Teachers in England Get 3.5% Pay Rise: What It Means for Your Salary and School Budgets

After months of uncertainty, heated union negotiations, and warnings of potential strike action, the government has confirmed that teachers in England will receive a 3.5% pay rise from September 2026, followed by a further 3% the following year. For many in the profession, the announcement will come as a modest relief after years of watching their real-terms pay erode. But the reaction from teaching unions has been far from celebratory, and the financial mechanics behind the offer mean this is a considerably more complicated story than a simple wage increase.

If you want to get straight to the numbers and see exactly how this pay rise affects different teaching grades, our updated teacher pay calculator and breakdown has been refreshed to reflect the new figures and helps you work out what the change means for your take-home pay.

What the Government Has Actually Announced

The Department for Education confirmed the multi-year pay deal alongside an additional £1.8 billion in funding for schools. According to the official government announcement, the award covers both classroom teachers and school leaders, with the aim of making the profession more attractive and addressing long-standing recruitment and retention challenges.

There is, however, a significant caveat baked into the deal. Schools will be expected to fund the first 1% of each annual rise from their existing budgets, with the government covering the remainder. In practical terms, this means headteachers and school business managers will need to find additional money from budgets that are already stretched thin. As Schools Week reported in its analysis of the partially funded settlement, the arrangement puts considerable pressure on individual schools to absorb costs that many feel should be centrally funded.

The Department for Education has also moved to cap the pay of senior leaders in academy trusts. From September, any role advertised with a salary above £174,000 will require government approval, and trust executives will not be permitted to receive higher percentage pay rises than classroom teachers. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson framed this as a matter of fairness, stating that teachers should not see executive pay rising faster than their own salaries. The move has nonetheless drawn criticism from the Confederation of School Trusts, whose chief executive Leora Cruddas described the new rules as "the latest example of micromanagement from Whitehall".

How Does This Pay Rise Compare to Recent Years?

To understand why reactions to this announcement have been so mixed, it helps to look at where teacher pay has been over the past decade and a half. The figures paint a sobering picture.

Research fellow Luke Sibieta at the Institute for Fiscal Studies has noted that even with this new award, salary levels for most teachers in 2027 to 2028 are expected to remain around 7% lower in real terms than they were back in 2010 to 2011. Starting salaries are forecast to be roughly 2% higher than 2010 levels, which represents a somewhat better picture for early-career teachers but still highlights the significant ground that has been lost across the profession as a whole.

For context, here is how recent pay awards have stacked up:

The trajectory is clearly downward in terms of the size of annual awards, even as inflation remains a concern. UK inflation stood at 2.8% in the year to May 2025, which means the 3.5% offer does represent a modest real-terms increase for this coming year. However, inflation is widely expected to rise further, and the 3% offer for 2027 could easily fall below the rate of price increases depending on how economic conditions develop. You can view the current pay scales for teachers in England to see exactly where your grade sits within the existing framework.

Why the Unions Are Not Satisfied

Given the context of years of real-terms pay cuts, it is perhaps unsurprising that the National Education Union, the largest teaching union in England, has not welcomed this announcement with open arms. Daniel Kebede, the NEU's general secretary, was direct in his assessment, describing the rise as "not the decisive shift" the profession needed. His central concern is not just the headline percentage but the partially funded nature of the deal.

When schools are required to find 1% of the total cost from their own budgets, that money has to come from somewhere. As Kebede put it, "a partially funded settlement still means cuts to education." Whether that translates into fewer teaching assistants, reduced resources, or other cutbacks will vary from school to school, but the concern is genuine and widely shared across the sector.

The NEU had already warned earlier this year that it would consider a formal ballot for industrial action if the government did not substantially improve its initial pay proposal. Following the announcement, the union said it was "considering all options," with the national executive due to meet to decide on next steps. An informal indicative ballot conducted earlier in 2025, with a turnout of 48.6%, found that 90.5% of participating NEU members said they would be prepared to take industrial action. That is a significant number, and it means the prospect of strikes has not been taken off the table.

Other unions echoed similar concerns. Matt Wrack of the NASUWT stated plainly that teachers "should not have to foot the bill for their own pay award through cuts to the education service," while Paul Whiteman of the NAHT acknowledged it was "another step in the right direction" but warned about the pressure on school budgets, particularly if inflation rises unexpectedly.

The Wellbeing Problem That Pay Alone Cannot Solve

One of the most striking contributions to the public debate around this announcement came not from a union official but from a former teacher. Jessica Featonby, who left primary school teaching to found an education technology company, made the point that higher salaries are part of the answer to recruitment and retention challenges but are far from the whole story.

Her account of working early mornings, evenings, weekends and school holidays, well beyond contracted hours, will resonate with many current teachers. "If I came at 8:30am and left at 3:30pm, there would be so much question around my commitment to the job," she told the BBC, illustrating a workplace culture where hours beyond the job description have become an informal expectation rather than an exception.

This speaks to something important about the structural challenges facing teaching as a profession. Pay is a critical factor, and years of below-inflation awards have undoubtedly pushed talented people out of classrooms and deterred others from entering. But workload, wellbeing and professional culture are equally significant drivers of the retention crisis, and a pay award, however generous, cannot address those issues on its own. For teachers thinking about their broader financial picture, it is also worth understanding how recent budgetary decisions affect the profession more widely, from tax thresholds to pension contributions.

What This Means for School Budgets and the Wider Picture

The announcement also included an additional £485 million over two years for further education colleges, which the Association of Colleges welcomed as "very positive" while noting that college pay continues to lag significantly behind both schools and industry. That gap represents another dimension of the funding challenge across the education sector as a whole.

For schools specifically, the financial arithmetic over the next two years will require careful management. The DfE has acknowledged that the first year of the settlement will be "considerably more challenging in financial terms" for schools, with around £250 million available in existing school budgets to offset costs in 2026 to 2027, rising to around £750 million in 2027 to 2028. Headteachers and governors will need to plan carefully, and for many the trade-offs will be difficult.

Understanding the broader context of UK fiscal policy in 2025 helps to situate this announcement within the government's wider approach to public spending, where departments are being asked to do more with constrained resources even as pay pressures across the public sector remain significant.

Building on all of this, the picture that emerges is one of an offer that represents genuine progress on paper but comes with enough strings attached to leave many in the profession feeling that the underlying problems remain unresolved. Teachers in England will see their salaries increase from September, and that is unambiguously a positive development after years of real-terms decline. Whether it is enough to stem the flow of experienced teachers leaving the profession, attract new entrants in sufficient numbers, and avoid further industrial action remains an open and genuinely uncertain question. The coming months, and the decisions taken by the NEU's national executive, will tell us considerably more about where this story heads next.