If you sit on an academy trust board or lead an executive team, the rules on executive pay changed on 1 October 2026 and you need to understand what they require of you. The Academy Trust Handbook 2026 (ATH) is now in force, and executive pay setting is one of its most significant areas of change.

The DfE has explained that:

From 1 October 2026, for new appointments within academy trusts where remuneration exceeds £174,000 – or the pro rata equivalent for part-time staff – or where performance-related pay exceeds £25,000, trusts must obtain DfE approval before the post is even advertised. 

Separately, executive remuneration must not increase at a faster rate than that of the academy trust's teachers, unless there is clear justification – and where a trust considers there is justification, it must seek DfE approval in advance.

The DfE also updated its Setting executive salaries guidance (the “DfE Guidance”) on 29 September 2026, giving further detail on the expectations on trusts when it comes to meeting the requirements in the ATH.

These are mostly mandatory obligations, embedded in a document whose compliance is a condition of every trust's funding agreement.

What the DfE guidance means for your trust

The guidance fills in some important gaps, but it also sharpens the picture of how demanding the new regime will be in practice. Here's what your board needs to know.

The approval triggers are broader than many assumed 

“New appointments” is broadly defined (Section 23, Annexe A of the DfE Guidance) as the appointment of an individual to a post, whether they are joining the trust from another organisation or are already employed by the trust. This includes external recruits, appointments to newly created roles, promotions and lateral moves into existing roles within the trust. Boards that assumed the approval requirement applied only to external hires need to revisit that assumption.

The teacher pay comparator is trust-specific

The comparison is between the percentage increase in an individual executive leader’s total remuneration package and the percentage increase in remuneration awarded to teaching staff employed by the same trust over the same relevant period. 

The teacher pay figure must include any nationally or locally determined pay awards that the trust has implemented; it is therefore the trust’s own award, rather than a sector-wide comparator, that is relevant. Executive pay is rising at a faster rate where the percentage increase in the executive leader’s remuneration package exceeds that teacher pay increase. 

The assessment must therefore consider the executive’s complete remuneration package and all elements of movement over the period, including any cost-of-living award and incremental progression. Their combined effect may exceed the increase awarded to the trust’s teaching staff even where neither element would do so on its own. This calculation requires care, and we can help trusts work through the assessment.

The DfE will assess applications against a number of criteria

These cover the complete pay package, the influence and impact of the role, relevant benchmarking data, trust-specific factors including size and Ofsted outcomes, and labour market and location considerations. The guidance is explicit that boards should consider how a salary could withstand public scrutiny, including media interest, and whether the level of pay can be publicly justified.

Succession planning cannot be reactive

Individuals should not automatically be recruited with the same remuneration package as their predecessor, and we know that an internal move is still classed as a "new appointment” (see point 1 in this article). Therefore, trusts need proactive succession planning in order to spot where DfE approval may be required. 

The trust must also  have an Accounting Officer in post at all times – and that obligation does not pause while the DfE processes an approval application. For trusts where the CEO remains on a headteacher's contract, the mismatch between notice periods and approval timelines is a very live risk, so it is also worth identifying (alongside the succession planning) what terms and conditions you are working with.

How will the DfE manage all of the requests?

The sector is already asking how the DfE will cope with the volume of applications. TES analysis from July 2026 found that 145 MAT employees received more than £170,000 in 2024-25, including around 80 CEOs. Even if only a fraction of those trusts require approval in any given year, the cumulative demand on a single regional approval process is likely to be significant. 

The DfE expects trusts to submit applications at the earliest opportunity and to allow a minimum of 20 working days for a decision when planning recruitment and pay processes. After submission, the application is allocated to the relevant regional team for assessment. Where a trust wishes to request reconsideration of a decision, it must submit a request within two calendar months of notice of the decision, and reconsideration is available only where the trust can provide additional supporting evidence not available at the time of the original application, or where the trust wishes to revise its proposal to a lower level of remuneration. 

Our advice is this: if a trust is already operating good practice – robust benchmarking, evidence-led decision-making and a well-documented board process – then an approval application should not be an onerous or time-consuming exercise. 

A trust that can demonstrate it has followed a rigorous process will make the DfE's assessment easier and will be far better placed to receive a prompt and positive outcome. The trusts that will find this hardest are those that have not invested in building that evidence base.

Why salary benchmarking matters more than ever

Benchmarking has always been good practice in any sector. Under the new ATH, it is the evidential foundation for any successful DfE application. Benchmarking data without a rationale is merely a number looking for a justification – benchmarking data coupled with the other sources of evidence that the DfE expects with a clear, documented rationale is evidence of robust governance. 

The quality of benchmarking in the academy trust sector is only as good as the data that underpins it. The DfE's own financial benchmarking tool is a useful starting point, but it has limitations – it reflects published accounts data (from the prior period), not live market intelligence, and it doesn’t give any benchmarks on executive pay.

That is why we recommend that every academy trust (regardless of size) contributes its salary data to Brightmine’s Education Salary Survey, which is supported by the Confederation of School Trusts and Browne Jacobson. It is free to contribute salary data, takes less than ten minutes to do and when a trust does that, it gets a free report.

Brightmine is a sector-trusted HR data and benchmarking platform, and it's only as useful as the data its members contribute. The ask is simple: contribute your data. Brightmine welcomes all salary data – not just executive pay – though for the purposes of the new DfE approval regime, ensuring that executive and senior leadership pay is well represented in the dataset is particularly important.

Four actions to start this week

1. Contribute your salary data to Brightmine: Brightmine's compensation benchmarks are built from over 1.4 million employee records submitted directly by employers – meaning comparisons are drawn from real, reliable market information, not job adverts or estimates. However, our dataset for education is much smaller and it could be so much better. Every trust that submits its data strengthens the evidential base for the whole sector. Brightmine has produced step-by-step guidance and short practical videos to walk you through the submission process; once your data has passed validation, it will be available within the platform within one to two working days.

Submit your data

Once a trust has participated in the survey by contributing its pay data, it will receive:

• A free priority copy of the national summary report.
• An individualised analysis of its position within the national landscape.
• The option to subscribe to the full Brightmine Compensation Planning platform at a CST negotiated discount.

2. Carry out benchmarking: Don't wait for when a vacancy arises. Benchmarking prepared in response to a vacancy, rather than held in advance, will carry less weight and creates time pressure at exactly the wrong moment. It also helps you to understand how current executive pay at your trust compares with the market.

3. Map the pay growth constraint against your planned annual review: Before your next executive pay review cycle, carry out a gap analysis comparing the total planned pay movement for your executive leaders – including for example any cost-of-living award, incremental progression, and performance-related pay – against the equivalent total pay movement for your teaching workforce, taking into account their cost-of-living award, any incremental progression and other remuneration changes. It's the combined picture on both sides of the comparison that matters.

4. Review and, if necessary, update your pay policy: It should cover how you will manage the annual pay review taking account of the pay growth constraint – including assessing the combined effect of cost-of-living and incremental progression together, not in isolation; succession planning; public scrutiny considerations; and the new ATH requirements in force from 1 October 2026, including the obligation to seek DfE prior approval where the combined effect of all pay elements would cause executive remuneration to increase faster than teacher pay.

Further help and support

Browne Jacobson's education HR, employment and governance teams have extensive experience advising academy trust boards on executive pay. 

We have been regularly supporting trusts with executive pay matters since 2017 and we can support your trust through every aspect of the challenges described here – from advising education trustees on their responsibilities, providing bespoke salary benchmarking analysis reports based on your roles and the context of your trust, to executive reward strategy, to drafting a compliant executive pay policy. We can also help your committee with a suitable terms of reference.

To discuss how we can support your trust, please email Emma Hughes, Partner and Head of HR services for education.