NHS Employers' 2026/27 pay page prints band 8d hourly rate as £55,65

Not a story, in the sense that no figure has changed: NHS Employers’ pay scales page for 2026/27 prints the band 8d top-step hourly rate as “£55,65”, a comma standing where the decimal point belongs.

The page was published on 12 February 2026 and the scales it carries take effect from 1 April 2026. It is the corroborating second document for England — the place the annual figures already held are checked against a second printing of the same table. Those reconcile, and the annual column is not what this is about. The hourly column is: a cell reading £55,65 is not a number, so anyone taking an hourly rate off this page gets nothing usable from that one.

What the comma is not is a dispute about the value. Every other hourly cell in the band 8 and band 9 rows reconciles to the same divisor: the annual figure over a 37.5-hour week across a 365-day year, which is 52 weeks and one day. Band 8d entry, £94,356, gives £48.26, and the page prints £48.26. The middle step, £100,140, gives £51.21, and the page prints £51.21. Band 9 top, £129,783, gives £66.37, and the page prints £66.37. Run the band 8d top step, £108,814, through the same sum and it gives £55.65. The digits either side of the comma are the digits that belong there. Only the mark between them is wrong.

The same table carries a second, smaller blemish: the band 8a entry hourly rate is printed as ”£ 29.42”, with a space after the pound sign. That one still reads as a number, so it corroborates normally. It is worth naming only because it points the same way — a formatting problem in the table, not an error in the pay data behind it.

The annual column is untouched by any of this. Band 8d for 2026/27 remains £94,356, £100,140 and £108,814, and nothing on the page gives reason to doubt them.

Two things follow. The first is narrow: anyone quoting a band 8d top-step hourly rate from this page should quote it as £55.65, and should know that in doing so they have made a repair the publisher has not. The second is the reason a note like this is published at all. Corroboration means a figure checked against a second document, and a second document retyped somewhere between the pay award and the web page is exactly the kind of check that quietly stops being one. Here the arithmetic rescues it, because every neighbouring cell agrees on the method. It will not always.

Until the cell is corrected, the band 8d top-step hourly rate has no readable printing on this page. The honest thing is to say so, and to say what the figure plainly is, rather than to round the comma off in silence and let a reader think the page gave them a number.

Where these figures come from

• Pay scales for 2026/27 — NHS Employers' HTML publication of the same pay table, used as the corroborating second document — NHS Employers

Every figure traces to a dated document — the line this section is named after. If one here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed publicly. Work out your own figures.