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Apprenticeship Levy receipts hit record £4.4bn as employer contributions approach £30bn

ended 24. July 2026

Apprenticeship Levy receipts rose 7.1% to a record £4.39 billion in 2025/26, according to a new analysis by Turing College.

Employers have contributed approximately £29.8 billion through the levy since its introduction nearly a decade ago.

Annual receipts are now 93.4% higher than in the levy’s first full financial year.

May 2026 receipts fell 21.6% compared with April but remained 7.8% higher than a year earlier.

  • Is it worth it for businesses?
  • £30 billion has been collected but how much has actually been spent? Is there some mystery around that?
  • What are the pros and cons of the Apprenticeship Levy?

Responses by tomorrow.

3 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Kate Underwood
Founder & Chief People Strategist at Kate Underwood HR and Training
Is the Apprenticeship Levy worth it? Depends who you ask.
Big corporates? They see a tax. Another line on the payroll to moan about. Half never spend it, and the leftovers drift quietly back to the Treasury. That's how you collect thirty billion quid and still can't say where it went. Now ask the small firms I look after. Totally different story. For them it's a lifeline. Bring fresh talent through the door, or upskill the team you've already got, and barely pay out a penny beyond the time it takes. Here's the bit that counts. Invest in people and they feel valued, so they stay. Loyalty you can't buy, only earn. The catch? Time. Training takes mentoring, patience, hours a busy owner hasn't always got. But get it right and the payoff is massive. A skilled, committed person who actually wants to be there. One firm's stealth tax is another firm's shot at building a team that sticks. So fix the admin. Protect the positives. Don't let the paperwork bury the best deal going.
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Editor
Harvey Dhillon
Founder & CEO at Zmartly
Where has the money gone? Nowhere hidden. The levy is a payroll tax wearing a training badge. There is no pot with your name on it. It joins general tax, and a separate fixed budget pays for training, so the total collected cannot tell you the training spend. Nothing is missing. It was never yours.

Go over a £3 million wage bill and you pay 0.5 per cent of the whole bill, not just the part above, less a £15,000 allowance. A haulier on £10 million pays £35,000 a year. That is another salary.

The pros and cons split by who you are. For a builder with 12 staff who pays nothing in, it gets better on 1 August 2026, when apprentices aged 16 to 24 are funded in full up to each course cap. For the firms who do pay, it gets worse. New funds will expire after 12 months instead of 24, and once your balance runs out your share of the cost jumps from 5 per cent to 25.

Half the time, five times the bill. If you pay the levy, start before August. If you do not, wait.
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Ritesh Sood B.A CeMAP®Diploma R05
CEO & Founder at Soul Mortgages
Record receipts, but ask two questions. Who pays, and where does it go? On paper, it's a tax on big employers. In practice, contractors inside IR35 pay it too: umbrella companies deduct the 0.5% levy from their day rates, so individual contractors personally fund a corporate training scheme they'll never benefit from. A stealth payroll tax. As for the money, nearly £30bn has been collected since 2017 yet apprenticeship starts among 16 to 24-year-olds fell about 40%. We doubled the cash and halved the young apprentices. Why? Unspent funds expire after 24 months and vanish back into the Treasury, over £3bn lost so far, while firms rebadged MBAs for existing managers as "apprenticeships" just to claw something back. And from April 2026, the expiry window will be halved to 12 months, guaranteeing even more expires. Any levy whose best feature, from the Treasury's view, is the money that goes unspent, isn't a training scheme. It's a revenue scheme wearing a hi-vis jacket.