What's new
Teachers' Pension Employer's Contribution rate change (1 April 2027)
From 1 April 2027, the Teachers' Pension Scheme employer contribution rate will decrease from 28.68% to 17.68% of pensionable pay. This follows the GOV.UK funding adjustment announcement.
To support this change, we've updated Access Education Budgets so schools and academies can apply the new rate in their 2026/27 budget scenarios.
Where to find the update
A notification will appear on the Manage Budgets screen via the Updates Available button, for 2026/27 working scenarios. Clicking through shows the update details, including the data section, publish date, version, and a summary of the rate change.
You have three options:
Action | What happens |
Apply | Updates both new scenarios and your existing 2026/27 working scenarios. The notification is cleared once applied. |
Ignore | Applies the new rate to new scenarios only — your existing 2026/27 scenarios remain unchanged. The notification is cleared once ignored. |
Close | Takes no action. The notification will remain visible so you can apply or ignore it later. |
What updates when you apply
Pay Related Factors screen — the rate will show as 17.68% from the 2026-27 budget year onward, with a tooltip confirming that 28.68% applies until 31 March 2027, and 17.68% applies from 1 April 2027.
If you've manually overridden your pension rate, this update will not change it — you'll need to update the rate yourself if you'd like to apply the new figure.
Teacher staff contracts — only pensionable teacher contracts are updated; non-teacher contracts and non-pensionable teacher contracts are unaffected. For each updated contract, the existing 28.68% pension line will be end-dated 31 March 2027, and a new 17.68% line will start 1 April 2027. New teacher contracts created after the update will automatically include both lines.
Minor updates and fixes
Support for decimal places in Budget Export — it is now possible to include decimal places when exporting the Budget Export report. A new "Include decimal places" checkbox (checked by default) is available on the report options.
Excel export updates — when reports are exported to excel they will be in modern .xlsx format, eliminating the "different format than specified" warning in Excel. Any reports that have cells containing totals or subtotals are now formatted as numbers instead of text, so they sum correctly in Excel without a "number stored as text" warning.
Action Planner removed from navigation — please note that the Action Planner has been removed from the navigation menu and budget toolbar, and is no longer in use. To discuss this change in more detail, please speak to your Account Manager, Customer Success Manager or raise a case in the support portal.
How this version will be made available
These enhancements were released to customers throughout July 2026.