Planning for the 2026 Civil Service Awards is now underway, and we're excited to be refreshing our award categories. To stay informed about programme updates, entry information, and important deadlines, please sign up for alerts here.
We will be in contact once nominations have opened.
About the Civil Service Awards
The Civil Service Awards are the premier recognition programme for the UK Civil Service, open to individuals and teams at every grade and in every department.
The awards exist to do three things: celebrate exceptional work, share best practice across government, and inspire civil servants everywhere to reach higher.
Each year, the categories and criteria are reviewed to reflect the priorities of the government and the Civil Service. Every nomination is assessed against the criteria and judged on the real difference the work has made.
How it works
The nomination period is open from September to October. The Category Champions – senior leaders who bring deep expertise to their category — review submissions and identify the strongest entries. A final panel chaired by the awards Senior Responsible Officer then determines the category finalists and overall winners.
The finalists for each category are announced in January.
The winners are announced at the award ceremony which takes place in March.
The Civil Service Awards is a highly respected and prestigious cross-government programme, recognising and celebrating the wealth of inspirational individuals and innovative projects within the Civil Service. For the last 20 years, these unique and empowering awards have helped to spread best practice right across government, sharing innovation, learning and leadership.
The Civil Service Awards are designed to recognise and celebrate excellence across the UK Civil Service, aligning with our priorities of delivering outstanding public service, driving efficiency, and building capability. Our 20th anniversary marks an update in the categories and criteria, reflecting on the government’s objectives the Civil Service shall deliver on. Each category is championed by two Senior Civil Servants, who are proud supporters of the awards and bring their expertise to the judging process. These category champions will also promote their specific category to colleagues through networks across government to encourage quality nominations from all parts of the Civil Service. Our champions also ensure their expert judging panel supports them in reviewing the thousands of nominations, and select the very best to be put forward as finalists.
The finalist announcement will take place on 22 October 2025.
And finally, the winners will be announced at the Civil Service Awards 2025 ceremony, taking place in December 2025.
Community/follow us
The Civil Service Awards Community is an online space where you can hear past winners’ experiences, learn more about the awards themselves, and hear from our category champions. This is a place to learn from all the good practice that we celebrate through the awards, and to be inspired by the many people and teams who have won over the past 20 years.
Follow us @UKCivilService and join the conversation using #CSAwards for updates, winner stories, and inspiration from across the programmme.