Location & Met Allowance Calculator

The Met allowance: two payments in one figure

The total Metropolitan Police location allowance is £9,738 a year, but this is not a single uniform payment — it is made up of two separate components with different treatment, shown below. The pensionable component counts as part of your pensionable pay for PPS 2015 purposes: it goes into the CARE accrual calculation and it counts towards the pension contribution tier your total pensionable pay falls into. The non-pensionable component never enters the pension calculation at all, either for accrual or for contribution purposes.

Both components are treated identically for tax and National Insurance purposes: both are simply added to your gross pay and taxed at your marginal rate, with National Insurance applied in the usual way (8% between the primary threshold and the upper earnings limit, 2% above).

Worked example: the pension accrual difference over a career

To see why the pensionable/non-pensionable split matters in real terms, it helps to work through the numbers. Suppose a constable has a base salary of £40,000 and receives the full Met allowance of £9,738. Their total gross pay for the year is £49,738. But for pension purposes, only the base salary plus the pensionable London Weighting counts: £40,000 + £3,150 = £43,150 in pensionable pay. The £6,588 London Allowance simply does not appear in the pension calculation at all.

Their annual CARE pension accrual for that year is 1/55.3 × £43,150 = approximately £780. Had the full £9,738 been pensionable, their pensionable pay would have been £49,738, giving an accrual of 1/55.3 × £49,738 = approximately £899 — a difference of around £119 of additional annual pension for that single year alone. Over a 25-year career at broadly similar relative pay levels, that gap compounds year after year, with each year's shortfall also missing out on the CPI+1.25% revaluation that would otherwise have applied to it. It is a meaningful, cumulative difference, even though it arises from money the officer receives and is taxed on every single month regardless.

The pensionable London Weighting also affects which contribution tier applies. In this example, pensionable pay of £43,150 sits in the 13.88% tier (£37,035–£79,587), so the contribution is 13.88% of £43,150, roughly £5,989 for the year. Had the base salary alone (£40,000) been used, the officer would still fall in the same 13.88% tier, so in this particular case the pensionable allowance does not push them into a new tier — but for an officer whose base salary sits close to the £37,035 boundary, adding even the £3,150 pensionable portion of the Met allowance could be enough to tip their whole pensionable pay into the higher 13.88% tier, increasing the contribution rate applied to the base salary as well as the allowance. This calculator models that interaction so you can see your own figures rather than relying on a general rule of thumb.

South East allowance: simpler, smaller, but fully pensionable

Forces in the South East of England — outside the Metropolitan Police area but still within the London commuter belt, where housing costs remain well above the national average — typically pay a South East allowance of around £3,000 a year. Some forces set their own precise figure, so it is worth checking your specific force's current rate, but £3,000 is a reasonable representative figure for modelling purposes.

Unlike the Met allowance, the South East allowance is usually paid as a single, fully pensionable amount, without the split into pensionable and non-pensionable components. That makes the pension arithmetic considerably simpler: the whole allowance adds directly to pensionable pay, contributing fully to both CARE accrual and, where relevant, pushing pensionable pay towards or across a contribution tier boundary. In cash terms it is a smaller allowance than the Met's £9,738, but pound for pound it delivers more pension value, because none of it is excluded from the pension calculation the way £6,588 of the Met allowance is.

This is a genuinely useful comparison to run through the calculator: entering the same base salary with the Met allowance versus the South East allowance shows that while the Met package delivers substantially more cash in hand, the pension value gap between the two is proportionally smaller than the cash gap, because a much higher fraction of the South East allowance converts into pension.

How both allowances are taxed and NI'd

It bears repeating clearly because it is easy to lose track of amid the pensionable/non-pensionable distinction: every part of both allowances — the pensionable London Weighting, the non-pensionable London Allowance, and the South East allowance — is added to your gross salary and taxed exactly like any other part of your pay. There is no special tax treatment, no exemption, and no separate NI category. If a location allowance pushes your total gross income for the year above £50,270, the portion above that threshold is taxed at the higher 40% rate and NI drops to 2% on that portion, in exactly the same way as if that income had come from a higher base salary or from overtime. Officers close to the £100,000 threshold should also be aware that the personal allowance itself begins to taper down above that point, though this affects relatively few officers in practice. The pensionable/non-pensionable distinction is purely a pension-scheme rule about which pounds count towards your CARE accrual and contribution tier — it has no bearing whatsoever on your income tax or National Insurance bill.

Why a force transfer can change your package more than it looks

Because location allowances sit on top of the national pay scale rather than replacing part of it, an officer's base pay point on the scale can look identical before and after a move between forces, while the real value of their total package changes substantially. An officer transferring from a South East force into the Met, staying on the same rank and pay point, would typically see their location allowance jump from around £3,000 (fully pensionable) to £9,738 (split £3,150 pensionable, £6,588 non-pensionable) — a significant cash increase, but a smaller proportional increase in pension value than the cash figures alone suggest, because a large slice of the extra allowance falls outside the pension calculation.

The reverse move — from the Met to a South East or non-London force — sees the officer lose the allowance altogether in favour of a smaller one, or in some cases lose it entirely if moving further afield, while their pensionable pay (and therefore pension contribution and accrual) falls by a correspondingly smaller amount, because a large part of what they are giving up was never pensionable in the first place. Officers weighing a transfer purely by comparing headline salary and allowance figures can therefore end up with a misleading picture of the real change to their long-term pension position.

Modelling a transfer to or from London

The most reliable way to understand the real financial effect of a transfer is to run both scenarios through this calculator with your actual base salary at each force (checking whether the destination force's pay point differs from your current one, since not all forces align exactly on the national scale structure) and compare four figures side by side: total gross pay, net take-home pay after tax and NI, pension contribution for the year, and annual pension accrual. Do not stop at comparing gross salary or total allowance alone, since neither figure on its own tells you what is happening to your net income or your pension.

It is also worth factoring in that the cost of living difference this allowance is meant to offset is real and substantial — London housing costs, in particular, are typically far higher than the allowance differential alone would suggest, so officers considering a move to London for the pay uplift should weigh the allowance increase against realistic housing and commuting cost estimates for the area they would be moving to, not just the pay figures in isolation. Equally, an officer considering leaving London for a lower cost-of-living area should weigh the allowance reduction against the corresponding fall in living costs, which for many officers more than offsets the smaller allowance. This calculator is designed to isolate the pay and pension side of that decision clearly, so that it can be combined with your own judgement about housing, commuting, and personal circumstances to reach a fully informed view.

Allowances and pay progression over a full career

Because location allowances are added on top of your base salary rather than folded into it, they behave differently to a normal incremental pay rise as your career progresses. A pay point increase from moving up the national scale, or a promotion, permanently raises your base pensionable salary and every subsequent year's accrual is calculated against that higher figure. A location allowance, by contrast, only applies for as long as you remain eligible for it — typically for as long as you are posted to a force or area that attracts it. An officer who spends part of a career in the Met and later transfers to a force outside London, or outside the South East, loses the allowance from that point onwards, and their pensionable pay (and future accrual) reverts to whatever their base salary alone supports.

This means the pension benefit of a location allowance is very much tied to how many years you spend receiving it. An officer who spends their entire career in the Met accrues the benefit of the pensionable London Weighting portion across every one of those years, compounding through CPI+1.25% revaluation, whereas an officer who spends only a few years there before transferring elsewhere banks a correspondingly smaller cumulative benefit. This is a useful thing to model if you are weighing up the long-term career implications of a period spent in a higher-allowance force versus staying in a lower cost-of-living area for the whole of your service — the right answer depends heavily on how long you expect to remain in the higher-allowance role, not just the allowance figure for a single year.

Using this calculator alongside other tools on this site

Because location allowances interact with tax bands, National Insurance thresholds, and pension contribution tiers in ways that are not always intuitive, it is worth combining this calculator with the main Police Pay Calculator and, where relevant, the Detective Allowance Calculator if you also receive a detective allowance, since the two can combine to push pensionable pay across a tier boundary in ways that assessing either allowance alone would not reveal. Entering your full package — base salary, location allowance, and any other pensionable additions — into the main calculator gives the most complete and accurate picture of your total tax, National Insurance, and pension position for the year, which is the figure that ultimately matters for both your monthly budgeting and your long-term retirement planning.