At 0.5% of your annual pay bill, your contribution to the Apprenticeship Levy can represent a significant investment in your workforce. If your organisation has a payroll of over £3 million, you will be contributing to the levy. These funds are available to you for up to 24 months (reducing to 12 months for funds entering your account from August 2026), after which any unused balance expires. Put simply, if you don’t use it, you lose it.
Levy funds can be used to invest in apprenticeship programmes and apprenticeship units, making them a powerful tool to develop your people and build capability across your organisation. This is not limited to new hires. Many employers use these programmes to upskill existing employees, particularly when developing future leaders, strengthening management capability and preparing individuals for progression.
Apprenticeships provide structured, impactful development across a wide range of roles. From early career talent through to experienced professionals, they support the development of core skills, leadership behaviours and business-critical capabilities. Alongside full apprenticeship programmes, apprenticeship units offer a flexible way to quickly build targeted skills in priority areas, enabling organisations to respond to immediate needs while maintaining a longer-term development strategy.
By taking a pathway-led approach, organisations can create clear progression routes for their people. This might include developing emerging talent, building leadership capability over time, or supporting individuals to move into more senior roles. Combining apprenticeships, apprenticeship units and, where appropriate, commercial training creates a comprehensive and scalable approach to workforce development.
Our role is to work in partnership with you to design a structured plan that makes the most of your levy investment. We help you align training to your organisational goals, ensuring your programmes deliver both measurable business impact and long-term value.
Not sure how to get the most from your levy? We can support you to plan the best way to invest your funds and maximise their impact.
Our clients will recover in excess of £20 million from the Apprenticeship Levy this year.
Every apprenticeship that we offer has a recovery value. Depending on the specific apprenticeship standard you choose. The rates are set by Government and will be subject to annual review. See our AI and Automation Practitioner course description for an example.
The simplest way to think about how to recover your levy is to work out how much you are paying in annually and then look up the values (and recommended durations) of the apprenticeships you want to use and calculate how much of your levy such a programme would recover.
All apprenticeships are different. Not only do they have different content but will have different programme lengths, number of workshops and costs. The minimum length of an apprenticeship is 8 months, but some may last 18 months, 24 months or in some cases even longer. The cost of the apprenticeship is split over the duration of the programme on a monthly basis.
Prior to any learner starting with us we will plan the delivery over the relevant time period to ensure everyone is clear on the schedule.
There are a few additional factors to consider when planning your levy investment. Typically, 20% of the funding value is withheld until the apprentice completes their End Point Assessment (EPA).
The EPA is a final, independent assessment that evaluates the apprentice’s overall competence. This often includes a presentation of their work, alongside questioning from an assessment panel. The remaining 20% of the funding is only released once this process has been successfully completed.
Where apprenticeships include mandatory qualifications, these must also be achieved before the EPA can take place. This makes effective planning and delivery essential, ensuring learners progress on time and are fully prepared for assessment.
From a financial planning perspective, organisations often base their monthly levy recovery on 80% of the total funding value, spread across the duration of the programme, with the final 20% realised upon completion.
To get the ball rolling you’ll need to have registered as a levy-paying employer and set up your Apprenticeship Service (AS) account.
Then it’s a question of working with your training provider to plan your apprenticeship scheme and to profile monthly and annual recovery values. At the Apprenticeship College, our planning culminates in a Development Plan that:
Our apprenticeship training uses a combination of masterclasses, immersive theatre-based learning, technical workshops, online learning and skills coaching. Learn more about our training model here.
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