Academies Budget Forecast Return 2026: what has changed and how to prepare

The academies budget forecast return is a financial data collection the Department for Education (DfE) uses to assess the financial health of the academies sector. It spans the past, current and future financial years, combining actuals from the year just gone with forecasts for the year ahead and a three-year medium-term view. 

You should complete the BFR if your academy trust was active on 1 May 2026. The return is prepared on an accruals and prepayments basis. Multi academy trusts that prepare aggregated financial statements submit a single consolidated return that brings together the budgets of each academy in the trust, rather than a separate return per school.

The 2026 academies budget forecast return opened on 13 July 2026. The deadline for submitting your BFR to the DfE is 24 September 2026. Submissions can only be made through the DfE's online form - you cannot submit by uploading a workbook. 

To access the form you will need a DfE Sign-in (DSI) account. If anyone in your team is new to the BFR, set up their DSI access early rather than in the final week, as it is a common cause of last-minute delays. 

Give yourself an internal deadline 

The DfE deadline is 24 September, but that is not the date to aim for. Setting an internal submission date at least two weeks earlier gives trustees or governors time to review and approve the return before it goes to the DfE, and leaves room to resolve any validation issues without pressure. With the workbook arriving later this year, that internal buffer matters more than usual.

If you completed the BFR last year, most of the form will feel familiar, and the September 2024 to March 2025 period will be pre-populated with the data your trust returned. The main changes and points to note for 2026, as set out in the DfE's guidance for completing the online form, are: 

• ICT spend - you need to report both actual and forecast figures for ICT costs, split correctly between revenue and capital. 
• Buildings repairs and maintenance - a dedicated line (379) separates what your trust spends on buildings repairs and maintenance, and the percentage funded through capital grants. 
• Pay awards - the three-year forecast section asks you to state your assumptions for teaching and support staff pay awards, so agree these internally before you start. 
• RAAC - guidance sets out where to report reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete funding and expenditure, if relevant to your estate. 
• Privacy notices - new privacy notice sections have been added to the guidance. 

The return itself is completed in the DfE online form, but the accuracy of your submission depends almost entirely on the preparation you do first. A clear order of work keeps the process manageable: 

• Confirm DSI access for everyone who needs it, and check who in your trust is responsible for each part of the return. 
• Complete a clean month-end. Your actuals cover a fixed period, so post all accruals, prepayments and adjustments before you pull the figures. Recreating an historic "as at" position later is far harder than getting it right now. 
• Reconcile against your finance system. Cross-check the return against your trust's internal accounts, last year's BFR and your audited financial statements before you commit anything. 
• Agree your assumptions with the wider team. Work with your senior leadership and HR colleagues so pupil numbers, staffing forecasts, pay assumptions and funding changes are realistic and consistent across the three-year view. 
• Use the validation checks. The DfE workbook and form include validation to flag errors early - run these before submission rather than relying on a final read-through. 
• Build in review and sign-off time. Get the return in front of trustees or governors ahead of your internal deadline, not the DfE one. 

The DfE also runs weekly dial-in sessions during the collection period where you can ask questions about your return, which are worth using if anything in the form is unclear for your trust's circumstances. 

Whilst the BFR is a DfE requirement, the work behind it is genuinely useful to your trust, not just as an exercise in compliance. Done well, it gives you three things. 

1. Strategic clarity: pulling three years of forecasts together forces a clear view of how your resources line up against your plans, and where the pressure points are. This is the same discipline behind integrated curriculum and financial planning, which links your curriculum decisions to their financial impact. 
2. Earlier sight of risk: testing your assumptions and modelling forecasts surfaces financial risks while there is still time to act on them. 
3. Stronger financial controls: the month-end discipline and reconciliation the BFR needs is the same discipline that keeps your day-to-day finances accurate and catches anomalies early. Treating the BFR as a planning tool rather than a form to get through is what turns it from an annual task into something your trust actually gets value from. 

None of these are hard to avoid once you know they are coming, but there are a few that catch trusts out most often: 

• Underestimating how long it takes. Gathering accurate actuals and building forecasts for every academy is more work than the form itself suggests, particularly without a system that holds the data ready. 
• An incomplete month-end. If accruals, prepayments and adjustments are not fully posted before you pull your figures, the gaps show up in your actuals and are hard to correct later. 
• Assumptions that do not line up. Pay awards, pupil numbers and funding changes need to be consistent across the three-year forecast, not set differently in different sections. 
• Leaving no time for sign-off. A return that reaches trustees the day before the deadline leaves no room to resolve a query. 

Most of these come back to the same thing: having accurate, up-to-date financial data ready before you start. That is where the right budgeting software makes the difference, keeping your actuals and forecasts in one place so the return draws on figures you can trust. 

Most of the time taken to complete the BFR is not the form itself – but in gathering accurate actuals, reconciling them against your finance system and pulling forecasts together for every academy in the trust. This is where the right budgeting software removes the manual effort. 

Access Education Budgets is ready for the 2026 academies budget forecast return. The Academies Budget Forecast Return report has been updated to reflect the DfE's 2026 workbook, and it is available in both single academy and consolidated versions - so MATs can prepare one trust-wide return rather than stitching together separate school workbooks. Forecast years are populated automatically from your published budget scenarios, so the numbers in the return match the budgets you are already working to. 

If your trust also uses Access Education Finance, the return imports trial balance actuals directly from your finance system to populate the previous and current year figures. That removes the copy-and-paste step between systems that introduces errors and keeps the actuals in your return matching your official accounts.