Reward and Recognition and performance-related payments: 2025 to 2026 financial year

You asked

FOI reference: FOI-2026-3666

For the 2025 to 2026 financial year:

1) The total value of your department's non-consolidated performance pay pot (the non-consolidated pay remit).

2) The amount and the proportion (%) of that pot allocated to (a) in-year Reward and Recognition scheme (R&R), also sometimes known as discretionary recognition awards, and (b) end-of-year performance-related payments (PRP).

3) For R&R and for PRP separately: the total number of awards made, total expenditure, and the mean and median award value.

4) The figures in items 2 and 3 broken down by grade.

5) The figures in items 2 and 3 broken down by directorate/business area.

6) The figures in items 2 and 3 broken down by the protected characteristics if recorded (eg sex, age band, ethnicity, disability status).

7) Copies of the policy, guidance, and eligibility or assessment criteria governing R&R awards and PRP awards, including any changes to those criteria over the period.

8) Any internal analysis, board or committee papers, or Equality Impact Assessment concerning the allocation of funds between PRP and R&R, or the equality implications of either scheme.

We said

Thank you for your request. 

For our grades below the senior civil service, their non-consolidated performance pay pot is set at 1.0% of their pay-bill. For our senior civil service grades, their non-consolidated performance pay pot is set at 3.3% of their pay bill. 

For our grades below the senior civil service, the whole non-consolidated performance pay pot is used for their in-year Reward and Recognition scheme. For our senior civil service grades, 47% of their non-consolidated performance pay pot is used for their in-year Reward and Recognition scheme, and 53% of their non-consolidated performance pay pot is used for end year Performance-Related Pay (PRP) payments. 

For Reward and Recognition payments, there were 29,926 awards, an expenditure of £2,563,250.00, a mean award value of £84.75 and a median award value of £50.00. 

For PRP payments, there were 34 awards, an expenditure of £195,000.00, a mean award value of £5,735.29 and a median award value of £5,000.00. 

Our guidance documents are provided as separate attachments. Additionally, our approach to the payment of awards for our senior civil service grades is governed by Cabinet Office guidance. 

Our 2025 Gender Pay Gap report, which includes our bonus pay gap, is available on the UK Statistics Authority website. 

To fulfil the remainder of your request, we would need to carry out significant additional processing of data. 

To determine Reward and Recognition payments by the variables requested, we would need to cross reference information from a number of different data sources, across the 29,296 rows of data. This would ensure we were attributing the correct point-in-time variable to the correct payment date, as staff data may have changed across the 12-month period. Following this, the data would need to be aggregated into the categories requested.

Additionally, we would need to separately process grade, business areas and protected characteristic information for performance-related payments for senior civil service colleagues. The location, extraction and collation of this information would take more than 24 hours and would therefore exceed the cost limit for FOI requests. As such, Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies. 

You may wish to resubmit your request with narrower parameters so we may answer within the cost limit. This could be done by refining your query to questions 4 and 5 only for Reward and Recognition awards. 

Our Annual Report and Accounts 2025/2026 provides performance-related payments for directors and above broken down by job title, grade and approximate amount received. This is available on the UK Statistics Authority website and provides some information in scope of parts 4 and 5 of your request for performance-related payments.