Budget 2026: what to watch on 28 October
Nothing to do before the date. Plenty to have modelled before it.
The Budget is on Wednesday 28 October. For anyone running early careers programmes there are three open questions rather than one, and only one of them has been flagged in advance.
The flagged one is brokerage. Government confirmed on 7 October that the mayoral apprenticeship brokerage pilots expand to all 14 areas with directly elected mayors, with an extra £100 million, and said in terms that further detail follows at the Budget. So the spending is announced and the mechanism is not. What is worth knowing by the end of October is whether brokers route candidates to a training provider or straight to the employer, because that decides whether this is a recruitment channel or a competitor.
The second question is what the August and October changes cost over a full year. Co-investment was rewritten from 1 August so that government funds the whole cost for apprentices aged 16 to 24 at both levy and non-levy employers. The £2,000 hiring payment opened on 1 October. Both are open-ended commitments whose cost depends on employer behaviour that nobody has measured yet, because the behaviour has not happened. A first-year underspend invites expansion. A first-year overspend invites a cap, and caps in this system usually arrive as eligibility conditions rather than as a stated budget limit.
The third is whether anything else gets defunded. Sixteen standards went in September. Skills England has separately been reviewing standards to clarify which qualifications inside them are mandatory and which are not, and a review that produces one list has a habit of producing a second.
What it changed from: for the last two years the direction has been set at fiscal events and the detail has followed in the funding rules three to six months later. What follows: that pattern means nothing in the rules changes on the day, so there is no compliance action to take on 28 October.
The useful preparation is in the modelling. If you are costing 2027/28 provision now, build it so a co-investment rate, an age threshold and the twelve month expiry on levy funds are each a single input you can change, rather than assumptions baked through a spreadsheet. Every one of those three has moved once already in eighteen months.