News for School Payroll Staff

Kia ora koutou

Thank you for all the Start of Year work you’ve been doing to set up your school’s employees for the year. If you have any issues, please get in touch with your payroll advisor. We’re here to help.

2025 audit reports – available for download from 9 February 2026

Please download these reports from EdPay and the Ministry’s Secure Data Portal from 9 February. You will need the reports to complete your school’s 2025 financial statements.

Resources

If you need more information or help, please use these resources.

• For instructions and a checklist to guide you through the process, you can download the Ministry’s Annual reporting guidelines - Accounting for School Payroll
• If you need help with the annual financial statements contact your School Finance Advisor
• For audit information, see EdPay’s page on Audit requirements for payroll records
• For the timeline and process information, see the Ministry’s webpage School annual financial statements - Ministry of Education

Key dates

Overpayments

In preparation for visits from your auditors, we also recommend checking whether there is any overpayment debt owed to your school and overdue. These overpayments will show on the payroll error schedules you download from the Ministry’s Secure Data Portal. It is good practice to regularly review overpayments that are due to your school and to let us know if we need to step up our collection efforts or write off the debt.

Extending the Cultural Leadership Allowance (CULA) end date for teachers at primary and area schools

If a teacher at your school is currently receiving CULA, you may need to update the end date of the allowance in EdPay.
CULA is intended to be a permanent allowance and would normally be allocated with the end date 31 December 2049. However, many eligible schools have assigned an end date of January 2026, which will mean the allowance has now stopped.
In some cases, CULA may be set as a fixed-term allowance, but this should only be for a specific and agreed reason, such as covering parental leave.
Please check the end date in the Allowances Entitlement section in EdPay for relevant teachers. If needed, update the allowance end date to 31 December 2049. For step-by-step guidance, please refer to the Cultural Leadership Allowance page on the Edpay website.
If you have any queries about CULA please contact ohumahi.support@education.govt.nz.

Community Education Collective Agreement (CECA) changes

The new CECA agreement includes an increase in pay rates for Tutors, Professional Supervisors, Coordinator Assistants, and Non-teaching Coordinators Levels 1–3, with a backpay lumpsum in PP24. There are also changes to some allowances and a new parental care allowance.
Some employees are part of the Administration Staff Pay Equity Claim (PEC) and may receive a second backpay later in the year. This includes former employees.

Key dates

• The new collective agreement is effective from 28 November 2025.
• Payslips from 17 February 2026 (pay day PP24) will show new pay rates and allowances and include backpay from 26 November 2025 (the new pay rate begins two days before the agreement date).
• The new classification and allowance codes will appear in the SUE report from PP24.
• For employees who are included in the PEC, payslips from 28 April 2026 (pay day PP02) will show backpay across current and former jobs (from 20 August 2021) and may include recalculated holiday pay and termination pay.
• Casual staff will see the change to their holiday pay in payslips from PP02. 
• Employees who don’t have casual holiday pay will see holiday pay or termination pay on their payslips from 12 May 2026 (pay day PP03).

Onboarding / new hire - changes to designation names and classification codes

We are changing some names and codes in preparation for pay equity claims. These changes only affect roles that are included in the pay equity claim.
Please select the new designations and codes when you are onboarding new hires. You do not need to make any changes for existing employees, we will update them automatically.

New designation names

These designation codes have been renamed.

New classification codes

The new classification codes are for roles that are included in the Administration Staff PEC.

Note: Non-teaching Coordinators Level 2 will not have a new classification code as they are not included in pay equity claims.  

Allowances

Changes to current allowances

Reimbursements:

• Motorcycle/moped use can now be reimbursed, if required for official business. 
• Adult Community Education (ACE) and Out of Hours Music & Arts (OHMA) employees can now reimburse expenses related to their course.

Schools are responsible for checking the receipts for claimed expenses. Please submit the reimbursement either:

• on an EdPay timesheet, select the relevant Pay Code (eg, REIM or MCYC), or
• on a Timesheet for Community Education (EP14nt) form, enter the reimbursement amount in field 12 for expenses or the kilometres in field 13 for motor vehicle. (See information about the combined EP10nt/EP14nt at the end of this newsletter.)

New parental care allowance

The agreement includes a new parental payment for eligible employees who:

• return to duty before or at the end of their parental leave, and 
• complete a further six months’ service.

The payment will be paid from central funding (11100). To apply, please use the Paid parental leave grant (EP27) form. See EdPay forms.

Individual employment agreement (IEA)

The new Community Education IEA (CE25) was promulgated on 12 December 2025. If any employees at your school have signed this IEA, please go to the IEA change screen (My School > Administration > IEA change tab), click on the Community Education IEA (CE25), enter the date the employee signed the agreement and click SUBMIT.

Start of Year (SOY) reminders

Thank you for all your hard work to make sure your employees’ start dates and other pay information is correct for the new school year. Here are some final SOY reminders.

The SOY screen closes at 5pm on 26 February 2026

Please check that the restart counter is on zero and that you have restarted all your employees before the SOY screen closes.

Download your SOY report

Please remember to download your SOY report before the screen closes. Your school’s auditors will need this report and it won’t be available after the SOY screen closes.

Annualisation top-up

The annualisation top-up for returning employees is paid in PP24, pay day 17 February. Top-up amounts include:

• a holiday pay top-up for additional hours worked throughout the year, and/or
• a percentage of gross earnings for pay periods 19–22 if they were term-time-only in 2024 but annualised in 2025.

Forms EP10nt/EP14nt form updated and combined

If you used the EP10nt for any employees at your school, please now use the EP14nt instead.  See EdPay forms.

EP24nt now available on our website

The Annualisation agreement change of hours/pay rate for non-teachers (EP24nt) form is now available on our website’s forms page. Use this form if you need to change pay-affecting details for a currently annualised employee.

If you have questions about anything in this update, please contact your dedicated payroll advisor.

Ngā mihi
Education Payroll