NHS Hourly Rate Calculator: Convert Salary to Pay Per Hour

Last updated: 13 October 2026 · Figures verified against the NHS Employers 2026/27 pay circular.

By the NHS Bands Pay editorial team

The calculator

The 52.2-week convention, explained

Every Agenda for Change hourly rate in England is derived from one formula: annual salary ÷ 52.2 ÷ contracted weekly hours. The formula comes from the Agenda for Change handbook, and it is the same calculation NHS payroll teams use when they need an hourly figure, for example to price overtime, bank shifts or unsocial-hours enhancements. Our Agenda for Change guide explains how the handbook structures pay; this page puts the formula to work.

The number that confuses people is 52.2. A year is not 52 weeks long: 52 weeks is 364 days, and the calendar gives you one or two more than that. Averaged over leap years, a year is 365.25 days, and 365.25 ÷ 7 = 52.1786 weeks, which the handbook conventionally rounds to 52.2. Dividing your salary by 52 instead would pretend you work a 364-day year, which slightly overstates the hourly rate. The difference is small, around 0.4%, but payroll uses 52.2 and so should you, because every published NHS hourly table you will ever see is built on it.

That convention also explains the mistakes people make when they try to work the rate out by hand. The common errors:

• Dividing monthly pay by 4.33 weeks. There are not exactly 4.33 weeks in a month, and the rounding compounds. Work from the annual figure.
• Dividing the annual salary by 1,950 (52.2 × 37.5 rounded wrong) or 2,080. The 2,080-hour year is an American convention based on a 40-hour week; the NHS full-time week is 37.5 hours, so the denominator is 52.2 × 37.5 = 1,957.5 hours.
• Using 37.5 hours for a Scotland contract. Scotland moved to a 36-hour week in April 2026, so Scottish staff must divide by 36, not 37.5. See the Scotland section below.
• Including allowances in the "annual salary". The basic hourly rate is calculated on basic pay only. High Cost Area Supplement, recruitment and retention premia and other allowances sit outside it and are paid on top.

Get the inputs right and the formula is exact: it is the definition of the rate, not an approximation of it. The calculator above applies it precisely, and the table below shows the results for every band and pay step in the 2026/27 England scale.

Hourly rates by band and pay step, 2026/27

The table below applies the official formula to every step of the England 2026/27 Agenda for Change scale, following the 3.3% pay award that took effect on 1 April 2026 (our 2026/27 pay rise guide covers the award itself). England uses entry, intermediate and top pay steps; bands 2 to 4 have fewer steps, and Band 2 is a single spot rate, so entry and top are the same figure. Band 1 is closed to new entrants and is not on the current scale.

A few things worth noticing in the table. First, the jump between the Band 5 top (£19.95) and the Band 6 entry (£20.41) is small: progression between bands is a steady climb rather than a cliff, which is why the pay-step increments within a band matter almost as much as promotion. Second, a Band 5 nurse at the top of the band earns a higher hourly rate than a newly promoted Band 6 nurse at the entry step, which is worth knowing when you weigh up applying for promotion. Third, these are basic rates only: unsocial-hours enhancements, overtime and London weighting are all calculated from these figures but paid on top, as the later sections explain.

Scotland: the 36-hour week

Scotland runs its own Agenda for Change deal, and from April 2026 the Scottish full-time week is 36 hours, not 37.5. The hourly-rate formula does not change, but the denominator does: annual salary ÷ 52.2 ÷ 36. Because the same salary is spread over fewer hours, every Scottish hourly rate is higher than the English equivalent for the same salary.

Take the bottom of Band 5 in Scotland, £34,494. Run the formula: £34,494 ÷ 52.2 ÷ 36 = £18.36 an hour. The England Band 5 entry salary of £32,073 at 37.5 hours gives £16.38, so the Scottish figure reflects two differences at once: Scotland's own pay scale (Band 5 runs £34,494 to £42,977) and the shorter week. If you work in Scotland, enter 36 in the calculator's hours field rather than 37.5, and the rest takes care of itself.

The shorter week has a second consequence: the overtime threshold in Scotland is now 36 hours, not 37.5. Hours worked beyond 36 in a week attract overtime rates (time-and-a-half, double time on public holidays for bands 1 to 7), where in England the threshold is 37.5. Scotland's 2026/27 award was 3.75% from 1 April 2026, part of a two-year deal that includes a CPI-plus-1% inflation guarantee to be checked in early 2027, so the scale itself may move again before the pay year ends.

Wales, for completeness, kept the 37.5-hour week and took the same 3.3% award as England, but its scale differs slightly (Band 5 runs £32,557, £35,114 and £39,631, and Band 2 has a Real Living Wage floor of £13.45 an hour applied at the minimum). If you work in Wales, the English formula and hours apply, but use the Welsh salary figures for your band and step.

Part-time staff: same rate, pro-rata pay

The hourly rate does not care how many hours you work. A part-time Band 5 nurse at the entry step earns exactly the same £16.38 an hour as her full-time colleague; what differs is the total: her annual salary is the full-time salary multiplied by her whole-time equivalent (WTE) fraction. At 0.6 WTE, that is £32,073 × 0.6 = £19,243.80 a year, still at £16.38 an hour.

This is why the calculator asks for contracted hours. Enter 37.5 and your full-time salary and you get the standard rate; the rate is the same whether you actually work 37.5 hours or 22.5, because the formula divides the full-time salary by full-time hours either way. Where part-timers do need care is overtime: under Section 3, hours worked above your contracted hours but below 37.5 a week are paid at plain time (plus any unsocial-hours enhancement that applies), and the time-and-a-half overtime rate only kicks in above 37.5 hours. So a 0.6 WTE nurse working 30 hours in a week gets 7.5 of those hours at plain time, not at time-and-a-half.

One more part-time nuance worth knowing: enhancements, allowances and pension contributions all key off the same hourly base, so a part-timer doing regular night shifts accrues unsocial-hours pay at the same enhanced hourly rates as full-time staff. The system is deliberately neutral between full-time and part-time: the rate is the rate, and only the quantity of hours changes.

Bank shifts versus paid overtime

Staff often use "bank" and "overtime" interchangeably, but Agenda for Change treats them differently, and the hourly rate sits at the centre of both calculations.

Bank shifts are extra shifts you pick up, usually through your trust's staff bank, paid at your plain hourly rate. A Band 5 nurse doing a bank day shift earns £16.38 an hour for those hours, nothing more, nothing less. If the bank shift falls in unsocial hours, say a Saturday night, the relevant unsocial-hours enhancement is added on top of the plain rate, which is where the enhancement examples in the next section come in. Bank work is pensionable only in limited circumstances, so it boosts take-home pay without boosting pension accrual in most cases.

Overtime, strictly defined, is time worked above 37.5 hours in a week (36 in Scotland), and it is paid at premium rates under Section 3: time-and-a-half Monday to Saturday, double time on bank and public holidays, both calculated on your basic hourly rate. Four Sunday overtime hours for a Band 5 nurse at £16.38 would be 4 × £16.38 × 1.5 = £98.28; on a bank holiday Monday the same four hours would be 4 × £16.38 × 2 = £131.04. Our unsocial hours and overtime guide sets out the full Section 2 and Section 3 rules with more scenarios.

Three rules govern the boundary between the two. First, you cannot claim overtime and unsocial-hours enhancement for the same hours: the higher of the applicable rates wins, and payroll applies one or the other. Second, staff in bands 8 and 9 have no contractual right to paid overtime at all: extra hours are compensated with time off in lieu (TOIL), which is why the calculator shows "TOIL only" for those bands. Third, staff may elect TOIL instead of overtime pay at any band, banking the hours to take as leave later, which some staff prefer around school holidays or planned time off.

In practice, most extra hours NHS staff work are bank shifts at plain time rather than formal overtime at premium rates, because trusts roster bank shifts to fill gaps and true overtime (staying late beyond a full week) is the exception. Knowing which you are being paid for is worth a payslip check: plain-time bank hours and time-and-a-half overtime should appear as separate lines, and both should trace back to the hourly rate in the table above.

Unsocial-hours enhancements: worked examples

Unsocial hours are defined in Section 2 as weekday nights (8pm to 6am), all of Saturday, and Sundays plus public holidays. Work in those periods attracts an enhancement on top of your basic hourly rate, with the percentage depending on your band. The percentages used on this site, and in the calculator above, are:

A note on the Band 2 and Band 3 figures: they are this site's published percentages, and a small number of other sources show slightly different numbers (41% and 83% appear on some sites, likely pay-year drift). We use 44%/88% and 37%/74% consistently across our unsocial hours guide and this calculator. Staff on regular unsocial-hours rotas, such as ambulance crews, may instead be on Annex 5 averaged enhancements, where the enhancement is smoothed into salary rather than paid per shift: if your contract mentions Annex 5, the per-shift percentages above do not apply to you.

Here is what the enhancements mean in cash terms, using 2026/27 England rates:

• Band 2 healthcare assistant, Saturday day shift: £12.91 × 1.44 = £18.59 an hour. An 8-hour Saturday shift is worth 8 × £18.59 = £148.72 before deductions.
• Band 2 healthcare assistant, Sunday shift: £12.91 × 1.88 = £24.27 an hour, nearly double the basic rate. Sunday working is the single most lucrative regular shift pattern in the lower bands.
• Band 3 senior HCA, weekday night shift: £13.16 × 1.37 = £18.03 an hour for hours between 8pm and 6am.
• Band 5 nurse, Sunday shift: £16.38 × 1.60 = £26.21 an hour. At the top of Band 5, the Sunday rate is £19.95 × 1.60 = £31.92.
• Band 6 physio, Saturday: £20.41 × 1.30 = £26.53 an hour at the entry step.

Notice how the enhancement narrows the gap between bands on unsocial shifts: a Band 2 Sunday hour (£24.27) pays more than a Band 5 plain weekday hour (£16.38). That is deliberate. The enhancement system exists to compensate the disruption of nights and weekends, and for lower-banded staff who work heavy weekend rotas, enhancements can be a large share of total earnings, sometimes a fifth or more. If you regularly work unsocial hours, your effective hourly earnings across the month will be well above the basic rate in the table, which is one reason the basic rate alone understates what shift workers actually take home.

Minimum wage sanity check

Every Agenda for Change hourly rate sits comfortably above the UK's statutory minimum and living wage rates. The lowest rate on the 2026/27 scale is the Band 2 spot rate at £12.91 an hour, and every step above it climbs from there, so no AfC-contracted adult is anywhere near the legal floor. Wales goes further and applies a Real Living Wage floor of £13.45 an hour to its Band 1 and Band 2 minimum, which lifts the Welsh Band 2 spot to £26,300 a year.

The caveat is that not everyone working in the NHS is on Agenda for Change. Apprentices on apprentice rates, some bank-only workers on local arrangements, and staff employed by private contractors providing NHS services can be on different terms, and the minimum-wage check matters for them. But if your contract says Agenda for Change, your hourly rate is set by the national scale, and the national scale clears the legal minimum with room to spare at every band.

Hourly rate versus take-home pay

The hourly rate is a gross basic figure: it is what each hour is worth before anything is taken off. Your payslip will show a lower effective rate per hour actually worked, and that is not an error. Between the gross rate and your bank account sit income tax, National Insurance, your tiered NHS pension contribution (5.2% to 12.5% of pensionable pay in England and Wales), and student loan repayments if you are over the threshold. A Band 5 nurse on £16.38 an hour might see roughly £11 to £12 an hour land in her account after deductions, depending on her tax code and pension tier.

There are two other reasons the payslip rate and the table rate diverge. First, enhancements and overtime inflate the payslip: a nurse who worked two Sunday shifts will show higher average earnings per hour than the basic rate, because the +60% enhancement is in the total. Second, allowances sit outside the hourly rate: High Cost Area Supplement is paid as a separate addition (a percentage of basic salary between set minima and maxima), not folded into the hourly figure, and neither are recruitment premia or on-call availability payments. If you divide your total monthly pay by your hours and get a number above the table rate, enhancements and allowances are almost certainly the explanation.

To read the whole picture, from gross to net, see our NHS payslip explained guide, which walks through each deduction line and shows how the hourly rate, enhancements and allowances combine on a real payslip.

Worked examples

Check the first row against the calculator: select Band 5 and the entry step with 37.5 hours and the hero box reads £16.38. The second row shows why Saturday working matters at the lower bands: one Saturday shift at the enhanced rate is worth more than eleven plain weekday hours. The third row is the Scotland case in full: a different scale and a different week length, giving a rate nearly £2 an hour above the English Band 5 entry figure. The fourth shows overtime stacking on the basic rate, and the fifth is a straight table lookup for a senior band.

One pattern to carry away: the formula never changes, only the inputs do. Band, step, nation and contracted hours go in; the hourly rate comes out. Everything else on this page, overtime premiums, unsocial enhancements, part-time pro-rating, is arithmetic built on that one number.

Frequently asked questions

How is the NHS hourly rate calculated?

The official Agenda for Change formula is your full-time annual salary divided by 52.2 weeks, divided by your contracted weekly hours (37.5 in England). For example, £32,073 ÷ 52.2 ÷ 37.5 = £16.38 an hour. The calculator at the top of this page applies the formula to every band and pay step.

Why 52.2 weeks instead of 52?

A calendar year averages 365.25 days once leap years are counted, and 365.25 ÷ 7 = 52.1786 weeks, conventionally rounded to 52.2. Dividing by 52 instead would use only 364 days and slightly overstate the hourly rate, so NHS payroll uses 52.2.

What is the Band 5 hourly rate for 2026/27?

In England, the Band 5 hourly rate for 2026/27 is £16.38 at the entry step (£32,073), £17.67 at the intermediate step (£34,592) and £19.95 at the top step (£39,043), using the official ÷ 52.2 ÷ 37.5 formula. See our Band 5 pay guide for the full breakdown.

Is NHS overtime paid at the same hourly rate?

No. For bands 1 to 7, overtime is paid at time-and-a-half Monday to Saturday and double time on bank and public holidays, calculated on the basic hourly rate. Bands 8 and 9 get time off in lieu instead of paid overtime. Part-time staff earn plain time for hours above their contracted hours up to 37.5 a week, with premium rates only above that.

Do part-time NHS staff get the same hourly rate?

Yes. Part-time staff are paid the same hourly rate as full-time colleagues in the same band and pay step; only their total salary is pro-rated to their contracted hours. A 0.6 WTE Band 5 on the entry step still earns £16.38 an hour.

What is the NHS hourly rate in Scotland?

Scotland uses the same annual ÷ 52.2 formula but a 36-hour week from April 2026, so the same salary gives a higher hourly rate. Scotland's Band 5 bottom of £34,494 ÷ 52.2 ÷ 36 = £18.36 an hour.

Does the hourly rate include unsocial-hours enhancement?

No. The basic hourly rate is the plain rate before any enhancement. Unsocial-hours payments are added on top for qualifying shifts: for example +44% for Band 2 Saturday and weekday night hours, or +60% for bands 4 to 9 on Sundays and public holidays.

Sources and independence

Source: NHS Employers: 2026/27 pay award announcement.

Source: NHS Employers: unsocial hours factsheet.

Source: Health Careers NHS: Agenda for Change pay rates.

NHS Bands Pay is an independent guide and is not affiliated with the NHS. Figures were verified against official sources on 13 October 2026 and can change: always confirm with the relevant official body before making financial decisions. The calculator is an estimate only.