Correction of data labelling.
Correction of section headings.
This publication provides statistics on school revenue funding from financial year 2010 to 2011 through to 2025 to 2026.
The aim is to provide an overview of trends in school funding over recent years, as well as detailed information about funding allocations for individual schools for 2024 to 2025.
The total amount of funding allocated to English schools for 5-16 year old pupils has grown since 2010-11 as the total pupil population has generally also grown.
In cash terms, the total funding allocated to schools through the grants covered in this report is £63.7 billion in 2025-26, an increase of 82% compared to the £35.0 billion allocated in 2010-11.
On a per-pupil basis the total funding allocated to schools for 5-16 year old pupils, in cash terms, in 2025-26 was £8,210, a 59% increase compared to £5,180 allocated per pupil in 2010-11.
When adjusted for inflation, funding per pupil was broadly flat between 2010-11 and 2015-16 at around £7,400 in 2024-25 prices. It then fell by 3.9% over 2016-17 and 2017-18, but subsequently increased by 1.2% over 2018-19 and 2019-20. Since then, funding has increased by 11.1% (after adjusting for inflation) over the course of the following six years, reaching £8,020 in 2025-26 (in 2024-25 prices). This includes a 1.2% increase in 2025-26 compared to 2024-25.
View tables that we have built for you, or create your own tables from open data using our table tool
Browse and download open data files from this release in our data catalogue
Learn more about the data files used in this release using our online guidance
Download all data available in this release as a compressed ZIP file
All supporting files from this release are listed for individual download below:
School funding allocations for 2025-26: This data shows the funding received by individual mainstream schools, both through their core budgets and through several other revenue grants.
Throughout this annual release, the time periods referred to are financial years unless otherwise stated. The shorthand “2024-25” is used to denote the 2024 to 2025 financial year (i.e. the period from April 2024 to March 2025), and similarly for other years. The shorthand “2024/25” is used to denote the 2024 to 2025 academic year (i.e. the period from September 2024 to August 2025), and similarly for other years.
This publication contains two sets of data:
All this data relates to the funding that is allocated to local authorities and state-funded schools in England by the Department for Education (DfE) in each year.
This is not the same as the amount of money that is spent in a year by schools and local authorities. Other official statistics reports published by the department provide information on local authority and school spending on education, including academies and children and young people's services. These can be found on the local authority and school finance page (opens in a new tab).
The Methodology section provides much more detailed information about each of the datasets.
This is the sixth edition of this annual statistics report and we are keen to receive feedback on the data presented. If you have any feedback or comments on this publication please contact us at:
This section presents time series data on revenue funding for primary and secondary pupils aged 5-16 in England.
The funding covers all state-funded schools: that is, primary and secondary maintained schools and academies; special schools; pupil referral units (including alternative provision academies and free schools); local authority alternative provision; and non-maintained special schools.
For mainstream schools, funding covers pupils in reception through to year 11.
To calculate inflation-adjusted school funding figures in this report, we use the GDP deflator, for which the most recent figures were published in January 2025 by HM Treasury (HMT).
The GDP deflator is the broadest measure of inflation in the domestic economy. It is commonly used to measure price changes in public sector expenditure and is the most suitable inflation measure for this national-level time series, which is looking at funding levels for English schools as a whole. Price inflation experienced by individual schools may be different.
The GDP deflator series displays atypical year-on-year movement in the data for years 2020-21 and 2021-22, which has arisen as a result of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The latest deflator series indicates like-for-like price increases of about 4.8% over the two year period overall, equivalent to increases of 2.3% in each year.
Given the atypical year-on-year movement in the deflator data, we have considered inflation-adjusted changes over that two-year period as a whole, rather than for each of the individual years, and the commentary in this publication is written from that standpoint.
The following funding elements in 2025-26 are included in the figures:
This coverage has been chosen both to capture core funding for schools and to ensure the series is as comparable over time as possible, despite changes to the specific grants allocated to schools over the years shown.
The figures shown for 2025-26 do not include additional funding schools will receive in the year to support towards the increase in employers’ national insurance contributions which take effect in April 2025.
In this publication, the figures for years 2010-11 to 2024-25 are mostly based on the latest funding allocations that have been issued to schools and local authorities. The figures for 2025-26 are based on a combination of published funding allocations, the budget settlement agreed at the Autumn Budget 2024, and some estimates of small grant and high needs spending.
More detailed information on the funding covered by the figures in this section can be found in the Methodology section.
The total amount of funding allocated to English schools for 5-16 year olds is closely linked to the number of pupils in attendance, and has grown since 2010-11 as the total pupil population has generally also grown.
In cash terms, the total funding allocated to schools through the grants listed above was £63.7 billion in 2025-26, an increase of 82% compared to the £35.0 billion allocated in 2010-11.
On a per-pupil basis the total funding to be allocated to schools for 5-16 year olds, in cash terms, in 2025-26 is £8,210, a 59% increase compared to £5,180 allocated per pupil in 2010-11.
After adjusting for inflation, funding per pupil was broadly flat between 2010-11 and 2015-16 at about £7,400 in 2024-25 prices.
It then fell by 3.9% over 2016-17 and 2017-18, but subsequently increased by 1.2% over 2018-19 and 2020-21. Since then, funding has increased by 11.1% (after adjusting for inflation) over the course of the following six years, reaching £8,020 in 2025-26 (in 2024-25 prices). This includes a 1.2% increase in 2025-26 compared to 2024-25.
Taking account of some small differences in coverage, these figures are comparable to the school funding settlements announced in the 2021 Spending Review, which covers the financial years 2022-23 to 2024-25, and the Autumn Budget 2024.
The 2021 Spending Review confirmed an additional £4.7 billion by 2024-25 for the core schools budget in England, over and above the schools settlement for 2022-23 secured at the 2019 Spending Round. The 2022 Autumn Statement confirmed an additional £2.0 billion in funding for 2024-25, on top of the original 2024-25 settlement announced at the 2021 Spending Review. In 2023, we announced additional funding via the teachers’ pay additional grant of £482.5 million in 2023-24 and £827.5 million in 2024-25, for mainstream schools and high needs providers. In 2024, we announced additional funding of approximately £1.1 billion that was allocated via the core schools budget grant, to support schools with overall costs including pay awards.
The Autumn Budget 2024 confirmed an additional £2.3 billion for the core schools budget for 2025-26 compared to 2024-25. This means that core schools funding will reach over £63.9 billion in 2025-26. The Methodology section explains why the table shows a figure which is slightly different to this core schools budget total.
The figures for 2025-26 do not include further funding that the government has committed to providing to support schools with increases to the employer contribution rate and the lower threshold for National Insurance contributions. This funding has not been included because, at time of publication, allocations have not been announced. This funding will, however, be included in the 2025-26 figures in next year’s edition of the report.
The data in this section is presented in two ways.
First, if you are interested in seeing the data for an individual school, the easiest way to access this is using the table tool: this can be found higher up this page by selecting ‘Explore data and files’ and then ‘Create your own tables’.
Alternatively, data for all schools can be accessed by downloading the data file (which is in Excel format) associated with this release entitled ‘School funding allocations for 2024-25 (Excel version)’. This can be found by selecting ‘Explore data and files’ and then ‘List of all supporting files’.
The data shows the total funding that has been allocated to each individual mainstream school through several different funding streams for 2024-25. This covers funding allocated to mainstream schools for their running costs for pupils aged 5-16, that was provided through some of the funding streams covered in the other main section of this report, “School revenue funding for 5-16 year olds for 2010-11 to 2025-26”:
The school funding allocations data also includes several other funding streams for schools that are not included in the figures in the previous section. This funding is provided to schools for specific functions and pupils of other ages in attendance. Detailed school allocations through these funding streams have been previously published for 2024-25, but they are included here to show schools’ data in a single place:
For core funding, the data shows financial year 2024-25 allocations for local authority maintained schools, and academic year 2024/25 allocations for academies (including free schools). This is because these are the time periods for which maintained schools and academies receive their budgets.
For the other grants, the data primarily shows allocations for financial year 2024-25. More information about this data and the different elements of funding presented is provided in the Methodology section.
The totals of the figures in this section do not match those for 2024-25 shown in the time series dataset, for several reasons.
First, the figures presented in this section relate to mainstream schools only, whereas the time series dataset also includes funding for age 5-16 pupils attending other types of institution, such as special schools, non-maintained special schools and alternative provision settings.
Second, these school-level figures for 2024-25 include some funding (the PE and sport premium and universal infant free school meals) which are not included in the time series, for the reasons explained above.
Please note that schools listed in the data are as at 31 March 2024. The figures do not reflect where schools have changed their name, opened, closed, or have been subject to other changes since that date.
For years prior to 2019-20, these data were published by ESFA in a separate annual report ‘Schools block funding allocations’. However, those previous reports presented data for core funding only. The more recent school funding statistics reports also include data on schools’ allocations for the pupil premium, UIFSM and other grants as listed above.
The figures presented here are the funding schools received in 2024-25. These are not the same as illustrative allocations under the national funding formula (NFF) in 2024-25 that the DfE has previously published.
The NFF is a single, national formula which calculates an illustrative allocation for all mainstream schools in England based mainly on their pupils’ needs and characteristics. However, schools’ NFF allocations for 2024-25 were in most cases not exactly the same as the funding they actually received.
For each local authority in England, the schools NFF calculates overall per-pupil amounts at primary and secondary level, which are then multiplied by the latest pupil numbers to give a total allocation to the authority. Each local authority then determines schools’ final allocations for the year through setting a local funding formula.
It is schools’ final funding as indicated by their authority’s local formula which is shown in this report.
The data shows figures for 20,150 mainstream schools in England. Of these, 10,138 are maintained schools, meaning that they are overseen by the local authority, and 10,012 are academies, meaning they operate independently of local authority control and receive their funding directly from the ESFA.
The basic entitlement factor in authorities’ local formula gives every school a basic amount of funding for every pupil, and authorities could specify different per-pupil amounts for primary age pupils, for pupils in key stage 3 (years 7 to 9), and for pupils in key stage 4 (years 10 and 11).
Differences between schools’ basic entitlement funding reflect where they had different numbers of pupils and where their respective local authorities decided to set different per-pupil rates in their 2024-25 local formulae.
In their local formula, authorities also use several other ‘pupil-led factors’ – these are factors where the amount of funding a school receives depends on the number of pupils with appropriate characteristics that attend the school. Descriptions of each factor can be found in the Methodology section.
Figure 2 shows the percentage of schools receiving funding in 2024-25 through each of these other pupil-led factors.
Differences in the amount of funding that schools received through the pupil-led factors in 2024-25 were due to several reasons, such as: where schools had different numbers of pupils who were eligible to attract funding through the factor, and where the local authority set different per-pupil rates in their local formula.
The DfE already publishes a large amount of information about funding allocated to schools. This section indicates where some of this further information can be found.
Since 2018-19, school funding has been distributed according to a formula based on the individual needs and characteristics of every school in England. In 2024-25, the national funding formula (NFF) was used to determine the total schools block funding for each local authority, but local authorities continued to be responsible for distributing that money between the schools in their area using a locally-agreed formula. The school-level figures presented in this report are mainstream schools’ final funding allocations, calculated using their respective local formulae. More information about the schools NFF in 2024-25 can be found on the DfE website (opens in a new tab). In many cases the final allocations presented here will differ slightly from the NFF figures for 2024-25, including because the latter are based on schools’ pupil counts and characteristics from an earlier period (as explained in more detail in the school-level chapter).
Details of pupil premium funding to schools in 2024-25 can be found on the allocations and conditions of grant page (opens in a new tab).
Details of PE and sport premium funding allocated in 2024-25 can be found on the conditions of grant page (opens in a new tab).
More information about universal infant free school meals funding for academic year 2024/25 can be found on the UIFSM allocations page (opens in a new tab).
Details of teachers’ pay additional grant funding to schools in 2024-25 can be found on the guidance page (opens in a new tab).
Information about the funding provided through the teachers’ pay additional grant in 2024-25 can be found on its guidance page (opens in a new tab).
Details of the funding given to schools through the core schools budget grant can be found on its guidance page (opens in a new tab).
While this report focuses on funding provided for schools, the department already publishes official statistics reports on how schools and local authorities spent their funding on education, children's services and social care. These can be found on the local authority and school finance page (opens in a new tab).
Data on trends in school spending is published by the IFS as part of their annual report on all education spending, but is not directly comparable to our time series on funding, primarily due to different coverage. Their 2024-25 report can be found on the IFS website (opens in a new tab).
Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA) data is published by HM Treasury and can be found on their PESA page (opens in a new tab).
Find out how and why we collect, process and publish these statistics.
These are Official Statistics and have been produced in line with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.
This can be broadly interpreted to mean that these statistics are:
Find out more about the standards we follow to produce these statistics through our Standards for official statistics published by DfE guidance.
Our statistical practice is regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR).
OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to.
You are welcome to contact us directly with any comments about how we meet these standards. Alternatively, you can contact OSR by emailing regulation@statistics.gov.uk or via the OSR website.
If you have a specific enquiry about School funding statistics statistics and data:
If you have a media enquiry:
Telephone: 020 7783 8300
If you have a general enquiry about the Department for Education (DfE) or education:
Telephone: 037 0000 2288
Opening times:
Monday to Friday from 9.30am to 5pm (excluding bank holidays)
Don't include personal or financial information like your National Insurance number or credit card details.