Council pay: the 2026/27 NJC spine is published, backdated to April
The NJC issued its signed agreement on 24 August 2026 with the uplifted Green Book pay spine attached. Council and school support staff are owed 3.3% back to 1 April.
The 3.3% Green Book award settled in August and the uplifted spine was published on 24 August 2026. Pay is backdated to 1 April 2026, so most staff are owed five months of arrears, and the circular asks employers to pay ex-employees who request it.
- Effective from
- 1 April 2026, backdated
- Who it affects
- Council and school support staff in England, Wales and Northern Ireland on the NJC Green Book
The National Joint Council issued its signed agreement on 24 August 2026 with the uplifted pay spine attached at Annex 1 and the uprated allowances at Annex 2. Pay rises 3.30 per cent and is backdated to 1 April 2026.
What the money is
The bottom of the spine, spine point 3, goes from £24,796 to £25,614 a year, which is £13.28 an hour on the standard 37-hour week. The top of the spine, point 43, goes from £54,495 to £56,293.
Spine point 2 was deleted on 1 April 2026, as agreed in the previous year’s deal, so point 3 is now the floor. Annex 1 shows it simply as “Deleted 01-Apr-26”.
Allowances move by the same 3.30 per cent. The sleeping-in duty payment is now £44.54 a night, the inner and outer fringe allowances £1,079 and £753 a year, and the social worker standby session £35.86.
The part worth acting on
The award is backdated five months. If your employer has not yet restated its scales, you are owed the difference from 1 April, not from the date they get round to it.
That extends to people who have already left, though as a recommendation rather than an entitlement: the circular says that where an ex-employee asks, employers “should pay any monies due to that employee from 1 April 2026 to the employee’s last day of employment”. So if you left a council job since April, it is worth asking, and nobody will ask on your behalf.
If you were in the Local Government Pension Scheme, arrears paid after you left also mean the employer must tell the LGPS fund. The circular’s own wording: employers “will need to amend the CARE and final pay figures (if the ex-employee has pre-April 2014 LGPS membership and / or underpin protection) accordingly”.
How it got here
The employers made a 3.30 per cent offer on 24 March 2026 and described it as full and final. All three unions rejected it. GMB members voted it down on 28 May, the employers declined to reopen negotiations on 9 June, and UNISON balloted about 200,000 members in England and Wales for industrial action.
That ballot missed the 50 per cent turnout threshold in enough large employers, and UNISON’s NJC Committee accepted on 11 August, with GMB following on 21 August. Unite did not accept. Under NJC rules the two acceptances were enough for the deal to go through.
A separate review of the spine’s structure is running alongside, on terms of reference the NJC agreed on 18 May 2026. It has not changed the spine.
What we have updated
Our NJC pay scales page now carries the 2026/27 points, parsed from Annex 1 and checked twice: against the circular’s own rule that the hourly rate is the annual salary divided by 52.143 weeks and then by 37 hours, and against the 2025 column uplifted by 3.30 per cent.
The per-authority council pages deliberately still show what each council itself has published, which for most of them is the 1 April 2025 document. Restating a named council’s pay scale using our own arithmetic would be worse than showing what it published and saying the uplift and arrears are due on top.