Payment Plus Explained: The Flat £23 Rate for Bands 3-5

In shortA flat cash payment for specified operational duties beyond your normal pattern: never time and a half, and never automatic for staying late.

The Prison Service Pay Review Body (PSPRB), which recommends pay for prison staff in England and Wales, describes it as a non-consolidated, non-pensionable payment made to officer grades, Bands 3 to 5 and their closed-grade equivalents, "for specific operational duties".

It was introduced in July 2008, replacing separate payments for bedwatch, constant watch and contracted supplementary hours with a single hourly rate. The PSPRB is explicit that it was never designed to be an all-encompassing overtime payment, which explains most of the confusion online.

Non-consolidated

It never becomes part of your basic salary.

Non-pensionable

It does not count towards your pension and no pension contribution is taken from it.

In shortThe rate stayed at £22 for a decade, then rose £1 to £23 on 1 April 2026 as an interim measure, below the £25 and £30 asked for.

• New rate£23From 1 April 2026; recommendation 9, accepted in full
• HMPPS asked for£25The POA asked for £30
• Cost of each £1About £1.6m a yearAbout £3.6 million with knock-on costs

The PSPRB's 25th Report, published on 26 March 2026, recommended the £1 increase, and the Government accepted every recommendation in the report. The Ministry of Justice's own remit letter for the 2027/28 round, dated 15 July 2026, confirms this.

The new rate was paid through June 2026 salaries with backdating to 1 April, according to HMPPS as reported by the Prison Officers' Association (POA).

The PSPRB called the increase an interim measure, and said it would review Payment Plus fully in its 2027 Report, once HMPPS completes its own review of the payment.

In shortEligibility is by grade (Bands 3 to 5); which duties qualify is not published, so confirm locally.

Eligibility is by grade. It is the only overtime-type payment available to Bands 3 to 5. Band 2 Operational Support Grades are on a separate overtime system with weekday and weekend multipliers, covered below. For Bands 7 to 12 we found no overtime-type payment described in the sources we read; check your own terms.

Eligibility by duty is the harder part. The PSPRB says Payment Plus is for "specific operational duties" and names bedwatch and constant watch as paid at the Payment Plus rate.

We could not find the full published list of qualifying duties or the HMPPS policy document that governs them, and we are not going to guess one.

• Band 3 Prison Officers.
• Band 4 Supervising and Specialist Officers.
• Band 5 Custodial Managers.
• The equivalent closed grades.

In shortBoth tests must pass: the time is a non-working day or outside your scheduled shift for that day, and the work is a qualifying duty.

The PSPRB's description of when Payment Plus is paid is precise even though the list of duties is not: staff are paid only on a non-working day, or for hours outside the scheduled shift pattern for that day.

The PSPRB's own example is a shift pattern that finishes at 17:00. Hours after 17:00 only count if you are carrying out a qualifying duty.

Hours inside your shift pattern do not count, even if you are doing a duty that would be paid on a rest day.

Neither question tells you who decides whether you work the extra hours at all: whether you can be asked to, whether you can refuse, and what notice applies are matters of your terms and local policy, which we have not verified.

If you are being pressed to cover hours and you are unsure of your position, speak to your POA representative.

1. Look at your roster for the day. If it is a rest day, or the hours fall after your scheduled finish (or before your scheduled start), the first test is met.
2. Identify the duty you are being asked to do. If it is bedwatch or constant watch, the PSPRB says it is paid at the Payment Plus rate. For anything else, confirm the duty is a qualifying one.
3. Record start and finish times, and who authorised the work, as soon as you finish. Write down the establishment's reference if the duty has one.
4. Multiply the paid hours by £23.00 to get the gross amount. For example, 8 hours is £184.00 gross.
5. Check the next payslip or the pay system and query any missing hours quickly, because late claims are harder to resolve.

In shortA flat £23 is about 1.45 times basic hourly pay at the top of Band 3 but only about 1.2 times once the 20% unsocial hours allowance is counted, and below Band 5 pay including UWH.

• Band 3, pay point 31.45x basicAbout 1.2 times including 20% UWH
• Band 5, pay point 30.94x incl. UWH£23 is below hourly pay including UWH

The table shows basic hourly pay and hourly pay including the 20% unsocial working hours (UWH) allowance for the national rates from 1 April 2026, with the ratio of £23 to each.

We calculated hourly figures as annual pay divided by 1,929.29 hours (37 hours a week for 52.14 weeks). That is our own illustrative convention, not an HMPPS payroll formula, but it is the same basis that reproduces the PSPRB's published Band 2 multipliers.

At the top of Band 3, £23 is close to the "time and two-fifths" the POA calculated for the old £22 rate against 2025 pay.

For Band 5, the PSPRB noticed that £23 is below your normal hourly rate including UWH at the top of the scale, and said it considers it reasonable because the duties paid at Payment Plus are Band 3 duties.

In shortOfficers get no multiplier-based overtime: contracted extra hours are rostered and paid weekly, and the 1.33 and 1.75 multipliers apply to Band 2 OSGs only.

If you have seen 1.33, 1.5 and 2.0 multipliers on earlier versions of this site or elsewhere online, those were neutral illustrative multipliers used by a generic calculator, not rates that apply to Band 3 to 5 officers. Officer grades do not get time and a half.

That is the single most common misunderstanding we see, and it is why we have rebuilt the calculators around the real £23 rate.

In shortA basic-rate taxpayer keeps about £16.56 of each £23 hour and a higher-rate taxpayer about £13.34, with no pension deduction because it is non-pensionable.

• Basic-rate taxpayer keeps£16.56£23 less 20% tax less 8% NI
• Higher-rate taxpayer keeps£13.34£23 less 40% tax less 2% NI

Payment Plus is taxable earnings like any other. For 2026/27 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, income between £12,571 and £50,270 is taxed at 20% and above that at 40%.

Employee NI is 8% between £12,570 and £50,270 a year and 2% above that. Because Payment Plus is non-pensionable, no Alpha pension contribution is taken from it.

Student loan repayments, if you have a plan, come on top and are collected through the same payslip; check the current thresholds on GOV.UK.

Because Payment Plus is not pensionable it also adds nothing to your pension, which is the trade-off against pensionable contract hours. Our overtime after tax guide works through full annual examples by contract.

In shortMost disputes come down to hours never entered, the wrong duty code or hours inside the scheduled shift pattern; a log from the day settles them.

Most disputes come down to one of three things: the hours were worked but never entered, the duty was entered under the wrong code, or the hours fell inside the scheduled shift pattern for that day. You cannot resolve any of those without a record from the day.

Keep a simple log: date, start and finish times, duty, who asked, and the roster for that day. Photograph or save the roster if your establishment issues it electronically. If something is missing, ask your business hub or line manager, and raise it with your POA representative if it is not resolved.

We have no information on claim deadlines at establishment level, so ask what the local cut-off is rather than assuming there is none.

In shortIt depends entirely on how many qualifying hours you work; it is a useful top-up but fragile as a core income plan.

• 50 hours a year£1,150 gross£828 after basic-rate tax and NI
• 100 hours a year£2,300 gross£1,656 after basic-rate tax and NI
• 200 hours a year£4,600 gross200 hours: £3,312 after basic-rate tax and NI
• One 12-hour bedwatch£276 grossOn a rest day

It depends on your establishment's staffing, the demand for bedwatch and the other qualifying duties, and local budget controls. The PSPRB data suggests those hours are shrinking: Payment Plus spend on its own in 2024/25 was about half its 2022/23 peak.

We have no published figure for the average number of Payment Plus hours per officer, so we will not invent one.

Used well and sparingly, it is a useful top-up. Used as a core income plan, it is fragile, because the amount can fall when a prison's staffing improves or the rules change.

That is one reason the paid Pay Planner models a base case and a no-extra-hours case side by side, and why we recommend that you plan fixed commitments like a mortgage on contracted pay, not on Payment Plus.

In shortPayment Plus is under review and the rate, the scope or both could change, but nothing is decided.

We could not find the outcome of either review, or a published timetable for the 2027/28 round, on 3 October 2026. We will update this guide when it is published; the living page for awards is the prison officer pay rise page.

If you want the bigger picture on how all officer pay fits together, start with prison officer pay bands, then read how overtime works across the grades, and see how market supplements add to base pay at some prisons.