Please take a few moments to check your UCU account details are up to date.

Of particular importance (in addition to having your personal details up to date) are, for legal reasons:

• What is listed as your ‘your workplace’, on the employment tab. Some of these have changed to reflect changes in the university’s organisation
• ‘Who do you work for’, on the employment tab. If you’ve moved (or, if you’re about to, when you move) update your employer and you will be automatically transferred to your new branch. (You can list more than one current employer, but please remove any employer you no longer do paid work for.)
• Whether you have the right category of ‘current membership’, on the membership tab.

Please log in to ‘My UCU’, which you can find from the national website or this website, or by using this direct link if you prefer: https://my.ucu.org.uk/app/utils/login_form/

Branch reps can’t make changes to your My UCU account for you. You don’t need to know your membership number to log into My UCU. There is a ‘forgot password’ option there. If you can’t access My UCU, the UCU membership team will be able to help. https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/2112/Membership

Full membership

If you are doing paid work for the university you should have full, standard membership.

Postgraduate students who do paid teaching should also be on full membership, but if you’ve finished teaching now and don’t know yet if you will have teaching in semester 1 next year, there’s no need to change it now – wait until you know about next term.

Types of student membership

If you are a student, please have a look at the different categories of membership for students, because these changed in recent years: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/5143/Can-students-or-postgraduates-join

Parental leave

Update My UCU if you go on parental leave. This will mean you don’t need to pay subscriptions for that period.

Sick leave and unpaid leave

There’s no need to update My UCU if you’re off sick on full pay (but if there is an industrial action ballot the union will need to know, for legal reasons, if you’re likely to be off work for a long period). If your pay is reduced, update My UCU with your reduced pay rate so that your UCU subscription reduces (and put it back up afterwards!). If it’s reduced to statutory sick pay, treat as unpaid leave.

Update My UCU if you’re on unpaid leave – whether that is unpaid sick leave or an unpaid sabbatical – so that you don’t need to pay a subscription.

Attached (unemployed) membership

Update My UCU if you are unemployed but are looking for another post within the sector. You can keep your membership open by changing to this membership category, which is free for a year.

Retired membership

If you’ve fully retired and do no paid work for the university and you wish to stay involved in UCU please check you are in the retired membership category. (You have a choice to stay connected to this branch or join a regional retired members branch.)

For more on the different types of membership, see https://www.ucu.org.uk/ucumembership

This post is based on an email sent to branch members by the branch administrator/organiser on 19 June 2025. The information should be correct at that time, but, if you are viewing this page at a later date, you should check the UCU website in case of changes to membership types and subscription rules.

This page was last updated on 19 June 2025