Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science has confirmed plans to raise teacher salaries from September 1, 2026, and announced a sweeping structural reform of educator pay — expected to launch in 2027. But behind the optimistic headlines lie significant caveats, from the risk of “paper” pay raises to the postponement of a reform that was promised earlier.
What Has Already Happened: +30% from January 1, 2026
The Cabinet of Ministers approved a decree prepared by the Ministry of Education providing for a 30% increase in base salaries for all teaching and academic staff from January 1, 2026. Funding the measure required 64.6 billion hryvnias in the state budget, and the raise extended beyond school teachers to educators in preschool, extracurricular, vocational, and professional pre-higher education institutions.
Yet the starting baseline remains extremely low. Education Minister Oksен Lisovyi acknowledged that the average teacher’s salary in Ukraine is around 14,000 hryvnias, calling the figure “critically low.”
What Is Planned: +20% from September 1, 2026
From September 1, salaries are set to rise by a further 20%, making the combined annual increase one of the largest in recent memory.
There is an important caveat here, however. Serhiy Babak, chair of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Education, pointed out that the planned 20% is calculated against the 2025 salary level — not the already-raised 2026 base — meaning the real increase amounts to just 15.4%. “This needs to be explained,” he stressed.
The Key Development: The Reform Is Being Postponed
Back in 2025, the Ministry of Education promised to implement a structural reform of teacher pay precisely from September 1, 2026. That will not happen.
At a session of the relevant parliamentary committee, the Deputy Minister stated that it would be more appropriate to carry out the reform from September 1, 2027, in order to allow more time to draft legislative amendments and reach deeper agreement with trade unions. Committee chair Babak summarized the outcome bluntly: “There will be no pay reform on September 1, 2026.”
He also noted that an additional 4.6 billion hryvnias had been allocated specifically to fund the reform from September 2026, and that if it is now being deferred, the question arises whether those funds might be better used elsewhere.
What the Ministry of Education Is Proposing for 2027
The Ministry is developing a new salary calculation model. Its key elements are:
The prestige allowance folded into the base salary. The proposal is to consolidate the professional prestige allowance directly into the base salary, so that a portion of pay that currently depends on local government decisions becomes a guaranteed component of every paycheck. This is a direct response to a systemic problem: according to Minister Lisovyi, 79 out of 1,450 local communities cut the prestige allowance by at least 10% — even as overall teacher salaries were being raised.
The hardship supplement also folded into the base salary. A baseline payment of 2,000 hryvnias is to be integrated into the base salary as a guaranteed component for all school educators, while teachers in frontline and border communities will retain an additional 2,000 hryvnias on top of that.
Exiting the Unified Tariff Grid (UTG). The Ministry explains that the UTG is shared across very different categories of public-sector workers, meaning that any targeted pay increase for teachers automatically requires significantly larger resources for all other professions tied to the same grid. Leaving the UTG would allow for a separate, more flexible pay mechanism tailored specifically to educators.
The Core Risk: Pay Raises on Paper vs. Real Take-Home Pay
The systemic flaw in the current model is that local communities can effectively cancel out any salary increase by cutting the allowances they finance from local budgets. The new model is specifically designed to close this loophole by converting as many payments as possible into guaranteed components of the base salary.
The Ministry emphasizes that what is on the table right now are proposals and a framework — not a finalized decision. All of the drafts will be discussed with trade unions, local communities, school administrators, parliament, and the professional community before anything is adopted.
Bottom Line
The 2026 teacher pay increases are real, though smaller in practice than the headlines suggest. The structural reform that was supposed to change the very logic of salary calculation has been pushed back to at least September 2027. The central question remains open: will there be sufficient political will and budgetary resources to carry it out in wartime conditions?