Teachers' Pension Contribution Rates 2026/27: 7.4% to 12% Tiers

Every active teacher in the UK pays a percentage of their salary into their occupational pension scheme, and exactly what percentage depends on which of six salary-based bands — a "tier" — their pay falls into. This page lays out the full, current tier tables for all three UK teacher pension schemes side by side, explains precisely how your own tier gets decided, and covers the mechanism that can move you between tiers even when nothing about your job or your pay rate has changed. It's meant to be the page you land on when you just want to look up a rate directly, without running a full calculation — though the two calculators linked further down will give you an exact pounds-and-pence figure for your own circumstances in seconds.

How your tier is actually decided

The single most misunderstood point about contribution tiers is what salary figure actually sets them. It is tempting to assume your tier is set by the full-time equivalent (FTE) value of your post — the salary a full-time colleague on the same pay point would receive — but that is not correct. Your tier is set by your own actual annual pensionable pay for that specific employment: what you are genuinely paid, after any part-time or job-share fraction has already been applied, plus any TLR, SEN allowance or other regular pensionable addition you actually receive. If you work 0.6 FTE, your tier is based on that 0.6 FTE actual salary — not on the full-time salary your post would pay someone working it full-time.

England & Wales: TPS contribution tiers 2026/27

Wales does not run a separate scheme — England and Wales share the single Teachers' Pension Scheme (TPS), administered by Teachers' Pensions on behalf of the Department for Education. The table below is the full set of six member contribution tiers effective for the 2026/27 scheme year (1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027), based on annual pensionable pay.

These six bands and rates are unchanged from those reproduced on our 2015 CARE scheme explainer, and are the exact figures our calculators use internally — the boundaries themselves were most recently uprated by 3.8% from 1 April 2026 in line with that year's Pensions Increase.

Scotland: STPS contribution tiers 2026/27

Scotland's teacher pension arrangements predate the England & Wales scheme and are set entirely independently by Scottish Ministers, administered by the Scottish Public Pensions Agency (SPPA). The Scottish Teachers' Pension Scheme (STPS) also uses six tiers, but neither the boundaries nor the rates match the TPS table above — there is no read-across at all between the two. The table below reflects SPPA Teachers Circular 2026/03, covering member contribution tiers on actual pensionable pay for 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027.

Notice the fourth and fifth Scottish bands break away from the England & Wales boundaries much sooner — the STPS top rate of 12.14% starts at £92,694, well below the £104,414 threshold that triggers the equivalent 12% TPS top rate. A Scottish teacher and an England & Wales teacher on identical salaries of, say, £95,000 pay meaningfully different contribution rates purely because of which scheme they're in.

Northern Ireland: NITPS contribution tiers 2026/27

Northern Ireland runs a third, separate scheme — the Northern Ireland Teachers' Pension Scheme (NITPS), administered by the Department of Education (NI). The table below reflects DE NI Circular 2026/11 (18 February 2026), covering member contribution rates for 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027.

Banded, not marginal — the cliff-edge

Every one of the three tables above works the same way, and it is genuinely different from how income tax bands work. Income tax is marginal: only the slice of your income that falls above a threshold is taxed at the higher rate. Pension contribution tiers are not marginal — once your total annual pensionable pay crosses a threshold, the higher rate applies to your entire pensionable pay, not just the amount above the boundary. This creates a genuine cliff-edge at each threshold, where a small pay increase can trigger a disproportionately larger jump in what you contribute.

This is worth bearing in mind around pay rises, TLR negotiations or a move to a higher pay point that happens to sit close to one of the five boundaries in your nation's table. It rarely makes a pay rise not worth taking overall, but it explains why a small increase in gross pay can sometimes produce a smaller, or even negative, change in net take-home pay for that year.

Why your tier can move even if your pay doesn't

The band boundaries themselves are not fixed forever. Teachers' Pensions, the SPPA and the Department of Education (NI) each review their own tier boundaries periodically and uprate them — typically annually, from 1 April — using a mechanism tied to Pensions Increase, the same inflation-linked uprating mechanism used across public service pensions more broadly. The 2026/27 England & Wales boundaries shown above, for instance, were uprated by 3.8% from 1 April 2026 compared with the previous year's thresholds, alongside a revision to the rates themselves.

The practical effect is that the tier boundaries move independently of your own salary. If your pay rises by a similar percentage to the uprating in a given year, you'll likely stay in the same relative tier. But if your pay is frozen, rises by less than that year's uprating, or the tier structure is revised for reasons beyond a simple inflation link, you can find your salary drifting into a different band — up or down — purely because the boundaries moved past you, not because you did anything differently. This is exactly why this page is dated and scoped to 2026/27 specifically, rather than presented as a permanent table: expect the boundaries (and sometimes the rates) to be revised again from 1 April 2027, and check back here or with your scheme's administrator rather than assuming these figures carry forward unchanged. If the boundaries are uprated in line with September CPI again, as the 3.8% uprating for 2026/27 was, September 2026 CPI of 3.5% points to boundaries roughly 3.5% higher from April 2027; Teachers' Pensions confirms the actual table each spring.

Employer contribution rates by nation

Alongside your own member contribution, your employer pays a separate, much larger contribution into your pension on top — money that never appears as a deduction on your payslip and is easy to overlook entirely. Like the member tiers, the employer rate is set independently by each nation's scheme and is not interchangeable between them.

The England & Wales figure is the one to watch over the next year: Teachers' Pensions confirmed in June 2026 that the 2024 scheme valuation has reported and the employer rate will drop substantially, from 28.68% to 17.68%, from 1 April 2027. That reduction is specific to the TPS 2024 valuation — it has not been announced for Scotland or Northern Ireland, and their next valuations have not yet reported, so it would be a mistake to assume either STPS or NITPS will follow the same path down. In every case, whatever the current rate, it is paid by your school (ultimately funded via the relevant government department) and is typically two to four times the size of your own contribution once your tier is factored in — genuinely substantial value that simply never shows up as a number you personally see leave your bank account.

Part-time contracts and job shares

To restate the point from earlier in more depth: your contribution tier is set by your actual pensionable pay in each employment, never by a full-time equivalent figure and never by adding together multiple contracts into one notional salary. Three situations are worth spelling out individually.

• A single part-time contract — your tier is based on your actual, pro-rated salary as paid, which for many part-time teachers sits in a lower band than their full-time equivalent pay scale point alone would suggest.
• A job share — each partner's actual pensionable pay (their own share of the combined timetable) sets their own tier individually. There's no combining the two partners' pay into a single household or role-level figure for tiering purposes.
• Multiple separate contracts — for example a main post plus a separate supply or sessional contract, potentially with a different employer — each contract is tiered independently on its own actual pay. Nobody adds them together, and there's no year-end reconciliation that changes which tier applied to each one after the fact.

If you're actively weighing up a move to part-time or a job share, our part-time and job-share pay and pension guide covers the pay and pension consequences of that decision in full depth, including how a job share's timetable split translates into each partner's pensionable pay, accrual and tier.

Get your exact figure

Everything above is deliberately a reference table, not a personal calculation — the actual pound amount you'll see deducted depends on exactly what counts as your pensionable pay this year, which nation's scheme you're in, and where precisely your salary sits relative to the nearest boundary. Two purpose-built tools on this site apply the exact tables above automatically and do that arithmetic for you:

• Take-Home Pay Calculator — enter your salary and nation and see your pension contribution, tax, National Insurance and student loan deductions together, alongside your actual net take-home pay.
• Teachers' Pension Calculator — project your CARE pension pot forward year by year, using the correct nation-specific tier and employer rate, plus your own salary growth and revaluation assumptions.
• Part-Time Pay & Pension Calculator — built specifically for part-time and job-share contracts, and shows explicitly how the tier set on your actual pay compares with the (incorrect) tier a full-time equivalent salary would suggest.

Sources

Tier tables and employer rates above are drawn from Teachers' Pensions (teacherspensions.co.uk) for the England & Wales TPS, SPPA Teachers Circular 2026/03 for the Scottish STPS, and Department of Education (NI) Circular 2026/11 for NITPS, each covering the 2026/27 scheme year. These are the same figures encoded in this site's Take-Home Pay and Teachers' Pension calculators, so the numbers you see here and the numbers those tools compute with are always the same table. Tier boundaries and rates are reviewed periodically by each scheme's administrator — always check directly with Teachers' Pensions, the SPPA or the Department of Education (NI) before making a significant financial decision based on any single year's figures.