London and South East Allowances

The Met's £9,738: why it's split into two parts

Metropolitan Police officers receive a total location allowance of £9,738 a year. Unlike most pay elements, which are a single figure, this is deliberately split into two separate components that are treated differently for pension purposes.

Together they add up to the full £9,738, and in terms of your monthly take-home pay, the split makes no difference at all — both parts are added to your gross pay, taxed as normal income, and subject to National Insurance in exactly the same way as your basic salary. If you only ever looked at your payslip's net pay figure, you wouldn't be able to tell the two parts apart.

Where the split matters is your pension. Pensionable pay is the figure PPS 2015 uses to calculate both how much pension you accrue each year and which contribution tier you sit in. Because only £3,150 of the Met allowance counts as pensionable pay, that's the only part of the £9,738 that increases your annual pension accrual or affects your contribution tier. The remaining £6,588, despite being real money in your pocket every month, is invisible to the pension scheme entirely.

Why structure it this way at all, rather than just paying £9,738 as one pensionable figure, or one non-pensionable figure? The honest answer is cost control over the long term. Pensionable pay doesn't just affect your own pension — it's the base the employer's 35.3% contribution is calculated against too, and it permanently increases the value of the benefit being promised for as long as you serve in a role that attracts the allowance. Making the whole £9,738 pensionable would substantially increase the long-term cost of running the pension scheme for every Met officer, every year, indefinitely. By pensionising only part of the allowance, the arrangement compensates officers for London's cost of living in full, in cash terms, while limiting how much that compensation permanently inflates the pension scheme's long-term liabilities. It's a compromise that's existed in various forms for a long time, reflecting the tension between rewarding officers fairly now and controlling what the scheme costs to run for decades to come.

Worked example: what the pensionable £3,150 is actually worth

It helps to see the pension impact in real numbers rather than just in principle. Under PPS 2015, every year of pensionable pay earns you an accrual of 1/55.3 of that pay, added as a permanent slice to your career average pension, then revalued by CPI+1.25% every year after that.

Take the £3,150 pensionable portion of the Met allowance on its own, in isolation from your basic salary:

£3,150 ÷ 55.3 = £56.96

So in a single scheme year, the pensionable part of your London allowance alone adds about £57 to your annual pension. That might sound modest, but remember this happens every single year you're serving in an eligible Met role, and each year's £57 slice gets its own CPI+1.25% revaluation from the year it's earned right through to retirement. Over a 25-year career in the Met, those slices — each one earned in a different year, each one revalued for a different number of years — add up to a meaningful, permanent uplift to your total pension that you wouldn't get if you'd served the same career in a force with no pensionable location allowance at all.

Now compare that with the £6,588 non-pensionable portion. However long you serve, however many years you receive it, it contributes precisely £0 to your pension accrual. It's not that it's taxed differently or capped — it simply never enters the pension calculation. Two officers on identical basic salaries in the Met, both receiving the full £9,738 allowance, will see identical numbers on their payslip each month, but only £3,150 of that figure is doing anything for their pension. This is exactly why it's worth understanding the split, rather than treating the Met allowance as one undifferentiated £9,738 top-up — the number on your payslip and the number that matters for your pension are genuinely different figures.

South East allowance: smaller, but structured differently

A number of forces in the South East of England, generally covering the home counties around London, pay a location allowance of their own to help with recruitment and retention in an area that, while not as expensive as inner London, is still notably pricier than much of the rest of the country. This allowance is typically smaller than the Met's, often in the region of £3,000 a year, though the exact figure can vary between forces and over time.

The key structural difference is that the South East allowance is usually paid as a single, fully pensionable amount, rather than being split into pensionable and non-pensionable portions the way the Met's is. That means the whole allowance counts towards your pensionable pay for PPS 2015 purposes — every pound of it feeds into your annual accrual and, where relevant, your contribution tier.

Putting the two side by side: a South East officer receiving £3,000, fully pensionable, gets an annual pension accrual boost from their allowance of £3,000 ÷ 55.3 = £54.25 — genuinely comparable to the £56.96 boost a Met officer gets from their much larger £9,738 allowance, because only the Met's £3,150 pensionable slice actually counts. The Met officer is significantly better off in cash terms, receiving well over three times as much money overall, but the pension benefit from the allowance itself is broadly similar between the two, because the Met's non-pensionable £6,588 simply doesn't contribute to either officer's pension calculation.

This is a useful illustration of why comparing location allowances purely by headline figure can be misleading. £9,738 sounds far more generous than £3,000, and in terms of monthly take-home pay it genuinely is — but the gap in long-term pension value between the two allowances is much narrower than the cash figures alone would suggest. As with all force-specific figures, exact rates and structures can vary and change, so officers in or moving to a South East force should confirm the current confirmed rate with their own force rather than assuming the figure quoted here applies exactly.

How these allowances are taxed and NI'd

It's worth being unambiguous about this, because the pensionable/non-pensionable distinction sometimes gets confused with tax treatment, and the two are entirely separate things. Both the pensionable and non-pensionable parts of any location allowance — Met or South East — are treated identically for tax and National Insurance purposes. There is no special tax exemption, reduced NI rate, or other favourable treatment for either part.

In practice, your location allowance is simply added to your basic salary to arrive at your total gross pay for the period, and income tax and Class 1 National Insurance are calculated on that combined figure in the normal way, using your tax code and the current NI thresholds and rates, exactly as they would be for basic salary alone. If a portion of your allowance pushes part of your income into a higher income tax band, that portion is taxed at the higher rate, the same as any other pay would be.

Pensionable status only ever affects one thing: whether that portion of your pay is fed into the PPS 2015 pension calculation, which determines your annual accrual and which contribution tier you sit in for pension purposes. It has no bearing whatsoever on your income tax or National Insurance liability. If you're trying to work out your actual take-home pay including a location allowance, the Police Pay Calculator and the Location & Met Allowance Calculator on this site apply the correct tax and NI treatment automatically, so you don't need to work through the bands manually.

Comparing take-home impact across a few example ranks

To make the effect of the Met allowance more concrete, it's useful to look at how it lands on a few different salaries. Because the allowance is a flat cash amount rather than a percentage, it makes a bigger relative difference to lower earners than to higher earners, even though everyone gets the same £9,738.

For an officer on the lower end of the scale, the allowance isn't a minor top-up; it's a substantial part of their total income, and a meaningful part of what makes serving in London financially workable at that career stage. Further up the scale the increase is still significant, but proportionally smaller, simply because the allowance is a fixed amount being added to a larger base.

The cash amount is identical at every rank — £9,738 is £9,738 whether you're a new constable or a chief superintendent — but its proportional impact on total pay steadily shrinks as basic salary rises. This is a natural consequence of any flat-rate allowance sitting alongside a pay scale that varies by rank, and it's one reason the allowance is felt most acutely, in percentage terms, by newer and lower-paid officers, even though every eligible officer in the Met receives the same amount.

Moving forces: why you need to check the destination allowance

Officers transfer between forces for all sorts of reasons — promotion opportunities, family circumstances, a preference for a different type of policing, or simply wanting a change of scene. Whatever the reason, if a location allowance is currently part of your pay, moving forces is one of the biggest single changes you can make to your total package, and it's easy to underestimate by how much.

An officer transferring out of the Met to a force with no location allowance at all loses the full £9,738 immediately, with no transition period or tapering — the allowance is tied to being posted to an eligible role in an eligible force, not to length of prior service. That's a substantial pay cut in cash terms, even before considering the loss of pension accrual from the £3,150 pensionable portion, which stops building up from the point you leave.

The reverse is also true: an officer moving into the Met from a force with no location allowance, or a smaller one, will see a significant increase in gross pay, but should factor in London's higher cost of living, particularly housing, rather than assuming the allowance represents pure extra disposable income.

Because rates, eligibility rules, and even the pensionable/non-pensionable structure of location allowances can and do change over time, and can differ between forces in ways not fully captured by general guidance like this, confirming the exact current figures with the force itself is worth the extra step. The Location & Met Allowance Calculator on this site is a good starting point for modelling different scenarios, but for a decision as significant as a force transfer, that shouldn't replace a direct check with the receiving force.