqualified) instead, citing affordability.
Consultation on 3.5% (5% unqualified) launched when schools returned.
Ask a teacher in Cardiff or Wrexham what the 2026/27 pay rise is, and the answer is now settled: 3.5%, backdated to September. How Wales got there is less straightforward. The figure is not what Wales's own independent pay review body recommended, and it took three months, a consultation and a second Written Statement to confirm. This page walks through that process, stage by stage, using the 2026/27 round as the worked example throughout.
This matters for a reason beyond curiosity about process. Wales runs a structurally similar system to England's — an independent body recommends, a minister decides — but for two years running now, the two governments have made different choices about whether to accept their own review body's number. Understanding how that decision actually gets made, and who argues for what along the way, is the difference between reading a headline percentage and understanding what's actually been decided, what hasn't, and what could still change.
What the IWPRB actually is
The Independent Welsh Pay Review Body is the body that recommends teacher pay for Wales each year. It exists because of devolution: responsibility for teachers' pay and conditions transferred from the UK Government to the Welsh Ministers on 30 September 2018, under the Welsh Ministers (Transfer of Functions) Order 2018. Before that date, Wales was covered by exactly the same School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document and the same STRB process as England. Since then, Wales has run its own parallel machinery: the IWPRB advises Welsh Ministers, and its accepted recommendations are given effect through the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions (Wales) Document, or STPC(W)D.
The IWPRB was modelled on the STRB rather than invented from scratch — Wales did not adopt Scotland's negotiated bargaining model or set up anything resembling it. It's a genuinely independent body of appointed members, supported by its own secretariat, that gathers written and oral evidence from teaching unions, employer and local authority representatives, and the Welsh Government itself, then reaches its own recommendation rather than simply relaying whichever side submitted the loudest case. Its seventh annual report, covering the 2026/27 pay round, was published in July 2026.
The IWPRB's remit has, in practice, gone further than a single annual percentage. Alongside its yearly pay recommendation, it has produced fuller strategic reviews of the structure of Welsh teachers' and leaders' pay and conditions, and its remit letters have repeatedly raised questions with no direct STRB equivalent — the availability of a Welsh-medium teaching workforce, the treatment of Additional Learning Needs Coordinators, and the shape and length of the pay ranges themselves. Several of the structural differences between the Welsh and English pay scales covered in our Wales pay scales guide — the shortened main pay range, the reintroduction of pay portability, the retained 43-point leadership spine — trace back to IWPRB recommendations accepted in earlier years, not to the Welsh Government acting independently of it.
30 Sept 2018
Date teacher pay was devolved to the Welsh Ministers, creating the IWPRB process
It recommends — Welsh Ministers still decide
As with the STRB in England, this is the single most important nuance in the whole system, and it's the one that matters most for the 2026/27 round specifically. The IWPRB does not set Welsh teacher pay. It recommends a pay award to Welsh Ministers, via the Cabinet Secretary for Education, who then formally decides what to do with it. That decision can accept the recommendation in full, reject it, or — as has happened in each of the last two pay rounds — offer something lower on affordability grounds. There is no legal requirement for Welsh Ministers to implement the IWPRB's recommendation as written, in exactly the same way there's no such requirement on the UK Secretary of State for Education regarding the STRB. The difference in 2026/27 is not in the rule — it's in how that discretion has actually been exercised on each side of the border.
The annual IWPRB timeline, stage by stage
The IWPRB process runs on roughly the same shape of annual cycle as the STRB's, though on its own calendar — the two don't report on the same date even in years when they're close together, and in some years they've been weeks or months apart. Here's how the cycle has generally unfolded, illustrated with the confirmed dates from the 2026/27 round.
The remit letter
The Cabinet Secretary for Education writes to the IWPRB, setting out the specific questions the Welsh Government wants it to consider for the coming pay round — this is the IWPRB's seventh such remit since the body was established. As with England's remit letters, this defines the scope of what the IWPRB is being asked to look at; it doesn't set its own agenda independently of government. Welsh remit letters have historically gone beyond the headline percentage into structural questions specific to Wales.
The evidence submission window
Interested parties then submit written and oral evidence to the IWPRB — the Welsh Government, teaching unions including NASUWT Cymru, NEU Cymru and UCAC, employer and local authority representative bodies including those covering Wales's 22 local authorities, and the IWPRB's own secretariat. See the next section for what each side has tended to argue.
The IWPRB's report
The IWPRB considers the evidence and its own independent analysis, then produces a formal report containing its recommendation. For 2026/27, that was the Seventh Report, published on 13 July 2026, recommending 4.25% on all salaries and allowances from September 2026 — its first recommendation, of several the report contains.
The Welsh Government's response
Welsh Ministers then respond, via a Written Statement, confirming whether the recommendation is accepted, rejected, or modified. For 2026/27, the response came the same day as the report itself, 13 July 2026: the Cabinet Secretary announced a consultation on 3.5% for teachers and school leaders (5% for unqualified teachers) rather than the 4.25% recommended, citing affordability within existing budgets, while committing additional funding to local authorities and schools toward the award, and separately to Medr to maintain pay parity for post-16 practitioners.
Consultation, then implementation
Unlike a straightforward acceptance, a proposed figure that departs from the recommendation goes out to consultation before it's written into a revised STPC(W)D. For 2026/27, that consultation opened when schools returned in September 2026. Once a figure is finalised, it's normally implemented from 1 September of that academic year regardless of when the document itself catches up, with schools applying the confirmed rate and any shortfall backdated as a lump sum.
This page is a living tracker
Who submits evidence in Wales
The evidence stage is where each year's Welsh pay round actually takes shape, and the parties involved argue along fairly consistent lines year to year, much as they do in England's STRB process.
The Welsh Government
Welsh Government evidence to the IWPRB tends to centre on affordability within the Welsh Government's own budget — which is itself shaped by the block grant settlement from Westminster — alongside recruitment and retention data specific to Wales, including the persistent shortage of teachers able to teach through the medium of Welsh. The same affordability argument that shaped the evidence stage has, in the last two rounds, also shaped the final decision: both the 2025/26 and 2026/27 Written Statements point explicitly to budget pressure as the reason for going below the recommendation.
The teaching unions
NASUWT Cymru, NEU Cymru, UCAC and other unions representing Welsh teachers and school leaders submit evidence emphasising real-terms pay erosion, workload, and comparability with other graduate-entry professions — the same core themes their English counterparts raise with the STRB. In the 2026/27 round specifically, union evidence and subsequent public statements have gone further, arguing that a review body being overruled two years in a row sends what NASUWT Cymru has described as an "unfortunate message" about how seriously the process itself is being taken, and that the shortfall against the 2025/26 recommendation should have been factored into the 2026/27 decision. It was not.
Employer and local authority representatives
Bodies representing Welsh school employers and the 22 local authorities that maintain them focus on budget sustainability at the school and authority level, much as their English equivalents do — highlighting the practical difficulty of absorbing a pay award that isn't matched pound-for-pound by additional funding, given how much of a typical school's budget is staff costs.
The IWPRB's own analysis
Alongside submitted evidence, the IWPRB's secretariat carries out independent analysis of Welsh labour market data, recruitment and retention trends specific to Wales, and relevant economic indicators, feeding into a recommendation that reflects its own assessment rather than simply averaging what each side has argued for.
The 2026/27 round: 4.25% recommended, 3.5% offered
The IWPRB's Seventh Report contains several recommendations, but the pay award is the first and the one that matters most for most teachers' finances: the IWPRB recommended that all salaries and allowances be increased by 4.25% from September 2026.
In the Written Statement published the same day, 13 July 2026, the Cabinet Secretary for Education did not implement that figure. The statement announced a consultation, opening when schools returned in the autumn term, on a 3.5% award for teachers and school leaders, with a larger 5% increase for unqualified teachers. The stated reasoning was affordability: the IWPRB's recommendation was described as not affordable within existing budgets, against a backdrop of difficult financial circumstances facing schools and colleges. Additional funding was committed to local authorities and schools to support the award that was proposed, and separately to Medr, to maintain pay parity for post-16 practitioners in schools and colleges.
The same Written Statement also confirmed the Welsh Government would consult on two further, non-pay-percentage changes to the STPC(W)D: a single pay scale allowing classroom teachers to progress and see their pay rise every year, and amendments intended to protect school leaders' uninterrupted holiday periods and weekends. A separate commitment was made to fund doubling the length of maternity leave paid at full pay, subject to agreement with local authorities and unions. None of those three changes affects the headline percentage, but they're a genuine part of the same package under consultation, and worth knowing about if you're a school leader or on maternity leave planning around the 2026/27 year.
This is the second consecutive year Wales has gone below its own review body
It's worth being precise about the gap in cash terms and what it means for actual take-home pay, without repeating the full scale tables that live on our dedicated Wales pay scales page. The 0.75 percentage point difference between 4.25% recommended and 3.5% proposed is worth roughly a few hundred pounds a year at most points on the main and upper pay ranges, and considerably more across the leadership spine, where percentages apply to much larger base salaries. The gap compounds too: because each year's award is calculated on top of the previous year's confirmed figure, a shortfall against the recommendation in one year permanently lowers the base that the following year's percentage is applied to, unless a later award specifically corrects for it — which, as the box above sets out, hasn't happened here.
How Wales compares with England's STRB award
England's equivalent process for 2026/27 concluded rather differently. The STRB's 36th Report was published on 1 July 2026, recommending 3.5% on all pay and allowance ranges and advisory points from September 2026 (5% specifically on the minimum of the unqualified teacher range outside London), 3% from September 2027, and an indicative 3% pencilled in for 2028/29. The UK Government accepted that recommendation in full the same day — no reduction, no consultation on a lower figure, and a multi-year settlement rather than a single year's number.
England's 2026/27 round
STRB recommended 3.5% (5% on the unqualified minimum) from Sept 2026, 3% from Sept 2027. The Government accepted the recommendation in full on 1 July 2026 — the same day the report was published. No consultation on a lower figure.
Wales's 2026/27 round
IWPRB recommended 4.25% from Sept 2026. The Welsh Government did not accept it, announcing a consultation on 3.5% (5% for unqualified teachers) the same day the report was published — 13 July 2026. Confirmed on 14 October 2026, backdated to September.
The result is a genuinely odd-looking comparison once you line the two rounds up. On headline percentage, with the Welsh proposal confirmed unchanged on 14 October, both nations land on the same 3.5% for classroom teachers and leaders — arrived at by completely different routes: England's government accepting its review body's number outright, Wales's declining its own review body's higher number down to match. On process, England's figure was confirmed and final on the day its report landed; Wales's took until 14 October, more than three months later. On the unqualified range specifically, the two nations' 5% uplifts aren't even structured the same way — England applies 5% only to the minimum of that range, with the rest moving by 3.5% like everything else, while the Welsh proposal applies 5% across the whole unqualified range, from the bottom point to the top.
None of that means Welsh teachers end up worse off in cash terms than English ones — quite the opposite, in fact. Because the two national scales have already drifted apart in absolute pounds across several separate settlements since 2019, the Welsh scale currently pays more than England's national rate at every equivalent point, even before accounting for the 2026/27 round, and even after Wales's award came in below its own recommendation for a second year. See the comparison table in our Wales pay scales guide for the actual cash figures at each point on both scales. The point of the comparison here is narrower and about the decision-making process itself: two structurally similar review-body systems, in the same pay year, producing two different relationships between "recommended" and "decided."
How a pay award hits Welsh school budgets
As in England, a headline percentage and a fully funded pay award are not the same thing, and it's worth understanding the mechanic specifically for Wales rather than assuming it mirrors England's exactly. The Welsh Government's Written Statements for both the 2025/26 and 2026/27 rounds committed additional funding to local authorities and schools alongside the pay award actually implemented — but that funding has been pitched against the cost of the reduced award the Welsh Government chose to offer, not against the cost of the IWPRB's original, higher recommendation.
That distinction matters because it's genuinely possible for a school or local authority to receive funding that comfortably covers a 3.5% award while still facing a real financial squeeze had the full 4.25% recommendation been implemented without matching extra funding. Because Wales's local authorities maintain all of the nation's schools directly — there are no academies to complicate the picture, unlike in England — the funding flows through a more uniform channel, from Welsh Government to local authority to school, but the underlying budget pressure that shaped the decision to offer less than recommended in the first place doesn't disappear just because the lower figure is then funded.
Employer and local authority representative bodies made exactly this point during the evidence stage of the 2026/27 round, and it's the same argument that's shaped every recent Welsh pay round: a bigger recommended percentage sounds unambiguously better for teachers until you ask whether the money to pay for it actually exists in the budget it would have to come from.
England, Scotland and Northern Ireland run separate processes
Everything on this page relates specifically to Wales. The other three UK nations run entirely separate systems, and none of them is affected by an IWPRB recommendation or the Welsh Government's response to it, in the same way Wales isn't affected by anything the STRB, the SNCT or Northern Ireland's own process decide.
England: the STRB process
England's teacher pay is recommended by the School Teachers' Review Body and given effect through the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document, following the process compared against Wales's throughout this page. See our dedicated England STRB pay rise tracker for the full process and the confirmed 2026/27 and 2027/28 figures.
Scotland: the SNCT process
Scotland negotiates teacher pay directly through the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT), bringing together teaching unions and local authority employers via COSLA, with Scottish Government involvement — a bargaining model, not an independent review body recommending to a minister. Scotland has, in a number of recent years, settled earlier than either England's or Wales's review-body processes conclude. See our dedicated Scotland teacher pay scales guide for the actual figures.
Northern Ireland: its own, often slower process
Northern Ireland runs its own pay-setting process through the Department of Education Northern Ireland, in negotiation with Northern Ireland teaching unions, independent of the STRB, the SNCT and the IWPRB alike. It has, in various recent pay rounds, taken noticeably longer to conclude than any of the other three nations, at times for reasons connected to the wider functioning of Northern Ireland's devolved institutions. See our dedicated Northern Ireland teacher pay guide for what's currently confirmed there.
Don't assume a UK-wide figure — in either direction
How to read the eventual confirmation properly
Once the Welsh consultation concludes and a final figure is confirmed, a handful of things are worth checking carefully before taking a single reported percentage at face value — the same checks that matter for England's STRB announcements, applied here.
- Is it the recommended figure, the proposed figure, or something else again? The IWPRB recommended 4.25% and 3.5% was proposed for consultation — a final confirmation could match either number, or land somewhere else entirely.
- Is it flat across the scale, or does the 5% element apply only to part of the unqualified range, as it does in England, or across the whole range, as currently proposed for Wales?
- Is it consolidated, permanently raising your pay scale point and your pensionable pay, or a one-off non-consolidated payment that doesn't carry forward and generally doesn't count toward your Teachers' Pension Scheme benefits?
- Has the revised STPC(W)D actually been published, or is the figure still a Written Statement announcement ahead of the statutory document that gives it legal effect?
- Does the confirmed funding for schools and local authorities match the cost of the confirmed award, or does it leave a gap employer bodies have already flagged?
The consolidated-versus-non-consolidated distinction deserves particular attention because it affects your pension, not just this year's payslip. A consolidated rise is built permanently into your pay scale point and increases your pensionable pay under the Teachers' Pension Scheme's career-average calculation from that point onward. A non-consolidated, one-off payment sits on top of your salary for a single year without changing your underlying scale point, and generally doesn't count as pensionable pay at all, even though it's still taxed as normal income. Both the 2025/26 and 2026/27 Welsh awards have been framed as consolidated increases to the pay scale rather than one-off payments, but it's worth confirming that remains the case once the final Welsh figure is actually settled, since the two forms have very different long-term effects on retirement income for what can look like a similar number in a single year's payslip.
A brief history: devolution, and two years below recommendation
Until 30 September 2018, there was no separate Welsh question to ask at all — Welsh and English teachers were covered by the same STPCD, decided through the same STRB process, on the same numbers. Devolution created the IWPRB and the STPC(W)D, and the two systems spent their early years mostly tracking each other in headline terms, while Wales used its new devolved authority to make specific structural changes England didn't follow — restoring national pay scales, shortening the main pay range, reintroducing pay portability, and eventually retaining a 43-point leadership spine that England had abolished back in 2014.
The more recent and more consequential divergence is the one this page has focused on: for two consecutive pay rounds now, Welsh Ministers have chosen not to implement the IWPRB's recommendation in full, in both cases citing affordability within the Welsh Government's own budget. That's a genuinely different pattern from England's STRB process over the same period, where the 2026/27 recommendation — itself part of a two-year, 3.5%-then-3% package — was accepted outright. Whether that pattern continues, whether the 2026/27 consultation produces the proposed 3.5%/5% figures unchanged, or whether pressure from unions over two years of shortfalls shifts the outcome, is exactly the kind of genuine, still-unresolved development this page exists to track rather than pre-judge.
It's also worth placing this against the same broader real-terms backdrop that shapes English pay coverage: a decade of public sector pay restraint through the 2010s, followed by larger cash awards during and after the post-pandemic inflation surge. Welsh union evidence to the IWPRB draws on exactly the same cumulative real-terms-since-2010 framing that English union evidence puts to the STRB, for the same underlying reason — a single stronger year, on its own, doesn't undo several years of below-inflation increases that came before it, and a reduced award against a review body's own recommendation makes that recovery slower still, not faster.
Sources
- Written Statement: Teachers' Pay Award 2026/27 (13 July 2026) — GOV.WALES
- Independent Welsh Pay Review Body: Seventh Report 2026 — GOV.WALES
- Written Statement: Teachers' Pay Award 2025/26 (17 July 2025) — GOV.WALES, the source for the prior year's 4.8% recommended / 4% awarded comparison
- School Teachers' Review Body 36th Report: 2026 — GOV.UK, the source for England's comparison figures
- Teacher pay: everything you need to know about the latest multi-year pay award — DfE Education Hub, July 2026
- Teachers' pay: Welsh Government to consult on 3.5% rise but unions attack decision to reject independent 4.25% recommendation — Swansea Bay News
- Welsh council chiefs welcome teacher pay consultation plan — LocalGov, 14 July 2026
- Pay Scales (Wales) — NASUWT, for the underlying scale figures once a final award is confirmed
Frequently asked questions
Is the IWPRB's recommendation legally binding on Welsh Ministers? +
No. Like England's STRB, the Independent Welsh Pay Review Body is a non-statutory review body — it takes evidence and reports a recommendation, but the Welsh Ministers (in practice, the Cabinet Secretary for Education) formally decide what to do with it. They can accept it in full, reject it, or accept a modified version. Wales has actually exercised that discretion downward in each of the last two pay rounds, which makes the distinction between recommended and awarded considerably more than a technicality for Welsh teachers right now — see the section below on the 2026/27 round for exactly what that has meant in practice.
What is the confirmed Welsh teacher pay award for 2026/27? +
3.5% for teachers and school leaders, 5% on the unqualified teacher pay range and 3.5% for FE lecturers, confirmed in a Welsh Government Written Statement on 14 October 2026 and backdated to 1 September 2026. The IWPRB had recommended 4.25%; the Welsh Government consulted on 3.5% from September and then confirmed it, saying 4.25% was not affordable and that 3.5% matches England. The revised School Teachers' Pay and Conditions (Wales) Document giving it legal effect was due to be published the following week. Employers decide when to pay the new rate and the back pay. See our Wales pay scales guide for every point.
Why has Wales gone below its own pay review body two years running? +
Affordability, according to the Welsh Government's own stated reasoning both times. In 2025/26, the IWPRB recommended 4.8% and the Welsh Government implemented 4%. In 2026/27, the IWPRB recommended 4.25% and the Welsh Government has proposed 3.5% (5% for unqualified teachers), again citing budget pressure on schools and colleges. Both written statements describe the recommendation as not affordable within existing budgets, while committing some additional funding to local authorities and schools to support whatever award is eventually confirmed. Teaching unions have pushed back both times, arguing that declining a review body's recommendation twice in a row undermines the credibility of a process that exists precisely to take the pay question out of direct political bargaining.
How does the IWPRB differ from England's STRB, beyond just being a different body? +
The mechanism is genuinely similar — both are independent panels that take evidence from government, unions and employer representatives and report a recommendation to a minister, who then decides. The differences are in scope, timetable and, currently, outcome. The IWPRB's remit letters have gone further into structural questions specific to Wales — pay portability, the shape of the pay ranges, Welsh-medium teaching capacity, ALNCo pay — that have no direct STRB equivalent. The two bodies run on their own calendars, so their reports and government responses don't land on the same date even when they're close together, as they were in 2026. And for two consecutive years now, the two governments have made different choices about whether to accept their own review body's recommendation in full: the UK Government accepted the STRB's 2026 recommendation outright, while the Welsh Government has proposed going below the IWPRB's for the second year running.
Does a bigger IWPRB recommendation automatically mean more money for my school? +
No, and this is worth understanding before assuming a headline percentage settles the question of a school's budget. Even where the Welsh Government does provide additional funding alongside a pay award, as it has committed to for 2026/27, that funding has not historically matched the full cost of the IWPRB's original recommendation in years where the award itself was reduced below the recommendation. Staff costs make up the large majority of a typical school's budget, so a gap between the confirmed award's cost and the funding provided still has to be found from somewhere else in that budget. A generous-sounding headline and a genuinely comfortable school budget are two different things, and it's worth checking your own school or local authority's position on funding specifically, not just the headline percentage.
When does a confirmed Welsh award actually reach my payslip? +
Once a Welsh award is confirmed and given effect through a revised STPC(W)D, it's normally implemented from 1 September of that academic year, mirroring England's practice. Confirmation itself, though, has come well after that date in some recent years — the 2026/27 consultation only opened when schools returned in September, and the revised document giving it legal effect follows later still. When that happens, schools typically apply the eventual figure from 1 September regardless, with a backdated lump sum covering the gap once the document catches up. A delay between an announced figure and it appearing on your payslip is normal, not a sign of a payroll problem.
Do Scotland and Northern Ireland use the IWPRB too? +
No — despite the similar-sounding acronym-heavy landscape, all four UK nations run genuinely separate processes with no formal connection between them. Scotland negotiates teacher pay through the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT), a bargaining body of unions and local authority employers, rather than an independent review body. Northern Ireland has its own process run through the Department of Education Northern Ireland, which has in various recent years taken considerably longer to conclude than any of the other three nations. Only Wales and England use the review-body model, and even then, as the 36th and Seventh Reports for 2026/27 show, that structural similarity hasn't stopped them landing in different places.
Where can I check whether the 2026/27 Welsh award has since been finalised? +
Check the STPC(W)D itself on gov.wales, which is the only document that gives a figure legal effect, alongside Welsh Government Written Statements on the teachers' pay award, which typically announce a decision before the document itself is revised. NASUWT Cymru, NEU Cymru and UCAC all publish the Welsh position promptly once something is actually confirmed, usually noting clearly whether a figure is still provisional. This page is kept current as genuine developments happen — see the update log near the top for what's changed and when, rather than relying on a single news headline that may only capture one stage of a longer process.
Related guides
Wales Teacher Pay Scales 2026/27
The confirmed 2026/27 Welsh scale figures, the STPC(W)D structure, and how it compares with England point by point.
Teacher Pay Rise 2026/27 (England STRB Tracker)
England's parallel process — the STRB's 36th Report, accepted in full, and the confirmed 3.5%/3% multi-year award.
Scotland Teacher Pay Scales 2026/27
The SNCT's negotiated settlement, a genuinely different bargaining model from both the IWPRB and the STRB.
Northern Ireland Teacher Pay 2026/27
Northern Ireland's own, often later-settling process, and its separate NITPS pension scheme.
Teacher Take-Home Pay Calculator
See what a confirmed Welsh award actually means for your net monthly pay once it's finalised.
Teachers' Pension Scheme
How consolidated pay rises feed into career-average (CARE) pension accrual — the TPS covers England and Wales as one scheme.