Civil service unions have reacted with frustration after the Cabinet Office published pay-remit guidance limiting departments and agencies to an overall 3.25% increase in average pay for staff this financial year.
The announcement comes just a day after the Office for National Statistics said inflation in the year to April was 3.5%, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index.
The 2025-2026 Pay Remit Guidance is an over-arching target for departments, giving them flexibility to tailor the exact uplift that rank-and-file civil servants receive, depending on their specific grade and other factors.
The latest guidance includes the potential for a further 0.5% increase in spending on pay, on top of the 3.25%, to be targeted at “specific departmental workforce issues”. Examples of acceptable areas for such spending include helping the lowest-paid staff members, targeting pay to address skills shortages, improving productivity, and rewarding delivery towards the government’s “missions”.
Unlike civil servants working at delegated grades, members of the senior civil service have their own pay review body. The Cabinet Office confirmed today that SCS members would also be getting a 3.25% rise, backdated to April, based on recommendations from the Senior Salaries Review Body. This also comes with an anomalies pot worth 0.5% which departments can use to address "acute skills gaps and equal pay issues" in the SCS.
Ministers have also agreed that, exceptionally, it may be used to mitigate the effects of pay overlaps with the delegated grades.
The parliamentary secretary to the Cabinet Office, Georgia Gould, said ministers had decided to defer proposed increases in SCS pay bands to form part of a fundamental review of pay and reward frameworks.
Fran Heathcote, general secretary of PCS – the civil service’s biggest union, said the 3.25% guidance was an improvement on ministers’ opening gambit in negotiations, but was not enough to make a difference to the lives of many officials.
“While we have shifted the government in talks from its original proposal of 2.8%, we’re disappointed with the headline figure of 3.25% as inflation hits 3.5%,” she said.
"With increasing pay compression at lower paid grades, the 0.5% extra allocated to address low pay is derisory when tens of thousands of civil servants are paid at or barely above the minimum wage.
“Civil servants deserve a fair pay rise and PCS will continue to make that case in negotiations.”
Heathcote said the PCS National Executive Committee would meet to consider its formal response to the guidance shortly.
Steve Thomas, deputy general secretary of the Prospect union, which represents professionals such as scientists, engineers and technicians in the civil service, said the 2025-26 pay proposals would not address longstanding issues in the sector.
“Civil servants have seen huge erosion of their pay in the last 15 years,” he said. “This remit may ensure that their incomes are not further eroded by inflation, but it will not resolve many of the wider recruitment and retention challenges currently faced by government for digital, scientific and specialist skills.
“This pay remit does begin to address this issue with recognition of scarce skills but on its own will not solve the yawning gaps on pay that exist in many areas where there are direct private sector comparators.”
Thomas added: “The government still needs to come forward with a long-term strategic plan for how a reformed, transparent, properly evidence-based pay-setting process can repair the damage done by the short-sighted, politicised pay policies of previous governments.
“The focus must be to recruit, retain and develop the modern civil service workforce the government needs to deliver on its missions.”
Lauren Crowley, assistant general secretary at public-sector leaders’ union the FDA, said that while ministers had honoured the SSRB’s headline proposal, the result was still one of the lowest rises across the entire public sector. She also warned that the government had failed to tackle longstanding issue with civil service remuneration.
“Once again, we’re tinkering around the edges of civil service pay because the government has failed to grasp the nettle of fundamental reform,” she said.
“This government has set out its ambition to rewire the state, yet by refusing to address the long term and systemic issues within civil service pay, they are compounding the challenge of recruiting and retaining the talent needed in areas such as digital and artificial intelligence to deliver the government’s own agenda.
“While pay in rest of the public sector, including the senior civil service, is driven by recommendations made by pay review bodies, the decision on pay for the majority of civil servants is a political choice. This is a choice made solely by ministers who deliberately ignore all of the evidence highlighting how civil service salaries continue to fall behind comparable jobs.
“This is why the FDA continues to call for an independent pay review body for all civil service grades, which will depoliticise civil service pay and prioritise long-term reform and delivery.”