NHS Agenda for Change
NHS Employers prints one 2026/27 hourly rate as £55,65
NHS Employers' 2026/27 pay scales page prints the band 8d top hourly rate as £55,65 — the only hourly figure on it written with a comma, not a decimal point.
£55,65 band 8d top step, hourly, as printed, 2026/27
NHS Employers’ pay scales page for 2026/27 prints the band 8d top hourly rate as £55,65 — a comma where every other hourly figure on the page has a decimal point. The page does not say what that figure is meant to be, so we are not going to decide for it.
The article carries a publication date of 12 February 2026 and sets out annual and hourly Agenda for Change rates that it says “are effective from 1 April 2026”. We hold that page as the second document behind our 2026/27 England record, because our rule is that hourly rates are imported from a published document and never worked out from the annual figure. That is why one malformed cell matters: it cannot be imported, and we will not fill it by dividing.
Here is what the page prints for band 8d, using its own step labels.
| Band 8d | Annual rate | Hourly rate |
|---|---|---|
| Entry step point | £94,356 | £48.26 |
| Intermediate step point | £100,140 | £51.21 |
| Top step point | £108,814 | £55,65 |
The annual column is unaffected. The hourly column is what the corroboration rests on, and one cell of it is currently unusable, so that cell stays out of our data until the page is corrected. Nothing else in the band 8d row is in doubt: the two lower steps read £48.26 and £51.21, and the band 9 hourly steps below it read £57.68, £61.16 and £66.37.
One other blemish, this one harmless: band 8a entry hourly is printed ”£ 29.42”, with a space after the pound sign. The value is legible and we have imported it.
Two things on the page are easy to misread as errors and are not. Band 1 is marked closed to new entrants and is printed at £25,272 a year, £12.92 an hour. Band 2 is printed with an entry step of £25,272 and a top step of £25,272, with “2” years until eligible for pay progression shown between them — the same figure at both ends, as published.
The page states no award percentage, so we do not quote one. It does not name a nation either. It says only that “following government’s announcement on the 2026/27 pay award, the annual and hourly rates have been updated”, and that the NHS Terms and Conditions of Service Handbook “will be updated on 1 April 2026 to reflect the new rates”. Nothing on it is a figure for Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
For completeness, the page’s high cost area supplement limits are set out in the usual form: inner is 20 per cent of basic salary with a minimum of £5,794 and a maximum of £8,746; outer is 15 per cent with a minimum of £4,870 and a maximum of £6,137; fringe is 5 per cent with a minimum of £1,346 and a maximum of £2,270.
We will check the page again and say here if the band 8d hourly figure is corrected.
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.