Millions of teachers, NHS staff and other public sector workers have been told how much their pay will rise today.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has accepted recommendations from independent pay review bodies (PRBs) for above-inflation wage rises in the 2025/26 financial year. However unions reacted with fury, with both teachers and doctors threatening strike action.

Most doctors and dentists have been handed 4% pay awards, with an average of 5.4% for resident doctors - formerly known as junior doctors - who are getting a consolidated sum of £750 on top of the 4%. Nurses and NHS staff on Agenda for Change contracts will see their pay go up by 3.6%.

Teachers will receive a 4% award, while school staff including teaching assistants, caterers, admin staff and caretakers have been offered 3.2%.

Senior military (two-star rank and above) will receive a 3.75% increase to base pay, while other members of the armed forces will see their wages rise by 4.5%. Top civil servants will get a pay boost of 3.25% and prison officers will get 4%.

The figure is above inflation - which rose to 3.5% in April, up from 2.6% in March and the highest since January 2024. It is also higher than the 2.8% budgeted for and the Treasury has previously told Whitehall departments that they won't get extra cash to fund pay deals. Unions have warned that pay hikes must be fully-funded rather than paid for through stretched budgets.

It comes after the Labour Government ended a wave of public sector strikes last summer by accepting recommendations to increase public sector pay by between 4.75% and 6% for 2024-25. Doctors, nurses and teachers had been among those taking part in mass walkouts during Rishi Sunak's premiership.

Doctors leaders reacted with fury at the news, saying it did little to address 15 years of pay erosion. Chair of the BMA council, Professor Philip Banfield said: "No one wants a return to scenes of doctors on picket lines – we’d rather be in hospitals, in GP practices or in the community seeing patients, improving the health of the public – but today’s actions from the Government have sadly made this look far more likely.”

Royal College of Nursing (RCN) general secretary Professor Nicola Ranger said: "This pay award is entirely swallowed up by inflation and does nothing to change the status quo - where nursing is not valued, too few enter it and too many quit.

"It is a grotesque decision to again favour doctor colleagues for higher increases than nursing and the rest of the NHS."

Leading dentists said the headline 4% pay uplift "will do little to halt the exodus from NHS dentistry". Shiv Pabary, chairman of the British Dental Association's general dental practice committee, said: "On paper, dentists are being offered an uplift of 4%.

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"The reality is they won't see anything like this, unless ministers cover the mounting cost of care. Without real change, practices will remain stuck delivering NHS work at a loss and the exodus from this service will continue."

The GMB union said it would ballot tens of thousands of NHS and ambulance workers in England on this year's pay award. The ballot opens today and closes on July 17.

GMB national secretary Rachel Harrison said: "We're pleased dedicated NHS staff will get their pay rise closer to their anniversary date than they have in previous years. The decision on whether this pay award is acceptable is for GMB members to decide."

School leaders warned heads could be forced to make cuts to make up the shortfall from their budgets. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said £615 million of additional funding will be provided to schools this financial year to help them with the costs of pay, but heads will also be expected to find cash through improved productivity.

Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said the move from 2.8% to 4% for teachers was welcome but warned that it could force heads to make cuts.

He said: "Whilst we acknowledge and welcome additional funding to that initially offered by government, it is still the case that the pay award is not fully funded. In many schools this will mean cuts in service provision to children and young people, job losses, and additional workloads for an already overstretched profession."

Pepe Di’Iasio, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, welcomed the boost to teachers' pay but said school budgets were already stretched to breaking point.

He said: "If the government really thinks it will be possible to bridge this funding gap through ‘improved productivity and smarter spending’ then it is mistaken. Schools have already spent many years cutting costs to the bone and beyond. The most likely outcome is that there will be further cuts to educational provision."

IFS Research Fellow Luke Sibieta said pay offers for teachers "represent small real-terms rises, given that inflation is expected to be about 3% for the current year as a whole". He said: "The government is providing an extra grant to schools to help cover most of the costs. However, to afford the pay offer, schools will still need to find savings elsewhere of around £400 million or just less than 1% of their budgets. This is a bit less than was assumed a few months ago in the government’s proposals to the pay review body, which will probably come as a slight relief to schools.

"Given that the pay offer is only just above inflation, the real-terms cuts to most teacher salaries since 2010 still remain in place. Following on from these pay rises, most teacher salaries will be about 8% lower in real-terms than in 2010. However, because of recent boosts to starting salaries, salary levels for new teachers will be about 1% above their 2010 level in real-terms."