How have you been affected by the public sector pay cap?

Teachers have seen average pay fall by £3 an hour, the government’s pay advisers have found in a new report. Photograph: Caiaimage/Chris Ryan/Getty Images

Ministers are calling on the public sector pay cap to be reconsidered, after a new report found median hourly earnings of UK workers dropped in real terms by almost 6% between 2005 and 2015, with some sectors suffering worse drops than others.

Labour said the figures were highly significant, damning evidence of “the harsh and unfair reality of the Tories’ pay freeze on hard-working public sector workers”, whose earnings are decided by the government in contrast to those in the private sector.

Pay rises for five million public sector workers are set by independent pay review bodies, but have been capped at 1% since 2013, before which there was a two-year freeze on pay for all but the lowest-paid workers.

The teaching profession has seen average pay fall by £3 an hour in real terms and police officers by £2 an hour, while the wages of nurses have stagnated during a decade of public sector salary freezes. Police officers saw a median real earnings fall from £20 an hour to £18 an hour, and prison officers saw median real earnings fall from £16 an hour to £15 an hour over the same period.

The issue of public sector pay is expected to come to a head at a meeting of the cabinet on Tuesday morning, after signals from a series of influential ministers, including Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Justine Greening and Michael Gove.

Share your experiences

If you work in the public sector, we’d like you to tell us how the pay freeze has affected your life.

You can fill in the form below and we’ll use a selection of responses in our reporting. We will keep your information as secure as possible.