Academy Trust Teacher Pay — How MATs Set Their Own Scales

Trust-level pay information is genuinely hard to find, inconsistently published, and frequently out of date the moment it appears — which is precisely why it is worth trying to document properly. We started this section with a single, carefully researched profile and have since built out thirty-eight, covering every trust we found with genuinely verifiable evidence: a published pay policy, a corroborated pay differential, a real industrial dispute, or documented conditions worth knowing about before you apply. Every profile states plainly what is confirmed and what isn't — we deliberately left out several trusts a Tes investigation named as above-scale (including Advantage Schools) because we could not find enough independently verifiable material to write an honest page, not because they don't exist.

Why academy trusts can set their own pay

The STPCD is the statutory document that fixes teacher pay ranges and working conditions in maintained schools in England. (Wales has had its own equivalent, the STPC(W)D, since pay was devolved in 2018 — and no academies, so none of this page applies there.) It is where M1 to M6, the Upper Pay Range, TLR payments, London weighting and the 1,265-hour directed time limit all come from. Maintained schools have to apply it. Academies, converted or free schools, have not been bound by it — their funding agreements let each trust determine its own pay and conditions, and a trust with 40 schools can set one policy across all of them.

In principle that is a large freedom. In practice, most trusts use it barely at all. Mirroring the national scale is the path of least resistance: it is what applicants expect, what recruitment adverts are written against, what unions have negotiated around for decades, and what the annual pay award arrives pre-calculated for. Deviating means building and defending your own structure every single year. Most trusts have concluded that is not worth the trouble, and adopt STPCD by choice.

What "above scale" actually means in practice

The clearest attempt to quantify this is the Tes "MAT Tracker" investigation published on 7 June 2024, which asked trusts across England whether they paid in line with the national scales or departed from them, and received 624 replies. Its headline findings are worth stating precisely, because they are routinely repeated in vaguer and more dramatic forms elsewhere.

• 12 trusts, running 271 academies between them, pay above the national pay scales — a genuinely small minority of a sector containing well over a thousand trusts.
• A further 21 trusts, running 262 academies, differentiate on individual pay points or add extra benefits rather than uplifting the whole scale.
• The uplift ranges from 0.1 per cent to 5.6 per cent above the national teacher pay points, according to Tes. United Learning sat at the top of that range at 5.6 per cent; Ark Schools at around 2.5 per cent; Durrington Multi Academy Trust and Advantage Schools at around 1 per cent.
• Some trusts add a flat allowance instead of a percentage. Harris Federation adverts, for example, quote the standard London Main Pay Range plus a separate "Harris Allowance" of roughly £1,500 to £2,000.

Put in cash terms, a 2.5 per cent uplift on a Main Pay Range salary is worth somewhere around £850 a year before tax, and even the 5.6 per cent top of the range is under £2,000 on most points. That is real and not to be dismissed — but it is smaller than the annual national pay award in most recent years, and considerably smaller than the difference between two adjacent regional pay bands on the national scale. Moving from a National to an Outer London post will almost always change your pay more than moving to an above-scale trust will.

Pay is only half the contract

A trust that sets its own pay is, by definition, also setting its own conditions — and this is where the above-scale story gets more complicated. The STPCD does not only fix salaries; it also caps directed time at 1,265 hours across 195 days a year, which is one of the few hard workload protections teachers in England have. A trust outside STPCD is not bound by that cap.

Education Uncovered ran an analysis in February 2025 making exactly this point, arguing that several well-known above-scale academy contracts deliver a lower hourly rate than the national deal once the additional contracted hours are accounted for. It calculated that a first-year teacher on one such contract earned around £20.80 an hour against roughly £25.02 nationally. The National Education Union has, on similar grounds, advised members to stay on national contracts where they have the choice. That analysis is one commentator's arithmetic on one set of assumptions, not a settled finding — but the underlying logic is sound and worth carrying into any conversation with a trust about pay.

The practical conclusion is not that above-scale trusts are bad employers. It is that "pays above national scale" is a statement about one line of a contract, and you need the rest of the contract to know what it is worth.

How to find out what a specific trust pays

There is no central register of academy trust pay policies, which is the main reason this information is so hard to pin down. Working through these sources in order will usually get you an answer.

• Live vacancies first. Adverts on Teaching Vacancies (the DfE's own free service) and Tes Jobs have to quote a real salary range, and trusts with an uplift almost always advertise it, because it is a recruitment selling point. This is the most current source available to you.
• The trust's published pay policy. Most trusts file one under governance, statutory policies or "policies and admissions" on their website. Check the review date on the front page before believing anything inside it.
• The trust's annual report and accounts. Filed publicly every year, and sometimes describes pay arrangements, staff numbers and any departure from national terms in the governance sections.
• Union branch guidance. NEU and NASUWT national and local branches often publish member guidance on specific large trusts, including where a trust's contract differs from STPCD terms. This is the source most likely to flag conditions rather than just salary.
• Ask directly, in writing, before you accept. Ask which pay scale the post sits on, whether the trust applies STPCD, what the contracted hours and directed time arrangements are, and whether the uplift applies to the Upper Pay Range as well as the Main Pay Range. None of these are awkward questions.

What changes under the 2026 Act

This whole topic has a fixed expiry date on part of it, though the exact timing is more layered than most coverage suggests. The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026. Section 59 and most of Schedule 3 commenced on 29 June 2026, which gives the Secretary of State the power to make a minimum remuneration order for academies referenced to STPCD pay ranges, and formally adds academy trusts as consultees to the School Teachers' Review Body process. A government amendment during the bill's passage confirmed that this sets a floor and not a ceiling — trusts already paying above the national scales will be able to carry on doing so, and existing above-scale contracts do not have to be unwound.

Two dates are commonly conflated and shouldn't be. The pay floor is a power from 29 June 2026, which the Department for Education has said it intends to use no earlier than September 2026 — and no order had been confirmed as made at the time of writing. Separately, a distinct duty to have regard to the whole of STPCD, including conditions such as directed time and PPA, was carved out of that June 2026 commencement and awaits its own regulations on the same "no sooner than September 2026" timetable. The commonly repeated "September 2027" date belongs to a different provision of the same Act entirely: that is when Qualified Teacher Status becomes a requirement to teach in an academy, not when the pay floor takes effect. See our full page on the Act for the complete breakdown and sourcing.

The practical effect, once an order is actually made, is that the downside risk of joining an academy — being paid below what a maintained school would offer for the same post — largely disappears, while the upside of an above-scale trust remains available. It does not, however, do anything about the conditions side of the equation, which is where the more meaningful differences between trusts actually sit.

See all 39 trusts graded in one table: the Pay Transparency Index →  ·  Compare an offer's pay per contracted hour →

Trust profiles

Individual trust profiles, covering size, pay structure against the national scale, what is genuinely verified versus uncertain, and how to check current figures yourself.

If you're weighing up a trust's financial stability more generally, see our guide on why academy trusts are making teachers redundant in 2026, which explains the sector-wide deficit picture and how to check a trust's accounts before you apply.