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Term-Time Only Contracts: How Your Pay Is Worked Out

If you work in a school, chances are your contract only covers term time. Teaching assistants, catering staff, caretakers and admin teams across the UK are commonly employed on term-time only contracts, which means you are paid for the weeks the school is open rather than the full 52-week year. It is a setup that suits family life, but the way the pay is worked out can be confusing at first. The basic idea is simple enough. Your employer takes the full-time equivalent annual salary for your role, then reduces it in proportion to the number of weeks you actually work. Someone working 39 weeks of the year, for example, would receive roughly 39/52 of the full-time salary before any further adjustments. On top of that, most employers add a holiday entitlement top-up, since term-time staff still accrue paid annual leave like everyone else. This is where the calculations start to vary between employers. Some councils and academy trusts use 44.6 weeks as the divisor, others use 45.1 or their ...
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How to Convert an Annual Salary to an Hourly Rate (UK)

If you have ever seen a job advert quote an hourly rate and wondered how it stacks up against your current annual salary, you are not alone. Moving between salaried and hourly roles, or comparing offers across employers, means translating a yearly figure into what you actually earn for each hour you work. The basic maths is straightforward: take your gross annual salary and divide it by the number of hours you work in a year. For someone on a standard full-time contract of 37.5 hours a week, that works out at roughly 1,950 working hours a year, before you account for holidays. A £30,000 salary therefore comes out at a little over £15 an hour. Where it gets tricky is that no two contracts are quite the same. Some employers base the calculation on 37 hours a week, others on 40, and part-time workers need to scale everything down to their contracted hours. Bank holidays, unpaid lunch breaks and overtime policies can all shift the final figure, so it is worth reading your contract carefull...
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Do Bonuses Get Pro-Rated Too? What Part-Timers Should Ask

Here's a question that catches part-timers out every bonus season: if full-timers get a £2,000 annual bonus, what do you get on a three-day week? In most companies, the answer is £1,200 — bonuses are pro-rated just like salary, unless your contract says otherwise. The logic is the same proportion you already know: (your hours ÷ full-time hours) × the full-time amount. On 22.5 of 37.5 hours that's 60%, so 60% of any bonus, 60% of London weighting, and usually 60% of car allowances or other cash extras. The principle is consistent — if it's expressed as a full-time figure, your share scales with your hours. Where it gets interesting is performance-related pay. Some employers pro-rate the bonus pot but not the performance multiplier; others do the reverse. Neither is illegal as long as the scheme rules are applied consistently, but the difference can be worth hundreds of pounds, so read the bonus scheme document, not just your contract. Three questions worth asking HR be...
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