Prison officer overtime calculator

What this calculator does

Most overtime calculators ask for an hourly rate and a multiplier and hand back a gross figure. That is not how prison officer pay works, and it is why this page was rebuilt. Here you pick your band, pay point, pay zone and contract hours, enter the extra hours you work, and the calculator applies the rules that actually exist in England and Wales: a flat £23 an hour Payment Plus for Bands 3, 4 and 5, and the weekday and weekend overtime method for Band 2 Operational Support Grades. It then runs the whole thing through 2026/27 income tax, National Insurance, the alpha pension and, if you choose, a student loan, so the number you see is the extra money that reaches your bank account.

Results update as you type. The first thing you see is the annual value of your extra hours after tax, followed by the take-home pay you would see each month with and without them. A chart shows how the after-tax value of extra hours changes as the hours go up, so you can see when a tax or National Insurance threshold starts to matter. A second tab compares extra hours with the alternative most officers have, a longer contract. A third projects a full tax year month by month, which is part of the paid Pay Planner Pro.

Everything is based on figures we opened and checked on 3 October 2026 from the Pay Review Body's 2026 report, the HMPPS jobs site, GOV.UK and the Civil Service Pension Scheme. Where a rule is not published we say so, and we give you an editable box instead of a guess.

The prison officer overtime rate in 2026/27

From 1 April 2026 the overtime-type payment for officer grades in England and Wales is Payment Plus, and it is £23.00 an hour. The Prison Service Pay Review Body (PSPRB) recommended the £1 rise in its 25th Report and the Government accepted every recommendation in full. Payment Plus is non-consolidated and non-pensionable, it is paid for specified operational duties, and it is the only overtime-type payment open to Bands 3, 4 and 5. There is no time and a half and no double time for officers.

Band 2 Operational Support Grades are different. Their overtime is described by the PSPRB as 1.33 times the standard hourly base rate on weekdays and 1.75 times at weekends and on public or bank holidays, with a permanent extra £5 an hour added to the multiplier. On our arithmetic for the 2026/27 National rate that comes to about £22.52 an hour on a weekday and £28.05 at a weekend. For Bands 7 to 12 we found no overtime-type payment described in the sources we could read, so the calculator shows your take-home with no extras and says so.

How to use it, step by step

1. Choose your band and, for Bands 3 and 5, your pay point. Bands 8 to 11 are ranges, so you set a position within the range.
2. Pick your prison if it is listed. This sets your pay zone (National, Outer London or Inner London) and fills in any market supplement. You can overwrite both.
3. Choose your contract hours. Band 3 officers can choose 37, 38, 39, 40 or 41 hours after training; the published tables have the matching annual pay.
4. Enter your extra hours per week, month or year. Officers enter Payment Plus hours; Band 2 staff enter weekday and weekend or bank holiday hours separately.
5. Read the annual after-tax value of your extra hours, then open the contract comparison to see whether a longer contract would be worth more than occasional Payment Plus.
6. If you are a Scottish taxpayer, switch the income tax setting to Scotland. If you have a student loan, pick your plan.

Why the old multipliers were wrong

An earlier version of this calculator, and many generic overtime calculators online, used neutral multipliers of 1.33, 1.5 and 2.0 and a Payment Plus example of £22 an hour. Those figures were illustrations rather than rules. The £22 rate had applied since 2016 and rose to £23 on 1 April 2026. The multiplier approach does not describe Bands 3 to 5 at all, because Payment Plus is a flat cash rate. And the 1.33 and 1.75 multipliers belong to Band 2 overtime, not to officers.

The practical effect of getting this wrong was an overstated estimate for officers who expected a weekend uplift that does not exist, and a missing £5 an hour for Band 2 staff. This version uses the published rates, shows its working and labels every derived figure as our arithmetic.

Payment Plus: the rules that decide whether an hour is paid

The calculator multiplies the hours you enter by £23, so the sums are only as good as the hours. The PSPRB describes the test in two parts. First, the work must fall on a non-working day or outside the hours of your scheduled shift pattern for that day. The Review Body's own example is a shift that finishes at 17:00: hours after 17:00 only count if you are doing a qualifying duty. Second, the work must be a specific operational duty. Bedwatch and constant watch are named as paid at the Payment Plus rate. The full list of qualifying duties and the HMPPS policy behind it are not published in the sources we could read, and we have not guessed at one.

Payment Plus was introduced in July 2008 to replace separate bedwatch, constant watch and contracted supplementary hours payments, and the PSPRB is clear that it was never intended to be an all-encompassing overtime payment. Spend on it has fallen, from £62.6 million in 2022/23 to £30.8 million in 2024/25 on its own, which points to fewer paid hours. The Review Body will look at Payment Plus again in its 2027 Report. Read our full guide, Payment Plus explained, before planning around it.

What you actually keep: the after-tax maths

Payment Plus is taxed at your marginal rate and attracts employee National Insurance, but because it is non-pensionable nothing comes off for the alpha pension. For a basic-rate taxpayer in England, Wales or Northern Ireland the maths per £23 hour is: income tax 20% (£4.60), National Insurance 8% (£1.84), pension £0, so £16.56 reaches you, or 72%. If the extra pay falls in the 40% band you keep £13.34. Scottish bands differ, and a student loan takes a further 9% over the plan threshold.

The table shows the same sums for hours you might actually work. Because tax is calculated on your total pay through PAYE, a month with a lot of extra hours does not cost you money by pushing you over a threshold: you are never worse off for earning more, only the share you keep from the next pound changes.

Overtime or a longer contract?

Payment Plus is occasional and depends on demand. The structural alternative is contracted additional hours. HMPPS says trainees start on 37 hours and, once training is complete, can choose 39 or 41; the pay tables also publish 38 and 40 hours. At the top of Band 3 on the National scale, 37 hours including the 20% allowance is £36,778 and 41 hours is £41,417, a difference of £4,639 a year. Divided by 52.143 weeks and four extra hours, that works out at about £22.24 for each extra hour worked, slightly under £23, but guaranteed and rostered.

The comparison tab in the calculator turns that into your own after-tax figures and tells you how many Payment Plus hours it would take to match a 41-hour contract. Two cautions apply. We could not confirm whether plain additional committed hours (ACH) are pensionable; only the 'P' version, ACHP, is described that way, so the calculator lets you choose either reading. And how and when you may move between 37, 39 and 41 hours is HMPPS policy that we could not verify, so ask your establishment before you plan on a change. Our contract hours guide sets out the numbers.

What this calculator cannot know

No calculator can see your payslip. This one assumes tax code 1257L, deducts alpha pension before income tax, charges National Insurance on gross pay and treats your whole published contract pay as pensionable unless you tell it otherwise. It does not know about salary sacrifice, other income, marriage allowance, a tax code correction, or the month a back-pay lump landed. For your own pay the best use is to compare the result with a recent payslip and chase any gap over about £20 a month through payroll.

A few things are simply unpublished, and the calculator is deliberately silent on them: the exact list of duties that qualify for Payment Plus, any overtime rule for Bands 7 to 12, whether and how time off in lieu is available to officers, and the outcome of the HMPPS review of Payment Plus and of escort and bedwatch work with NHS England. The 2027/28 pay round formally started with a remit letter on 15 July 2026, and Payment Plus is on the Review Body's list for the 2027 Report, so the rate could change. The rate box lets you test a different figure, clearly as a what-if.

Plan around contracted pay, treat overtime as a bonus

Contracted pay, including the allowance and any pensionable additional hours, is what lenders and the pension scheme can rely on. Payment Plus comes and goes with demand and policy, and the evidence says it is shrinking. A sensible plan sets fixed commitments against contracted take-home and uses extra hours to build a deposit or pay down debt. The overtime to deposit calculator turns a savings target into hours, the mortgage calculator shows what your pay supports, and the shift pattern earnings planner shows what your rota is worth. For a full year with promotion and pay-award what-ifs, see Pay Planner Pro.