Guidance

Apprenticeship funding rules: 2026 to 2027

The rules employers and training providers must follow to get funding for training and assessing apprentices in England.

• From: Department for Work and Pensions
• Published: 22 April 2026
• Last updated: 3 August 2026
  Show all updates

  1. 3 August 2026

     Added 'Privately funded apprenticeships: rules and guidance'.

  2. 29 July 2026

     Added a paragraph explaining the version 3 changes to the landing page under the heading 'Summary of changes'. Replaced PDF with 'Apprenticeship funding rules: 2026 to 2027 (version 3)'. Amended the title for the web page to 'Apprenticeship funding rules: summary of changes (version 3)'. On the page, we have amended the 2nd paragraph under the heading 'Purpose'. We have added updates from version 3 to the 'Employer Co-investment' table and 'Glossary' table.

  3. 15 July 2026

     Published Version 2 of the Apprenticeship funding rules, 2026 to 2027. Updated the accompanying summary of changes to show the changes made between Version 1 and Version 2.

  4. 15 June 2026

     Version 1 of the apprenticeship funding rules and a summary of changes have been added.

  5. 10 June 2026

     Information added about the publishing of a new version of the funding rules.

  6. 22 April 2026

     First published.

Applies to England

Documents

Apprenticeship funding rules: 2026 to 2027 (version 3)

PDF, 1.13 MB, 176 pages

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Apprenticeship funding rules: summary of changes (version 3)

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Privately funded apprenticeships: rules and guidance

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Details

The 2026 to 2027 funding rules apply to apprenticeships starting between 1 August 2026 and 31 July 2027.

These rules apply to:

• employers
• employer-providers
• main providers

There are different funding rules for different apprenticeship start dates. You must follow the funding rules that apply to each apprentice.

Summary of changes

On 22 April 2026, we published the 2026 to 2027 apprenticeship funding rules (version 1) and a summary of changes to make it easy to identify the differences between the 2025 to 2026 and 2026 to 2027 rules.

On 15 July 2026, we published version 2 of the rules. The summary of changes now includes the changes made in both version 1 and version 2.

On 29 July 2026, we published version 3 of the rules. The summary of changes now includes the changes made in version 1, version 2 and version 3 of the rules.

Further guidance

We have published the rules for other years separately.