Teacher Pay Rise 2026: What the 3.5% Award Is Worth

The School Teachers’ Review Body recommended it in July. The Government accepted it the same month. Now, as the autumn term gets underway, the 3.5% pay award for September 2026 is working its way into teachers’ actual pay packets, with the final School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document expected from the Department for Education in mid-October. A further 3% is already locked in for September 2027, and an indicative 3% for September 2028.

Most coverage of teacher pay stops at the headline percentage. This piece goes further: the actual pay scale figures from the official report, how they compare with what ONS data says teachers in England are really paid, and an honest answer to the question everyone asks after a pay rise - has it actually kept up with prices?

The headline numbers: 3.5%, then 3%, then 3%

The School Teachers’ Review Body’s 36th Report, presented to Parliament in July 2026 and chaired by Dr Mike Aldred, recommends:

The STRB puts the three years together at 9.8% cumulative. The unqualified-teacher pay minimum outside London gets a bigger bump - 5% rather than 3.5% in 2026 - specifically so it doesn’t fall below the National Living Wage, which rises to £12.71 an hour in April 2026. The Government confirmed it had accepted the recommendations in a written ministerial statement on 1 July 2026.

What it’s actually worth, in pounds

Percentages are easy to publish and hard to picture. Here is what the award means on the main classroom teacher pay scale outside London, from the STRB report’s own pay tables:

Inner London runs higher throughout: a newly qualified teacher there starts on £41,729 from September 2026, and the upper pay range tops out at £64,684. The full set of pay points, allowances and head teacher bands for all four pay areas is in Appendix F of the STRB report.

Two things stand out. First, the gap between a new teacher’s starting salary and the top of the main pay range - before any leadership responsibility - is about £12,870 outside London (£34,069 to £46,940). Second, moving from classroom teaching into school leadership is where the real jump happens: even the smallest head teacher band tops out above the maximum a classroom teacher can earn without a leadership or leading-practitioner role.

How this lines up with what ONS says teachers actually earn

The pay scale tells you what schools are required to pay. ONS’s Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) tells you what the whole profession - new teachers, long-serving teachers, part-timers, everyone - actually took home. The two numbers measure different things, and comparing them is informative.

ASHE 2025 (April 2025 pay, the most recent year published) put the full-time median for secondary education teaching professionals at £47,632 and primary education teaching professionals at £45,939 - both sitting close to the top of the main pay range shown above, which fits a profession where most full-timers have several years’ experience. Head teachers and principals had a full-time median of £72,192, within the Band 1-2 range the STRB sets for September 2026. Teaching assistants, who are not covered by the STRB award at all, had a full-time median of just £21,239.

Against that spread, teaching sits in the same band as nursing and below law, software development and accountancy - a pattern the 2026 and 2027 awards narrow slightly but don’t close. The full occupation index has all 412 ONS occupations on the same basis if you want to compare your own field.

One important caveat on timing: these are 2025 figures, measuring pay as it stood in April 2025 - before even last year’s award, let alone this one. ASHE 2026, due 22 October 2026, will still reflect April 2026 pay, which is still before the 1 September 2026 award reaches most payslips. The first ONS data to properly capture this award’s effect will be ASHE 2027, not published until around October 2027. If you want to know what a teacher is paid today, the STRB’s own pay scale above is a better guide than ASHE for another year.

Has teacher pay kept up with prices?

Nobody can answer that for 2026 and 2027 yet - the data doesn’t exist. But CareerMetrics’ analysis of a full decade of ASHE data found secondary teachers’ pay rose 27.0% in cash terms between 2015 and 2025, but fell 7.8% once inflation is stripped out. That decade’s 165-occupation sample had a median real-terms change of roughly flat (the typical occupation’s pay rose 36.5% against 37.8% CPIH inflation), so secondary teachers’ decade was noticeably worse than the typical occupation’s, not just behind prices in isolation.

The STRB itself is candid about what the new award is and isn’t meant to do. Its report says the recommended increases are designed to “maintain competitiveness, provide certainty, and align with forecast earnings growth and the wider economic outlook” - which is a world away from promising to reverse a decade of real-terms decline. Whether 9.8% over three years outpaces prices depends entirely on inflation over that period, which nobody - the STRB included - is forecasting with any confidence this far out.

What this means if you’re in or considering teaching

• If you’re already teaching, the pay points above are what you’re entitled to from 1 September 2026, regardless of when your school’s payroll catches up and backdates it. Check which spine point and pay area you’re on against the STRB’s Appendix F.
• If you’re weighing teaching against another graduate career, the comparison table above uses the same ONS methodology CareerMetrics applies to all 412 occupations - a fairer basis than comparing a teaching salary advert against another job’s headline figure. Where Do I Stand? benchmarks any specific salary against real ONS data for the job and region.
• If you’re mapping out the full career, not just this year’s payslip, Salary Forecast and Lifetime Earnings project a career’s trajectory from new teacher through to leadership, rather than a single year’s award.
• For the wider public-sector pay picture, see our analysis of public sector pay growth, and for how frozen tax thresholds affect this and other pay rises, see fiscal drag and the Autumn Budget.

Sources: School Teachers’ Review Body, “Thirty-Sixth Report 2026”, presented to Parliament July 2026 (pay recommendations, Appendix F pay tables, National Living Wage reference). Government acceptance: written ministerial statement, 1 July 2026. Publication page: GOV.UK, “School Teachers’ Review Body 36th Report: 2026”. STPCD implementation timing: Department for Education, The Education Hub, “Teacher pay: everything you need to know about the latest multi-year pay award”, published 16 September 2026. Occupation pay: ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025, as held in the CareerMetrics occupation dataset (ASHE Table 14.7a). Decade and real-terms figures: UK Salary Growth by Career, 2015-2025. Next ASHE release: Employee earnings in the UK: 2026, provisional release date 22 October 2026. Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0.