About Education Payroll

Education Payroll – Rārangi Utu ā-Mātauranga is a core part of New Zealand’s education sector. We deliver an accurate, timely and secure payroll service to state schools on behalf of the Ministry of Education.

We pay around 100,000 teachers and support staff in around 2,500 schools every fortnight – that’s approximately $283 million per pay period and $7.4 billion per annum.

The schools’ payroll is complex, with many unique requirements and ongoing daily calculations. Our aim is to make payroll tasks easier for school administrators, and to provide assurance for teachers that their pay will be correct and on time every payday.

Education Payroll establishment date

In 2014 the Government transferred ownership and management of the schools’ payroll service from Talent2 to a new government-owned company. A transition programme was put in place to establish the new company, and on 17 October 2014 the service was transitioned to Education Payroll Limited.

Our te reo Māori name

In late 2017 we worked with the Māori Language Commission and the Ministry of Education on a te reo Māori name for Education Payroll Rārangi Utu ā-Mātauranga.

Rārangi is commonly used for listings or ranking of related things. This picks up the idea of roll, as in payroll.  ​

Utu means any sort of payment or adjustment to make things right and balanced. It is a positive word that is always used for wages or salary. (Utu ​is sometimes used in English to mean ‘revenge’.)

Mātauranga is the word for education and the knowledge that results from it.  

EdPay

EdPay – a fully online service – has replaced Novopay Online, which was switched off in October 2021

EdPay is intuitive and easy to use. We’ve made it easy for users to get things right – and hard to get them wrong. We’ve rolled out EdPay functions incrementally, once they were built and tested. EdPay also improves the timeliness and accuracy of schools’ payroll information, increases automation, and removes many of the pain points for schools’ payroll administrators, particularly processes based on lengthy, manual forms.

We engaged with schools early

We began trialling EdPay with payroll administrators and principals with 11 schools in March 2019, adding a further 15 in May, and increased to 200 in July 2019. Based on their feedback, we offered it to an additional 1,000 schools in September 2019, and rolled it out to the rest before the end of the year. EdPay is now available to all schools and has replaced Novopay Online.

Timeframes

EdPay now has most of the functions of the existing forms-based service, and the remainder are being built in stages, once they’re tested and ready. The timesheet and leave functions were switched off in Novopay Online on 6 October 2021, and the entire Novopay Online service was switched off on 20 October 2021.

Schools continue to be supported by their dedicated payroll advisors and there are training guides and materials available on our EdPay training page.

The 2016 Detailed Business Case for a better schools’ payroll