Police Pay Rise 2025 — What You Got

The September 2025 pay award

The pay award that took effect from 1 September 2025 is the nationally negotiated annual uplift that followed this PRRB process, and it's the award reflected in the current NPCC pay scales used throughout the calculators on this site — the Police Pay Calculator, Pay Scales, Overtime Pay Calculator, and the other tools that rely on accurate, up-to-date rank and pay point figures.

As with previous years' awards, the September 2025 uplift wasn't a single flat percentage applied uniformly to every officer regardless of rank — different ranks and different pay points within a rank received different absolute and percentage increases, reflecting the PRRB's specific recommendations for that year rather than a simple across-the-board rise. This is a normal feature of how these awards tend to work: the review body's recommendations often target particular pressure points, such as recruitment and retention at constable level, or pay progression through the more senior ranks, rather than treating pay as a single number that moves uniformly.

The practical effect for most officers is straightforward: from the point your force implemented the September 2025 award (see the note on implementation timing below), your pay moved to whichever point on the new scale corresponds to your existing rank and pay point. If you were, for example, a Constable at PP3 on the pre-award scale, the award moved you to PP3 on the new scale — it doesn't change which pay point you're on, only the amount attached to that point (progression to a higher pay point within your rank is a separate matter, generally tied to time served or an annual increment date, not to the pay award itself).

Rank-by-rank walkthrough of the new figures

Here's a walkthrough of the pay scales as they stand following the award effective 1 September 2025, covering the ranks used throughout this site's calculators.

Constable (post-2013 entrants — officers who joined from April 2013 onwards) runs across seven pay points, from PP1 up to PP7. This is the scale that applies to the great majority of serving constables today, given how long the post-2013 entry terms have now been in place.

Constable (pre-2013 entrants — officers who joined before April 2013, on the older, longer incremental scale) was restructured alongside the September 2025 award and now runs across eight pay points rather than the longer scale it used to be — PP0 on commencing service, PP1 on completion of initial training, PP2 on completion of 2 years' service, then PP3 through to PP7. Fewer officers remain on this scale each year as the pre-2013 cohort progresses through their careers or leaves the service, but it remains relevant for those officers, whose pay points and progression differ from post-2013 colleagues even at equivalent points in their careers — notably, the two scales converge at exactly the same top-of-scale figures at their respective points.

Sergeant sits on a single three-point scale, from PP2 up to PP4. There is no longer a PP1 on the sergeant scale.

Inspector runs across four pay points, from PP0 up to PP3.

Chief Inspector also runs across three pay points, from PP1 up to PP3.

Superintendent runs across six pay points, from PP1 up to PP6.

Chief Superintendent runs across five pay points, from PP1 up to PP5.

These are the base national pay figures — before any additional allowances that might apply to your specific role or location, such as a Metropolitan or South East allowance, a detective allowance, or overtime and unsocial hours payments, all of which sit on top of these core scales and are covered by their own calculators and guides on this site.

How a pay rise affects your pension contribution tier

A pay rise doesn't just change your headline salary — it can also change how much you contribute to your pension, because the Police Pension Scheme 2015 uses a tiered contribution structure based on your pensionable pay.

These tiers apply progressively to the relevant slices of your pay, similar in structure to how income tax bands work, rather than the whole of your pay suddenly being charged at a higher rate the moment you cross a threshold.

For most officers, a single annual pay award moves their pay within the same tier and doesn't change their effective contribution rate at all. But if a pay rise — whether from the national award, a promotion, or both together — pushes your pensionable pay across one of the £37,035 or £79,587 thresholds, the portion of your pay above that threshold starts attracting the higher contribution rate, while pay below the threshold continues at the lower rate. This is a genuinely useful thing to understand if you're weighing up a promotion or a pay point increase that happens to sit close to one of these thresholds, since it affects your net pay slightly differently than a simple percentage pay rise calculation might suggest. The Pension Calculator and Promotion Pay Comparison Calculator on this site both factor in these tier boundaries, which makes them a useful way to see the actual effect on your take-home pay and pension contributions side by side, rather than working it out by hand.

Why a pay rise permanently increases your pension accrual

This is one of the more valuable, but less obvious, effects of an annual pay award, and it's specific to how the Police Pension Scheme 2015 works as a career average scheme.

In a career average ("CARE") scheme, you build up a slice of pension each year based on that specific year's pensionable pay — at a rate of 1/55.3 of your pensionable pay for the year — and that slice is then locked in and revalued annually by CPI plus 1.25% for the rest of your career and into retirement. This is different from a final salary scheme, where your whole pension is calculated off your salary at (or near) retirement, meaning early-career pay rises matter less to your eventual pension than they do in a career average scheme.

The practical implication is that every pay rise, including the September 2025 award, permanently increases the amount of pension you accrue in the specific year the higher pay applies, because that year's pension accrual is calculated directly off that year's higher pensionable pay. A pay rise doesn't just give you more take-home pay this year — it also means the pension "slice" you bank for this year of service is bigger than it would have been at the old pay rate, and that bigger slice then continues to be revalued and paid out for the rest of your life once you retire. Unlike a final salary scheme, where a pay rise only really helps your pension if it happens close to retirement, a career average scheme means every single year's pay rise adds lasting value to your pension, not just to your current pay packet — which is a point worth appreciating fully when annual pay awards are announced, since the pension impact tends to get far less attention than the headline pay percentage.

What the rise means for real, inflation-adjusted pay

It's worth being straightforward about a distinction that headline pay award figures don't always make clear: the cash increase in your pay is not the same as an increase in your real, inflation-adjusted purchasing power. Whether a given pay award represents a genuine increase in living standards, a standstill, or an effective real-terms cut depends on how the percentage increase compares with inflation over the same period, most commonly measured against CPI.

This is a genuinely contested area in public sector pay discussions generally, and police pay is no exception — evidence submitted to the PRRB by different parties (the Police Federation, the NPCC, the Home Office) often disagrees, in good faith, about the right way to measure real-terms pay changes, appropriate comparator occupations, and the cumulative effect of pay awards over a run of years rather than just the most recent one in isolation. This site doesn't attempt to adjudicate that debate or tell you whether the September 2025 award, specifically, represents a real-terms increase or not for your circumstances, since that depends on prevailing inflation figures at the time, which move independently of the pay award itself and are best checked against current published CPI data rather than fixed guidance here.

What is worth doing, practically, is checking your own real-terms position over a period of a few years rather than judging any single award in isolation — comparing your pay now against your pay a few years ago, adjusted for inflation over that period, gives a much more meaningful picture of whether your living standards have kept pace than looking at one year's award alone. The Cost of Living guide elsewhere on this site, alongside the core Police Pay Calculator, can help with putting your current pay into a fuller, longer-term context.

Checking your own force's implementation date and back pay

While the pay award itself is agreed nationally, the practical administration of actually updating payroll and issuing any back pay is handled by each individual force, and this can create some genuine variation in timing between forces, even though the underlying scales are the same everywhere.

Because the award is effective from 1 September 2025, but payroll systems take time to update, it's common for forces to implement the change on payslips a little after the effective date. Exactly how the resulting back pay is calculated, and precisely when it lands, can vary between forces depending on their own payroll processing schedules and administrative arrangements.

If you want to know exactly when the September 2025 award appeared, or will appear, on your own payslip, and how any back pay is being handled, the most reliable source is your own force's HR or payroll communications, rather than assuming it's identical to another force or to a generic national timeline. Force intranets, payslip guidance, and your local Police Federation representative are all good places to check the specifics for your force. Our separate guide on how to read your police payslip can also help you make sense of exactly where a pay award and any associated back pay actually shows up once it does land, alongside your usual pension contributions, tax and National Insurance deductions.