Detective and CID Allowance

Typical amounts and why they vary

Detective allowance rates typically fall somewhere between £1,200 and £2,400 a year, though where any individual officer sits within that range, or indeed whether their force pays a detective allowance at all and at what level, depends entirely on local force policy. There is no single national rate that applies uniformly across England and Wales.

This might seem like an odd gap for what feels like a fairly standard, well-established role, but it reflects a broader pattern in policing pay: while basic salary scales for each rank are set nationally and apply consistently across forces, a range of allowances — location allowances, specialist skills payments, and the detective allowance among them — are negotiated or set at force level, reflecting local recruitment pressures, budget position, and workforce planning priorities. A force struggling to recruit or retain detectives might set a higher allowance to help address the shortfall; a force with a healthier detective workforce might set a lower one, or structure it differently, for instance with a higher rate for accredited PIP2 detectives than for those still working towards accreditation.

If you're an officer already in, or considering moving into, a detective or investigative role, the only way to know your actual figure is to check your own force's current policy — through your line manager, force intranet, or Police Federation representative — rather than assuming a headline figure from general guidance applies to you. This is also worth checking again if you transfer forces, since a detective allowance you're used to receiving at one force may be set at a different level, or structured differently, at another.

Fully pensionable — unlike overtime

One of the most important features of the detective allowance, and one that's easy to overlook, is that it's fully pensionable. That puts it in a genuinely different category from overtime pay, which is not pensionable under PPS 2015 at all, however much of it you work.

Being pensionable means the whole detective allowance counts as pensionable pay for PPS 2015 purposes. It's added to your basic salary (and any other pensionable elements, such as the pensionable portion of a location allowance where applicable) to arrive at your total pensionable pay for the scheme year, and that combined figure is what determines both your annual pension accrual and which contribution tier you fall into.

The practical effect is that a detective allowance genuinely builds your pension, year after year, for as long as you're in a role that attracts it — unlike overtime, where working extra hours boosts your take-home pay in the short term but does nothing at all for your long-term retirement income. If you're weighing up a move into a detective role partly on financial grounds, it's worth factoring in this pension benefit alongside the immediate cash value of the allowance, because over a full career the accumulated, revalued pension accrual from a pensionable allowance can be worth considerably more than the simple annual cash figure suggests.

Of course, the allowance is also taxed and subject to National Insurance exactly like ordinary salary — there's no special tax treatment or exemption for it. It simply gets added to your gross pay for the period and taxed through PAYE in the normal way, the same as your basic salary.

Worked example: how a pensionable allowance can nudge you into a higher tier

This is the part of the detective allowance that catches some officers by surprise, so it's worth working through carefully with real numbers. PPS 2015 contribution rates are tiered, not flat, as the table below shows.

Let's take a concrete example. Suppose a constable's basic pensionable pay for the year is £36,200 — comfortably within the 12.88% tier, below the £37,035 threshold. At 12.88%, their annual contribution would be:

£36,200 × 12.88% = £4,662.56

Now suppose this same officer moves into a designated detective role and starts receiving a detective allowance of £1,200 a year, fully pensionable. Their total pensionable pay for the year becomes £36,200 + £1,200 = £37,400 — which is now above the £37,035 threshold, putting their entire pensionable pay into the 13.88% tier rather than the 12.88% tier:

£37,400 × 13.88% = £5,190.12

That's an increase in annual contributions of £527.56 — noticeably more than you might expect just from the extra £1,200 of pay, because the higher rate now applies to the whole £37,400, not merely the £365 that sits above the threshold. In this example, the officer's net gain from the allowance, after the higher pension contribution (though before tax and NI, which apply to both scenarios anyway), is still positive — an extra £1,200 of gross pay against an extra £527.56 of pension contribution leaves them better off overall, and their pension accrual has also increased. But the jump in contribution rate is real, and worth understanding, rather than being an unwelcome surprise on a payslip.

This effect is most pronounced for officers whose pensionable pay sits close to a tier boundary before the allowance is added. An officer already well within a tier, with plenty of headroom before the next threshold, would see the allowance simply added at their existing contribution rate, with no tier change at all. If you want to check where you'd land, the Pension Calculator on this site lets you model your own pensionable pay, with and without an allowance, to see exactly how it affects your contribution tier.

How the allowance is taxed as normal income

There's nothing exotic about how HMRC treats the detective allowance. It's simply added to your other taxable pay for the period — basic salary, any other allowances, and anything else that counts as earnings — and income tax is calculated on the combined total through PAYE, using your tax code in the normal way. If the allowance, combined with your other pay, pushes part of your income into a higher income tax band, that portion is taxed at the higher rate, exactly as it would be for any other pay rise.

The same applies to Class 1 National Insurance, which is calculated on your gross pay including the allowance, using the current NI thresholds and rates. There's no NI exemption or reduced rate for allowances of this kind.

Because both tax and NI are calculated on gross pay before any pension contribution is deducted, it's worth remembering that your pension contribution (deducted after gross pay is calculated but before your final net pay) reduces your taxable income for income tax purposes, since pension contributions are typically deducted on a net pay or salary sacrifice basis depending on your force's payroll arrangement — meaning you get some tax relief on the contribution itself, though this doesn't offset the point above about a higher allowance potentially pushing you into a higher pension contribution tier. If you want an accurate, all-in figure for your own take-home pay including a detective allowance, the Police Pay Calculator on this site handles the interaction between allowance, tax, National Insurance and pension tier automatically.

Eligibility and qualifying routes: PIP2 and investigative accreditation

Eligibility for the detective allowance is generally tied to holding a formally designated detective or investigative post, rather than simply expressing an interest in investigative work or occasionally assisting CID. Most forces link this to the national Professionalising Investigation Programme (PIP) framework, under which officers progress through defined levels of investigative accreditation as they take on more complex casework.

PIP Level 2 (PIP2) accreditation is the level most closely associated with core CID detective roles, covering serious and complex investigations, and completing it typically involves a structured combination of training, supervised casework, and formal assessment against national standards. Many forces require an officer to have completed, or be actively working towards, PIP2 accreditation before the detective allowance becomes payable, though the exact qualifying route, any interim arrangements for officers still completing accreditation, and the precise timing of when the allowance starts are all matters of local force policy rather than a single national rule.

Some forces pay a reduced or trainee-level allowance to officers who are in a detective role but haven't yet completed full accreditation, moving to the full rate once PIP2 is achieved; others structure it differently. Because this varies by force, an officer considering a move into CID, or newly posted into a detective role, should check directly with their force's professional standards or CID management structure to understand exactly when the allowance becomes payable and at what rate, rather than assuming it starts from day one in role.

Why the exact amount varies by force, and what to do about it

It's worth stepping back and being honest about why guidance like this can only take you so far on the specifics. The detective allowance, like several other allowances in policing, is negotiated and set at force level rather than nationally, which means the figure that applies to a detective constable in one force can genuinely be different from the figure that applies to an equivalent officer in a neighbouring force, even though both are doing broadly similar work.

This isn't an oversight or an inconsistency to be frustrated by so much as a reflection of how police pay in England and Wales is structured more broadly: national scales for basic rank-based pay, with a layer of locally-set allowances on top to address local recruitment, retention and operational priorities. It gives forces some flexibility to respond to their own circumstances, but it does mean officers need to actively check their own force's policy rather than relying on a single figure that applies everywhere.

If you're trying to work out your own position — whether you're already in a detective role and want to check you're being paid correctly, or you're weighing up whether to pursue investigative accreditation and a move into CID — the practical steps are the same: check your force's current published pay and allowances policy (often available via the force intranet or HR), speak to your line manager or a serving detective colleague about the current local rate and qualifying route, and contact your Police Federation representative if you have any doubt about what you should be receiving. Once you know your actual figure, the Detective Allowance Calculator and Pension Calculator on this site can help you see exactly how it affects your take-home pay and your pension contribution tier, using your real numbers rather than a generic example.