NHS pay bands

Your band and step point give a full-time salary straight from the published Agenda for Change scales. Part-time pay is that figure scaled by your contracted hours against a 37.5-hour full-time week. From there it is the take-home pay calculator — the same engine, so the two cannot disagree.

⚠ These are England's pay scales

NHS Scotland, NHS Wales and HSC Northern Ireland negotiate their own Agenda for Change scales, and the money is different. The region control on this page sets your Income Tax bands and nothing else — choosing Scotland does not switch the pay scale, and the page says so where you can see it. If you work for a Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish employer, the salary here is not yours.

⚠ The pension tier is charged on all of your pay

This is the opposite of how Income Tax works, and it is the most important thing to know about the scheme. Income Tax charges each rate only on the slice of income inside its band. The NHS Pension picks one rate for your whole pensionable pay, based on which range that pay falls in — so crossing a tier boundary re-rates every pound you earn. A single pound of extra pay can cost several hundred pounds in contributions.

It is not a loss. Contributions are your money moved into a pension, not money taken away, so a bigger contribution buys a bigger pension. It reduces your take-home, which is what this page measures, and that is a different thing from making you worse off.

Contributions are also based on your actual pensionable pay, not on the whole-time equivalent — so half of a band 7 post is tiered on half of a band 7 salary.

And they are a net pay arrangement: they come off before Income Tax but not before National Insurance. Treating them like salary sacrifice, as some calculators do, understates the National Insurance for every member of the scheme.

⚠ An NHS hourly rate does not multiply back by 52

NHS Employers publishes an hourly column beside the annual one, and those hourly rates are the annual figure divided by 365/7 weeks — about 52.14 — times 37.5 hours. Multiply a published hourly rate by 52 and you land roughly £93 below a band 5 salary. The hourly figure on this page is derived with the same divisor the published column uses, which is checked against all thirty-one of them in our tests.

What this does not cover

High Cost Area Supplements — the inner, outer and fringe London uplifts — are not included, so if you work in or around London your pay is higher than the figure here. Also not covered: unsocial hours payments under Section 2, on-call and overtime, additional roles or bank shifts, salary sacrifice for a car or childcare, the pension's 50% section, and pay awards taking effect part-way through a year. Step progression here is the step you choose, not one worked out from your start date.

Where these figures come from

Pay scales are read from NHS Employers' 2026/27 pay scales, effective 1 April 2026. Pension contribution tiers are from the NHS Business Services Authority. Income Tax, National Insurance and student loan figures come from gov.uk — see Income Tax rates and Personal Allowances and rates and thresholds for employers. How these numbers are kept right sets out the whole process.

⚠ The Agenda for Change year runs 1 April to 31 March, six days out of step with the tax year, so the badge below expires before the rest of the site's figures do.