What your pay awards were really worth, and what you are owed.

Try the free pay vs inflation calculator and the free back-pay calculator first: both stay free.

What the pack is for

The free tools answer two questions for one role: has pay kept up with prices from a year you choose, and how much back pay is owed when an award is implemented late. Real careers are less tidy. You may have started at a different pay point from the one you are on now, moved up through development, competent and crew manager, and you may want to know how much of your pay change came from national awards and how much from your own progression. You may also be comparing your role with a colleague's, or checking what a late award would mean with your overtime included. The pack is built for those questions.

What is inside

• Compare roles: up to four pay points side by side from any base year between 2009 and 2025, with a real-pay index chart, gap in pounds, CPI against RPI and the earnings shortfall to June 2026.
• My career: your start year and pay path (development to competent, promotions, stage changes). The report shows your pay against a start pay that had tracked prices, your pay in today's money, and what the awards alone did to your starting pay.
• Scenarios: gross and estimated take-home back pay for any award from 2012 to 2026, from 0 to 24 months late, for six roles, with overtime, plus a table of when recent NJC circulars were dated against their 1 July effective dates.
• Report: a printable briefing with your assumptions, charts, award-by-award table, roles compared, career summary, back-pay scenario and full source list, with an optional AI-written summary of your figures. Save it to your account or download a CSV.
• Ask AI: questions answered from your own figures, with the free questions and unlimited answers once unlocked.

How the numbers are built

Pay is the national basic annual pay from the NJC tables on 1 July each year from 2009 to 2026. Prices are the ONS Consumer Prices Index (D7BT) or Retail Prices Index (CHAW) for July of each year. "Today's money" means July 2026 prices. The gap is base-year pay multiplied by the index ratio, minus actual pay; the real-terms change is actual pay divided by that matched pay. The career report uses the rate in force on 1 July for each pay year and ignores the month a promotion took effect. Back pay uses the difference between the old and new annual pay divided by the pay periods in the year, times the periods at the old rate, plus overtime hours times the change in the published overtime rate, and a net estimate from a month-by-month PAYE model on 2026/27 rules.

Honest limits

This is a calculation from published figures about the past. It does not predict awards or inflation, it does not include overtime and allowances outside the back-pay scenarios, it uses national NJC scales in the comparison and career reports, and the net back-pay figure is an estimate that your payslip will overrule. The debate about what counts as pay keeping up with prices is a matter of choices, such as the base year and the index, and the report states the choices it made. Where a source does not state a headline percentage for a year, the report says so and still uses the published pay rates.

Who it is for

Serving firefighters and officers preparing for a pay discussion or union meeting, people checking an arrears line on a payslip, control staff and support colleagues on percentage-linked pay who want a like-for-like comparison, and anyone who wants a dated, sourced statement of what firefighter pay has done against prices. If you only need the headline for one role, the free calculators do that.

For background see firefighter pay rises history, how back pay is calculated and the FBU pay claim and NJC process. The pay report covers total earnings and take-home pay.