Teacher pay rose 3.5% on 1 September, before the STPCD is published
The classroom scale turned over on 1 September 2026. M1 outside London goes from £32,916 to £34,069. The document that normally carries the scale has not been published yet.
Teachers in England moved onto the 2026/27 scale on 1 September. The figures come from the STRB's 36th Report, accepted in full, because the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document itself has not been published yet and will be backdated when it is.
- Effective from
- 1 September 2026
- Who it affects
- Teachers and school leaders in maintained schools in England
The classroom teacher pay scale in England turned over on 1 September 2026. The award is 3.5 per cent on all pay and allowance ranges, with 5 per cent on the minimum of the unqualified teacher range outside London. The Government accepted the School Teachers’ Review Body’s recommendations in full on 1 July 2026.
The scale, outside London
| Point | 2025/26 | From 1 September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| M1 | £32,916 | £34,069 |
| M6 | £45,352 | £46,940 |
| U1 | £47,472 | £49,134 |
| U3 | £51,048 | £52,835 |
Fringe, outer London and inner London ranges all move by the same percentage.
Why we are citing a review body report and not the STPCD
The School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document is what normally carries the scale, and the 2026 edition has not been published. It will be backdated to 1 September when it is made.
So for now the increase rests on an award that has been accepted in full but not yet written into the statutory document. The figures above come from Appendix F of the STRB’s 36th Report, which is the same table the accepted recommendation refers to.
Our pages name that report rather than the STPCD, and switch to naming the STPCD automatically once it lands. A current figure printed under a superseded citation reads as though somebody checked it when they did not.
What this means in practice
The award runs from 1 September, not from the date the document appears. Whether it reaches your September payslip depends on your employer, and the backdating is what closes the gap either way.
Leadership and headteacher ranges moved too. Those were the ones most at risk of going stale here, because the figures were unpublished for a while and deriving them from the 3.5 per cent would have been our arithmetic rather than a national scale. Appendix F prints the leadership group range and all eight head teacher group ranges alongside the classroom scale, so our pages carry published figures rather than computed ones.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are separate. This is the England scale. The other nations negotiate on their own timetables and their own figures.
What we updated
The teacher pay scales page and the take-home calculator select the scale by date, so they turned over on 1 September without anyone editing them. That mattered more than it sounds: a check written for exactly this found a calculator that would have quoted last year’s salaries from 1 September, which no amount of reading the source had caught.