NHS nurse salary

Why there is no single nurse salary

The NHS runs one pay system for nearly all its staff, and nursing is inside it rather than beside it. What decides a nurse’s salary is which band the post lands on, and that is decided by job evaluation: a panel matches the post to one of the national profiles published by the NHS Staff Council, each profile carries a job evaluation score range, and the range sits inside a band. The title on the advert decides nothing. Two people called staff nurse can sit on different bands, and neither of them is wrong.

There are 12 published nursing profiles. Between them they reach band 2 to band 9. That span is why the question has no one answer: the gap between the bottom of the first and the top of the last is £104,511 a year, and every figure in it belongs to a real nursing post.

Where the registered line falls

The profiles draw it themselves, and they draw it between band 4 and band 5. Band 4 nursing work is described like this:

Carries out specific care duties for patients, as delegated by a registered nurse or other relevant professional.

Band 5 is described like this:

Provides nursing assessment of patients/clients.

One sentence describes work done for a registered nurse. The other describes being the person who assesses. So bands 2, 3 and 4 are nursing support roles, paying £25,272 to £31,157, and band 5 is where the registered ladder starts, at £32,073. Both quotations are from National profiles for nursing — NHS Staff Council Job Evaluation Group national job profiles, NHS Staff Council Job Evaluation Group (published by NHS Employers).

What each nursing band pays

England, 2026/27, basic salary. The last column is how long the scale itself takes to walk from the bottom of a band to the top — it is published with the pay points, and it is not the same thing as how long it takes to reach the next band, which needs a different post.

Band 2 shows the same figure twice because the scale does: both its pay points are £25,272. The second year on the band brings the annual award and nothing else.

None of these figures includes unsocial hours, overtime or the London supplement, and none of them is take-home. For a nurse working nights and weekends that is not a detail — the sections below say where each of those lives.

At the top, one profile covers several bands

Most nursing profiles are published against a single band. Two are published against a range instead: Nursing: 8a-c covers bands 8a, 8b and 8c, and Nursing: 8c-9 covers bands 8c, 8d and 9. Inside a range the document says nothing that tells one band from the next. Nursing: 8c-9 describes a band 8c, a band 8d and a band 9 post with the same words:

• Provides expert professional advice to patients/clients, carers and staff
• Responsible for service development/redesign in own area of expertise
• Undertakes clinical audit, research in a specialist field
• Provides education and training to other staff, students: may develop or contribute to development of specialist training, education programmes in own field

The money separates them even though the words do not. Band 8c starts at £79,504 and band 9 at £112,782 — £33,278 apart on one profile. What decides which of the three a post lands on is its job evaluation score, and this profile spans 637 to 732.

It is also why bands 8b, 8c, 8d and 9 get no page of their own here. A band earns one when a published profile is specific to it alone, and for these four every profile that covers them covers a neighbour too. A page each would mean writing round that, which our own rules forbid. They sit on the full pay scale instead.

A nurse in Scotland is not paid the same

Pay is devolved, and nursing is not exempt from that. Four governments publish four circulars, and the figures in them are not the same. Below are the two ends of the nursing ladder in each — the first step of band 2 and the last step of band 9 — every one read from that nation’s own circular, never from England’s.

Read the week column before comparing the money. Scotland counts a full-time week as 36 hours, not 37.5. An identical figure in the salary column is therefore paid for a shorter week, and a nurse cannot compare the two without that.

Northern Ireland has made no 2026/27 award. Its column is 2025/26, and that is what nurses there are still being paid — what that costs, band by band.

What is not in these figures

Nights, weekends and public holidays. Unsocial hours are paid as a percentage on top of the basic rate, and the percentages are not the same in all four nations — the rates, and which hours qualify.

London. A post in or near London carries a High Cost Area Supplement, which has a floor and a ceiling and so is worth very different money at the bottom and the top of a band — what it actually adds. Overtime has its own rules.

Tax, National Insurance and pension. Everything above is gross. The take-home calculator deducts all three, for whichever nation you work in.

Who this does not cover. Midwives, health visitors and the allied health professions are evaluated under their own national profiles, which are separate documents. This site holds the nursing, ambulance service and physiotherapy families; anything else would be a guess, and a guess about someone’s salary is worse than no answer. See the methodology and the source register.