Fact check: How much do resident doctors earn, and what do they want?

Independent

a day ago

This roundup of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK's largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.
In May, the Government accepted recommendations from the Review Body on Doctors' and Dentists' Remuneration to give resident doctors (previously called 'junior' doctors) a pay rise of 4% plus £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. It is therefore balloting resident doctors about whether to strike.
This fact check looks at what NHS resident doctors in England earn and what the BMA is asking for, and explores some of the claims currently circulating 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 it has published hourly pay figures showing what the pay 'restoration' it is 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 the Government announced.
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.
What resident doctors currently earn
In the latest 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 specialty, 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.
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 level 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 does not 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.
In practice, resident doctors typically earn almost 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 considerations.
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 is 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 – and the latest NHS estimates cover earnings in the year to December 2024, before the latest pay rise was announced.
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.
Full Fact has 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.'