Resident doctors’ pay: how much do they earn, and what does the BMA want?

In May, the government accepted recommendations from the Review Body on Doctors’ and Dentists’ Remuneration to give all resident doctors (previously called junior doctors) a pay rise of 4% + £750.

But the British Medical Association (BMA) says this is not enough to make up for the “erosion” in the value of their pay that it says has happened since 2008. And on 8 July, it announced its members had voted to strike.

This explainer looks at what NHS resident doctors earn and what the BMA is asking for, and explores some of the claims that have circulated about their pay.

Doctors have just been awarded a pay rise, so why are they threatening to strike?

The BMA argues that the value of resident doctors’ pay has been eroded by inflation since 2008/09, and has published hourly pay figures showing what the pay “restoration” they are asking for would look like.

These pay figures amount to a 29% rise on the basic rates from 2024/25, instead of the 5-6% pay rise that the government announced. (A Telegraph article wrongly claimed the BMA demands amount to an “almost 30%” rise on top of the 5-6% announced this year, but this was corrected after Full Fact got in touch.)

The government, by contrast, says resident doctors have received the highest pay rise in the public sector for 2025-26, and that it expects average full-time basic pay for a resident doctor to reach about £54,300 in 2025-26 following the new deal.

Have resident doctors had a 28.9% pay rise over three years?

It is often said that resident doctors have already had a 28.9% pay rise covering the years from 2023-24 to 2025-6. This is correct, in terms of the cash amount that they’ve received on average.

The 28.9% figure represents the combined effect of several pay rises:

• An average pay rise of 8.8% for 2023/24
• A further 4.05% pay rise for the same year, on average, agreed with the Labour government after the 2024 election
• An average pay rise of 8% for 2024/25 agreed with the new government at the same time
• The average pay rise of 5.4% for 2025/26

Together, these pay rises amount to a rise of 28.9%, without adjustment for inflation. (This is not to be confused with the 29% pay rise that the BMA is demanding in place of the 5.4% rise this year.)

However, it is a moot point whether this overall rise was really delivered by the current government, as the health secretary Wes Streeting has claimed. He has said on X for instance: “We negotiated and delivered pay rises worth 28.9%.”

While the first 8.8% of these rises was included as part of the agreement between the BMA and the present government in September 2024, it had already been awarded by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government in July 2023, and had been paid to doctors since September that year.

As such, it isn’t strictly true to say that the first part of the pay rise was “delivered” by the current government, since doctors had already received it before Labour came to power—although this rise was included as part of the later agreement that the government reached with the BMA.

What resident doctors currently earn

In the data for February 2025, there were 77,287 resident doctors working for NHS England. (Although a few are part-time, making this the equivalent of 74,666 full-time doctors.) These are working, qualified doctors who are also in the process of training towards a speciality, which can take a decade or more. They do not include consultants, GPs, surgeons or other senior doctors who have completed their specialist training.

Resident doctors begin work after graduating with a medical degree. They are supervised by a more senior doctor, but as they gain experience some may also begin to supervise their more junior colleagues. Resident doctors need to pass exams at various points.

In short, there are many different types of resident doctor, with different levels of seniority and pay, as summarised below.

When speaking about basic pay only, for a 40-hour week, resident doctors currently earn between £38,831 and £73,992 a year, as recommended by the pay review body in May. At the time of writing, however, they are still being paid at last year’s rates while they wait for the new ones to be applied.

The government has said they will receive the extra money, backdated to April, in August, at which point their actual pay will shift to the higher rate.

The new rate amounts to a rise of about 5-6% on last year, depending on a doctor’s pay grade, with the higher grades receiving slightly smaller rises in percentage terms.

What about extra earnings?

Basic pay doesn’t cover everything that resident doctors earn. In the latest data for staff earnings, which covers the year ending March 2025, NHS England estimates how much different types of medical staff earned in that period.

This shows that in practice, resident doctors typically earn roughly a third more than their basic salary from other sources. Most of the extra pay comes from working extra hours and working unsocial hours, but it also includes geographic differences and other things.

So does the average resident doctor now earn £54,300, as the government says?

The government says: “We expect the average full-time basic pay of a resident doctor will reach about £54,300 in 2025-26.”

We asked the Department of Health and Social Care how this figure was calculated, and it shared its method with us. We were not able to replicate its calculations exactly, but we do know there are more resident doctors on the higher pay grades than on the lower ones, so an average in the higher part of the range seems plausible.

According to NHS England workforce figures for February 2025, the resident doctor workforce breaks down as follows:

• Foundation Doctor Year 1: 8,265 doctors, 11% of the total
• Foundation Doctor Year 2: 7,394 doctors, 10% of the total
• Core Training: 24,839 doctors, 32% of the total
• Specialty Registrar: 36,789 doctors, 48% of the total

It’s difficult to say precisely how much the average resident doctor earns, because we can’t exactly match the pay data we have to the numbers in each pay grade.

Do resident doctors really earn £17/hour, as claimed by some?

We’ve seen some claims on social media about resident doctors being paid £17 an hour. For example, one post on X which was shared by the BMA said: “£17/hr to save your life. That’s the reality for NHS resident doctors in England”.

This is potentially misleading, as the £17 figure seems to refer to the hourly rate of £17.56 cited by the BMA, which refers to basic pay only, for first-year doctors only, and for the last pay deal before the 2025/26 rise was announced—and the figure should in any case be £18, if rounding to the nearest pound. After the backdated pay rise, the BMA says the lowest hourly rate of basic pay will be £18.62.

We have written in the past about claims which may appear to be about the pay of junior doctors in general, but are based on figures that apply only to the minority of them who are in their first year (about 11%).

A BMA spokesperson told us: “BMA publishes clear hourly rates which clearly show £17.56 as the wage per hour earned by a FY1 doctor in England. This is a fair comparison for use against other 40 hour per week jobs. FY1 doctors work on teams that save people's lives daily in the NHS. Their basic rate of pay is not affected by additional hours they might take on."

Are resident doctors paid much less than doctors in other countries?

An obvious way to judge whether resident doctors are well paid, is to look at how much similar doctors are being paid in other countries.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done, because different countries may categorise doctors differently, or pay them in different ways for different kinds of work. Their working conditions and their benefits may vary too, and life in other countries brings with it a whole range of other pros and cons, including different taxes.

Nevertheless, after listing “a large number of issues” with international comparisons, the pay review body (DDRB) did conduct research on doctors’ pay in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Canada, which it said were “the top destinations for doctors leaving the UK”. Their work, which adjusted the figures to purchasing-power parity, revealed some broad differences in pay.

• Australia DDRB: “average Australian salaries of around… £94,000 for [non-consultant] doctors [in 2022/23]. This compares to average earnings per head in England of £76,112 for specialty doctors (Australia 23% higher); and 63,350 for registrars (Australia 48% higher)”.
• New Zealand DDRB: “At resident doctor level, England salaries are up to 26% higher than in New Zealand. There is also a maximum employer pension contribution of 6% in New Zealand, significantly below the England level.”
• Canada DDRB: “an average Canadian salary of around £263,500 for hospital physicians and £187,900 for family doctors. This is 182% higher than average earnings per head in England of £93,417 for all hospital doctors, and 70% higher than average earnings for GPs in England of £110,200 (£140,200 for contractors, £69,200 for salaried GPs) in 2022-23”. NB Canadian data does not differentiate by grade of doctors, which doesn’t allow for resident doctor comparisons.
• Ireland DDRB: “We have information on basic pay scales for doctors in Ireland, rather than earnings. Doctors will receive payment for overtime, on call and shifts in addition to this. Basic salaries are close to the UK at resident doctor level.”

To summarise this very roughly: resident doctors are paid somewhere between 23% and 48% more in Australia, 1% less to 26% more in England than in New Zealand and about the same in Ireland. Canada’s hospital doctors seem to be paid much more than in England, but the data doesn’t allow a direct comparison between junior or resident doctors specifically.

The BMA Resident Doctors Committee Co-chair, Dr Ross Nieuwoudt did get this wrong on the Jeremy Vine Show on Channel 5 in early July, when he said: "Compared to international comparators, we're paid maybe a half or a third of what they are."

When Full Fact contacted the BMA about this, a spokesperson told us: "A UK resident doctor going to practice in Australia would be paid a third more, a factor increasing the exodus of doctors from the NHS and worsening the staffing crisis. Dr Nieuwoudt was referring to this figure and misspoke. We are happy to correct the record."