Teacher Pay Rise 2025: The 4% Award

What was confirmed for 2025

In May 2025 the government accepted the School Teachers' Review Body's recommendation of a 4% increase for 2025/26, publishing the updated STPCD before the summer. The award applied to every range — main, upper, unqualified, lead practitioner and leadership — and to the published TLR and SEN allowance ranges. Wales adopted the same figure through its own negotiating machinery.

The decision came against a backdrop of improving but fragile recruitment: initial teacher training targets had been missed repeatedly, and unions argued that only sustained real-terms recovery would fix retention. The STRB process behind the recommendation takes evidence from all sides each spring.

The 2025/26 main pay scale in full

These were the figures on payslips until the 2026/27 award of 3.5% replaced them in September 2026. If you are reconciling an old P60 or checking backdated pay, this is the table to use for the 2025/26 school year.

Upper Pay Range and allowances in 2025/26

When the money arrived

The award was effective from 1 September 2025. Most maintained schools applied it to the September or October payslip; where payroll cut-offs fell early, the difference appeared as an arrears line later in the autumn. Teachers joining in September 2025 started directly on the new points, which is why contract offers made in the summer quoted the old scale while first payslips used the new one — a common source of confusion that year.

Supply and part-time teachers saw the same percentage flow through day rates and pro-rata salaries respectively. Agency supply rates lagged more often than school payrolls did.

How 4% compared with prices and other jobs

With CPI around the Bank of England's target through most of 2025, a 4% award delivered a modest real-terms gain — the second consecutive year of real recovery after 2022 and 2023, when inflation far outstripped pay. Combined with the previous year's 5.5%, cumulative growth since September 2023 ran well ahead of cumulative inflation over the same period, though real teacher pay remained below its early-2010s level.

Against other graduate professions the picture stayed mixed: starting salaries improved sharply because of successive M1 increases, while experienced salaries still trailed private-sector comparators in many subjects, particularly maths and physics where bursaries and external competition bite hardest. Our salary guides break the comparisons down by subject and phase.

Leadership pay in 2025/26

The same 4% applied across the 43-point leadership spine, lifting the group range in England outside London to roughly £51,524 at L1 and £143,106 at L43. Because the spine endpoints move with each award, promotion decisions made in 2025 locked in higher baselines that every subsequent award compounds. The leadership pay scale guide lists the interpolated points as they stand now.

Scotland and Northern Ireland diverged

Scottish teachers negotiated separately through the SNCT, agreeing a different settlement structure and timetable — searches for a Scottish teacher pay rise 2025 spiked precisely because the Scottish deal did not mirror England's single percentage. Northern Ireland's process ran separately again and its scale remained lower throughout. If you taught across borders in 2025/26, your reference scale depended entirely on which employing authority paid you.

Who the award covered

The STPCD binds maintained schools in England directly and applies to qualified teachers, unqualified teachers on the unqualified range, and leadership posts. Teachers employed by academy trusts were covered only where the trust's pay policy adopted the national terms — the overwhelming majority did, but a handful of trusts used their exemption to run their own structures. Sixth-form college and nursery school teachers have their separate arrangements, which is why college pay news sometimes reports different percentages in the same year.

If you were mid-year in a role change — say promoted from UPS3 to an assistant headship in January 2026 — your 2025/26 salary blended two points from different ranges, both of which had already received the 4% uplift. Reconstructing those blended years is exactly the scenario where the archived tables above earn their keep.

London weighting: regional values of the 2025 award

The same percentage applied everywhere in England and Wales, but the cash value scaled with regional weighting. For anyone comparing offers across regions in 2025/26 — or checking what they were paid against what they should have been paid — these were the anchor points.

The unqualified teacher range also rose 4%, from £22,929 to £23,731 at its lowest point and to £35,258 at the top. Higher-level teaching assistants comparing routes into teaching often used these figures as the entry benchmark for the qualified route.

Common payrise problems after September 2025

• Stuck on last year's point. The most frequent error was payroll rolling forward the 2024/25 salary unchanged. Compare your payslip against the table above and query it in writing.
• Progression refused without reasons. Schools must apply their published pay policy; a bare refusal with no reference to the policy criteria is worth challenging through the school's appeals process.
• Allowance not uplifted. If your TLR sat at a fixed value while the published range moved up around it, ask whether the governing body intended to hold your payment flat in real terms.
• Part-time pro-rata errors. Check the FTE point first, then the fraction of hours; mistakes compound when both change in the same September.

What replaced the 2025 award

From 1 September 2026 the 3.5% uplift superseded every figure on this page, and the settlement was packaged as a two-year deal covering 2027/28 as well. If you are planning forward, work from the current scale rather than these archived numbers — but keep the 2025/26 table handy for P60 checks, mortgage applications referencing prior years, and any backpay disputes that reach back into last year. Payroll teams occasionally need written evidence of historic scale values, and citing the STPCD directly settles most queries in one email. Keep a copy of your September 2025 contract letter alongside it, since that document fixes which pay point you were appointed to.