Plan your next twelve months of prison officer pay

What Pay Planner Pro is for

Most financial decisions a prison officer makes are not about one month. Whether to take a 41 hour contract, whether the extra bedwatch shifts are worth the hours, whether to apply for a Band 4 or Band 5 post, how long a deposit will take, how much room a pay award gives you: all of them play out over a year or more, and all of them are muddied by tax and pension, which take a different share from different kinds of pay. The free tools on this site show you one month or one annual figure. Pay Planner Pro puts the levers together and shows you twelve months.

You start from the same pay details as the free tools, so if you have already used the salary calculator or the overtime calculator on this device your band, pay point, zone, contract and supplement are already filled in. Then you choose when the plan starts and set the levers: how many extra hours you will work each month, whether a pay award takes effect and when, whether you are promoted and to what, and whether you change contract hours. The planner returns your month-by-month take-home, a comparison with contracted pay alone, a cumulative chart of what your extras add after tax, and the month you reach your goal.

How the planner works out each month

Each month starts from published pay. Your band, pay point, zone and contract give an annual contracted figure from the Pay Review Body's 2026 tables; the planner divides it by twelve. If you are in Band 3 at one of the supplement prisons the non-pensionable supplement is added. Extra hours are priced at £23 an hour for Bands 3 to 5, or at the Band 2 weekday method, and are non-pensionable. The alpha contribution is taken on pensionable pay at the rate for your annual pensionable pay, before tax. Income tax is worked cumulatively within each tax year, which is how PAYE behaves: the planner annualises the pay to date, applies the personal allowance and bands, and takes the difference from tax already paid. National Insurance and any student loan are worked month by month on monthly thresholds.

That cumulative approach matters in two ways. A month with a lot of Payment Plus is taxed at your marginal rate, not at some punishing combined rate, and it will not leave you worse off. And a promotion or award part-way through a tax year changes the tax picture smoothly rather than at a cliff edge. The planner starts the first tax year assuming earlier months matched your first plan month, and resets in April.

The four levers

Extra hours. Set the hours per month, or fine-tune each month if you know a run of shifts is coming. At £23 an hour a basic-rate taxpayer keeps about £16.56 of each Payment Plus hour, so 8 hours a month is worth about £1,590 a year after tax at the basic rate. The planner recomputes that against your own position, including National Insurance thresholds and any student loan.

Pay award. The 2026/27 award was 3.5% consolidated and pensionable. The 2027/28 round was formally started by the Ministry of Justice on 15 July 2026 with no restrictions stated beyond funding from departmental budgets, and no timetable has been published. The planner lets you choose an illustrative percentage and a month, applies it to contracted pay and holds market supplements flat, and prices the result after tax and pension. It is a what-if.

Promotion. Choose the band, pay point and contract you would move to and the month it starts. The planner uses the published 2026/27 pay for that role. The step from Band 3 to Band 4 is a spot-rate move; to Band 5 you choose a pay point. It also drops a Band 3 market supplement, because the supplement applies to Band 3 officers.

Contract change. Band 3 officers can choose a 38 to 41 hour contract after training. Moving from 37 to 41 hours at pay point 3 adds £4,639 a year gross in the published tables. Whether and how quickly you can change is HMPPS policy that we could not verify, so treat the month you choose as an assumption to check.

Why a plan beats a rule of thumb

The 'about 72%' rule of thumb for Payment Plus is a good starting point, and it is exactly right for most Band 3 and Band 4 officers. It is not right near £50,270, where the National Insurance rate drops from 8% to 2% for the part above the threshold, or where income tax moves to 40% and you keep only about 58%. It also hides interactions: a pay award raises your pension rate if it pushes you across £36,200 or £56,000, a promotion changes both the contracted pay and your eligibility for a market supplement, and a longer contract adds pensionable pay that attracts contributions. A twelve month plan with real tax lets you see those effects instead of guessing at them.

It also makes the risk visible. Payment Plus is non-consolidated and non-pensionable, spend on it has fallen from £62.6 million in 2022/23 to £30.8 million in 2024/25, and the Review Body will look at it again in 2027. A plan that depends on 40 Payment Plus hours a month is fragile. Compare it with a plan that has none, and use the gap as a measure of how much of your budget rests on hours you cannot guarantee. We recommend setting fixed commitments, such as a mortgage, against contracted pay, which is what lenders and the pension scheme can rely on. See our mortgage calculator.

Worked examples to try

• Overtime only. A Band 3 National officer at pay point 1 on 37 hours (£34,928) doing 8 Payment Plus hours a month adds about £2,208 gross a year, roughly £1,590 after tax at the basic rate. Set the award and promotion levers off and read the 'extra hours' figure.
• Contract change. The same officer moving to 41 hours adds £4,406 gross a year in the published tables (from £34,928 to £39,334). The planner prices it after the higher pension and tax.
• Promotion to Band 4. A Band 3 pay point 3 officer (£36,778) moving to the Band 4 spot rate (£41,328) in month seven gains £4,550 gross a year. The planner shows the part-year effect, including the pension band change at £36,200 and the loss of any market supplement.
• Award what-if. A 3.5% award on £36,778 adds £1,287 gross a year. Move the effect month to April and see the part-year result inside a 12 month plan.

Pay Planner Pro and the other paid tools

Pay Planner Pro unlocks the AI assistant on the overtime, Payment Plus, unsocial hours, shift pattern and planner tools, so unlimited answers grounded in your own numbers. It is also included in the Serving Officer Bundle with Pension Command, the Pension and Lump-Sum Report and the Promotion Prep Pack. If you want a one-off printable breakdown of this month's pay rather than a plan, the Personal Pay Report is the cheaper option at £7.99. For pension projections see Pension Command, and for promotion preparation the Promotion Prep Pack.

Everything is a one-off payment with no subscription. There is a 14-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked, and you can buy as a guest without creating an account. Creating a free account afterwards simply lets your access and saved plans follow you to other devices.