Ex-Police Salary Match Calculator

Basic pay comes from the 2026/27 officer pay scales (the 2025/26 scales plus the 3.5% award from 1 September 2026), the same data as our pay scales page. Inspector and chief inspector points are higher in the Met and City of London.

Location pay. In the Met and City, London Weighting is pay and counts for pension; the London Allowance is an allowance and does not. The South East Allowance in the forces that pay it does not count either.

Overtime and allowances are what you enter. They count in full as cash, but not towards the pension value, because they are not pensionable pay. Use a typical year from your payslips, not your best year.

The Government Actuary's Department valued the Police Pension Scheme (England and Wales) as at 31 March 2020. Its report sets the employer contribution rate at 35.3% of pensionable pay from 1 April 2024, after allowing for ill-health retirement charges (the headline rate before that allowance is 36.2%). The previous rate, from April 2019, was 31%.

That money is paid for you on top of your salary, in the same way a civilian employer pays into your workplace pension. So comparing salaries without it understates your police package. Two honest caveats:

• The rate is an average across the whole scheme and also covers past service, so it is a proxy, not a valuation of your own pension.
• If you leave, you keep what you have built but stop building more. If you would only have stayed a short time anyway, count less of it with "use my own percentage".

Another way to see it: in the 2015 scheme each year adds 1/55.3 of your pensionable pay to a pension payable from 60, revalued while you serve. For a top-of-scale constable that is about £941 a year of pension for every year served. See what happens to your pension if you leave.

The legal minimum. Under automatic enrolment an employer must pay at least 3% and the total must be at least 8%, on qualifying earnings. For 2026/27 qualifying earnings are pay between £6,240 and £50,270 and you are enrolled automatically once you earn over £10,000. On a salary above £50,270 the minimum employer payment is about £1,321 a year however much you earn.

What employers actually pay. The ONS pension tables for 2024 (provisional, published 10 March 2026) found median employer contributions in the private sector of 6% for men and 5% for women and 27% and 26% in the public sector. These are medians across all pension types. We use 5% as the default because it is the lower of the two private sector figures.

Public sector jobs (Civil Service, NCA, local government, police staff) usually have defined benefit schemes with much higher employer rates than a private job. If you are moving to one, enter the employer rate from the scheme or ask the employer.

Officers below superintendent get 25 days' annual leave under Annex O, rising to 30 with service (the bands changed from 1 April 2025 and officers appointed before then move to the new table by April 2027). Officers also get public holidays off, or are paid double time when they work them. We add 8 public holidays to compare with a civilian job's "days plus bank holidays". See our annual leave guide.

The legal minimum for a full-time civilian job is 5.6 weeks, 28 days for a five-day week and the employer can include bank holidays in it. Each day of difference is valued at your basic and location pay divided by 260 working days. That is our assumption, not an official rate.

Hours are used only for the hourly comparison. The officer hourly rate uses the Annex G basis (annual pay x 6/12520, a 40-hour week). If the civilian job has a shorter week, the same salary is worth more per hour.

Officer take-home uses our salary calculator's engine: 2026/27 England and Wales income tax and National Insurance and the 2015 scheme contribution of 12.88% to 14.22% (from 1 April 2026, by pay band) taken before tax.

For the civilian job we take your pension contribution before tax as well. Some schemes give tax relief another way (relief at source), which gives a similar result for basic rate taxpayers. Student loans, salary sacrifice and Scottish tax are not modelled.