Salaries
Registered Nurse Salary UK
Registered Nurse pay varies a great deal, so WageOra doesn't show one single salary figure for the title. Here's what we can reliably tell you instead.
There's no single salary that applies to every Registered Nurse in the UK. Pay depends on things like your employer, your specific role and responsibilities, your hours, where you work and, in the National Health Service (NHS), the pay band your role sits in. Rather than showing one figure that might not reflect your situation, this page brings together the official information WageOra can actually stand behind.
Salary information from the Office for National Statistics
WageOra's occupation salary figures come from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), 2025 (provisional). We don't show one ONS median salary for the broad title "Registered Nurse", because registered nursing isn't recorded as a single official occupation category. It's split across several categories, including ones for community nurses, specialist nurses, nurse practitioners, mental health nurses and children's nurses. Each of those has its own separate figure, and combining them into one number would risk giving a misleading impression of what any one of them actually pays.
WageOra does have verified ONS figures for several of these more specific nursing categories. You can look up the one closest to your own role, and compare it with other jobs, using Job Comparison. Separately, official salary estimates are sometimes withheld or judged too unreliable to publish for a particular occupation and period — that's a normal part of how survey statistics work, not something specific to nursing.
NHS nurse pay
Most nurses working in the National Health Service (NHS) are paid under Agenda for Change, the NHS's contractual pay system. Agenda for Change is not an Office for National Statistics survey figure — it's the actual pay structure the NHS uses to pay staff, set out in pay bands and points.
Nursing roles don't all sit in the same Agenda for Change band. Registered nurses can be found across more than one band depending on the responsibilities, seniority and clinical complexity of the specific role, and NHS England's ongoing job-evaluation work confirms that a nursing role's band should reflect its actual duties rather than a single assumed level. WageOra doesn't assume any one band represents every Registered Nurse, and doesn't currently publish NHS Agenda for Change pay bands — if you know your own band and salary, you can still estimate your take home pay directly.
What can affect a nurse's pay?
A Registered Nurse's actual pay can depend on:
- their employer, for example the NHS, a private hospital, a care provider or an agency
- their specific role and level of responsibility
- their NHS pay band, where Agenda for Change applies
- their experience
- their contracted hours, and whether they work full-time or part-time
- where in the UK they work
- any overtime, and shift or unsocial-hours working
- pension contributions and other deductions, once you're looking at take home pay rather than salary
WageOra doesn't publish figures for specific allowances, overtime rates, shift rates or regional supplements, because we don't currently have a verified source for them.
Estimate your take home pay
If you know your own salary, you can use it to estimate your take home pay after Income Tax and National Insurance with WageOra's Salary and Take Home Pay Calculator. The result is an estimate based on the figures you enter — it isn't a reproduction of a payslip, and your actual pay may differ depending on your tax code, pension scheme and other deductions.
Compare nursing pay with other jobs
Job Comparison lets you compare median annual pay for up to three occupations at once, using verified ONS figures where one exists. If you want to see how a specific nursing category compares with another job, that's the tool to use — this page doesn't have a comparable ONS figure of its own for the broad Registered Nurse title.