Ask what a nurse earns in the UK and the honest answer starts with a question back: which of the seven kinds does the Office for National Statistics think you are?
ASHE, the survey behind almost every UK salary figure, does not have one occupation called "nurse". It has seven, and 720,000 of the country's 1,078,000 nursing professionals — two thirds of them — are in the one ONS labels other nursing professionals. It is the largest nursing category in British official statistics and it is defined by what it is not.
The seven groups
These are the 2025 provisional ASHE medians across all employees, part-time and full-time together, with the full-time figure alongside.
| ONS group | Employees | All employees | Full-time | Hourly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Other nursing professionals | 720,000 | £36,775 | £42,300 | £22.39 |
| Nurse practitioners | 114,000 | £41,392 | £46,069 | £24.19 |
| Community nurses | 84,000 | £33,764 | £40,897 | £22.90 |
| Specialist nurses | 75,000 | £41,095 | £45,140 | £23.52 |
| Midwifery nurses | 46,000 | £39,327 | £46,990 | £25.72 |
| Mental health nurses | 20,000 | £40,028 | £42,692 | £21.00 |
| Children's nurses | 19,000 | £34,173 | £41,963 | £20.84 |
The seven add up to 1,078,000, which is exactly the total ONS publishes for nursing professionals as a whole. Nothing is missing. It is simply that six named specialisms account for 358,000 people, and everyone else — most ward nurses, most adult nurses, most of the profession — lands in the seventh.
Why the big number is the vague one
This is not ONS being careless. The classification names a group when it can define one cleanly and count enough people in it to publish a reliable figure. A nurse practitioner has a distinct role; an adult nurse on a general ward is the default case, and the default case is what "other" means here.
The practical consequence is that the most-quoted nursing salary in the country describes the least specific group. £36,775 covers band 5 newly qualified staff and band 7 seniors, day shifts and nights, full weeks and half weeks.
How wide is "other"?
Wide. Within that single group ASHE reports:
- £10,708 at the 10th percentile
- £24,960 at the 25th
- £36,775 median
- £45,742 at the 75th
- £54,827 at the 90th
The top tenth earns more than five times the bottom tenth. No single job pays that range. What the spread is really showing is hours: the same group holds someone doing two shifts a week and someone doing five, and annual pay counts them the same way.
Split it by working pattern and the picture settles down. Full-time other nursing professionals earn a median of £42,300. Part-time, £21,572. The all-employees figure of £36,775 is not a compromise between two kinds of nurse — it is an average of two lengths of week.
The ladder is shorter than it looks
Compare community nurses with nurse practitioners on annual pay and there is a £7,628 gap — practitioners earn 22.6% more. That reads like a serious difference in what the work is worth.
Compare the same two on hourly pay and the gap is £22.90 against £24.19: 5.6%. Most of what looked like a pay ladder is a difference in hours worked, not in the rate paid for them.
The hourly figures also reorder the profession. Midwifery nurses have the highest hourly rate of the seven at £25.72. Children's nurses have the lowest at £20.84 — below community nurses, below "other", and 19% below midwifery. On annual pay children's nurses look mid-table. On rate they are at the bottom.
What moved this year
ASHE publishes the change in each group's median against the previous year. Midwifery nurses rose 11.1%, the largest movement in nursing. Specialist nurses rose 0.9%, the smallest — barely a tenth of that, and well below inflation.
Treat single-year movements in small groups carefully. Mental health nurses (20,000 employees) and children's nurses (19,000) are measured from samples small enough that a change of a few percent can reflect who happened to be surveyed. The 720,000-strong "other" group rose 5.0%, and that figure is the most reliable of the seven for the simple reason that it rests on the most people.
Reading your own number
If you are an adult nurse on a general ward, the figure that describes you is other nursing professionals, and the useful version of it is the full-time one: £42,300. If you work part-time, £21,572 is the honest comparator, and the hourly rate of £22.39 is the only figure that compares cleanly across contracts.
One boundary worth knowing: nursing auxiliaries and assistants are a separate occupation entirely, not a nursing professional group. ASHE puts 466,000 people there on a median of £24,761 across all employees, £29,084 full-time. If a "nurse pay" figure looks far too low, this is often the group it came from.
ASHE covers Great Britain, so Northern Ireland is not in any of these numbers; NISRA publishes its own. And every figure here is gross pay for employees — bank shifts through an agency, and anything self-employed, sit outside the survey.