The UK NHS and healthcare jobs market in 2026

State of the sector

The NHS in England entered 2026 carrying roughly 100,000 vacant full-time equivalent posts, about 6.7% of all roles. Medical staff vacancies alone stood at 7,605 in December 2025, or 4.6% of all medical posts, with the deepest gaps in nursing (community and mental health particularly), midwifery, and general practice. The structural problem is not new, but the gap between the workforce the NHS plans to deliver against and the workforce it actually employs has widened rather than closed over the last two years.

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan responds with the largest training expansion in the service's history: medical school places are set to double to 15,000 a year by 2031/32, GP specialty training places rise 50% to 6,000 by 2031/32, and the government has committed to reducing reliance on international recruitment from around 34% of new joiners today to less than 10% by 2035. For UK-trained applicants this means the pipeline of new domestic posts will be larger every year for the foreseeable future, while competition from internationally recruited staff narrows.

Recruitment is concentrated at Band 5 and Band 6 clinical roles, plus a meaningful uplift in healthcare assistant and clinical support recruitment as trusts try to free senior clinician capacity for direct patient work. NHS Jobs and TRAC currently list more than 30,000 live vacancies on any given day.

Policy and cost pressures

The April 2025 employer National Insurance rate rise (13.8% to 15%) applies to NHS trusts as it does to private employers, eroding the per-FTE budget headroom that trusts had previously used for hiring at the edges. Trade unions report some non-clinical roles being held vacant or restructured rather than refilled.

Public sector pay growth at 5.2% per year is running well ahead of private sector pay (3.2%), narrowing the gap that historically pulled clinical staff into private practice. For UK-trained nurses and allied health professionals in particular, NHS roles are more competitive on pay than they have been for at least a decade.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 introduces day-one statutory sick pay rights for NHS staff (the lower earnings limit is removed), which marginally improves the offer for part-time and bank workers who previously fell below the earnings threshold.

Public sentiment on NHS pay continues to support upward pay-review-body pressure. YouGov's August 2025 polling of 30 occupations found 74% of GB adults believe nurses are underpaid, 83% say care workers are underpaid, and 66% say ambulance staff are underpaid. That sentiment translates into political pressure on the Department of Health and Social Care during each annual pay round, and into the pay-rise trajectory NHS staff have seen over the past two years.

What this means for applicants right now

• NHS recruitment runs almost entirely against published person specifications. Every essential and desirable criterion on the spec must be addressed with concrete, scoreable evidence in your CV or application. Generic CVs that don't map criterion-by-criterion routinely get scored out at shortlisting before a human reviewer reads anything substantive.
• Values-based recruitment (compassion, respect, dignity, learning, working together) is now a formal layer in most clinical shortlisting. Surface values-aligned phrasing in your bullets where it fits naturally, but do not script it.
• Banding language matters. A Band 5 application reads differently from a Band 7 application. Calibrate the autonomy, complexity and decision-making language to the specific band the advert states, not the band you most recently held.
• International candidates: the GMC and NMC continue to register applicants from approved overseas qualifications, but the government's stated direction is to reduce reliance over the coming decade. Plan registration timelines accordingly.