How pay & compliance are calculated

RotaSync already reads your own shift timeline to build your calendar feed. This feature reuses exactly that same timeline (nothing new is collected from your rota, and nothing about your colleagues is ever touched) to estimate two things: whether your rota looks like it might breach a published safe-working limit, and what you'd expect to be paid, gross and net, per year and per month.

How that's worked out depends on where you work. England uses the 2016 contract: pay is itemised (basic pay by nodal point, plus separate night, weekend, on-call and other lines). Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland use the 2002 contract: your basic pay is multiplied by a single banding supplement instead. We pick the right model automatically from the nation you tell us.

These are estimates, not a guarantee. Compliance findings are indicative checks against published limits, computed from what your rota says, not a determination that a limit was or wasn't breached in practice. Pay figures are based on your contracted rota, not locum/bank work or anything outside your linked rotas. Your payslip is the authoritative record of your pay, and your employer's own systems are the authoritative record of your hours; nothing here displaces either.

This is the single most important thing to understand about the number we show you, and it is not a bug.

Your trust pays you from your work schedule. That document takes the generic rota template for your post (the full cycle, often 12 to 20 weeks, as it applies to whoever holds the slot) and averages it into a single figure: “average weekly hours 44.75, of which 15.75 attract the 37% enhancement.” That average is contractual. You are paid it whether a given month runs heavy or light.

RotaSync works from the opposite end. We add up the shifts that were actually allocated to you, with their real times, over however many weeks your linked rota covers. No template, no generic slot, just your actual duties.

Those are different questions, so they give slightly different answers. Your personal allocation is a sample of the cycle: if your six months happened to contain a few more long days and a few fewer standard days than the template average, your bottom-up total comes out different, even though the parsing, the times and the pay rates are all correct.

Expect a difference of roughly ±5%. Treat that as the typical range rather than a bound: a rota whose duty mix swings across the year, or one whose linked period happens to catch a heavier or lighter stretch than the template average, can sit further out.

Which way the gap runs tells you different things. An estimate persistently higher than your work schedule means the duties you were actually allocated are heavier than the post the schedule was written for. An estimate persistently lower means the opposite. You are still paid your work schedule either way, because the schedule average is the contractual figure.

You can check this yourself. The Compliance & Pay panel on your dashboard has a Compare with your work schedule section: type in the headline figures your schedule states (average weekly hours, hours at the enhanced rate, weekend frequency), and we price them with the same engine, holding your grade, London zone, pension and tax settings identical. Everything the comparison shows is then attributable to the hours themselves, not to two calculators disagreeing. If your schedule also states a total, we show our figure against it, which is a direct check on our arithmetic versus your trust’s.

We lead with the rota estimate rather than the work schedule because most doctors can get their rota into RotaSync in seconds and their work schedule PDF is somewhere in an email from last August. The schedule remains the contractual document: where the two disagree, the schedule is what you are paid.

Every figure in the Compliance & Pay panel is priced from a short list of details you control, shown as a Your details list at the top of that same panel. Tap any row to change it; each one saves as you pick it and the numbers below update immediately. There is no separate settings screen to keep in sync.

• Nation: selects the whole pay model (England’s 2016 itemised contract vs. the 2002 banding contract). Nothing runs without it.
• London weighting: England only, and only if you say you work in or around London. Your hospital is used for one thing: resolving which zone’s flat weighting applies. It is never used to infer your nation or pension scheme.
• Grade: your nodal point, and with it basic pay, your hourly rate, and every percentage-based allowance.
• Annual leave: 27 or 32 days, depending on your years of NHS service. It sets the prospective-cover uplift on the night-enhancement line. Your grade alone can’t determine it for FY2/CT1-2/ST1-2, so we assume the lower figure and mark it as assumed until you confirm.
• Hours: your less-than-full-time fraction. We infer it from your rota; set it explicitly if your agreed fraction differs from what your shifts imply.
• Specialty: used solely to check flexible-pay-premium eligibility in England.
• Student loan and NHS pension: take-home only; neither changes your gross.

Anything we are guessing at rather than reading from an answer you gave is shown as Not set or assumed, in amber, so you can tell at a glance which inputs are yours.

Every number on this page is only as good as your shift times. If a shift's start or end time is wrong, edit its timings. The pay and compliance estimates recalculate automatically the next time you view them, with no re-linking needed.

This matters more than it sounds. Where your rota sheet carries a legend or key, we read the times straight off it. Where it doesn’t, we fall back to a sensible default for that kind of shift (a long day, a night, a standard day), and a default can be half an hour out, or occasionally read a long day as a short one. Across the real rotas we test against, only about one stream in ten has every worked hour backed by times the sheet itself documents; the median rota documents around two thirds of them.

A half-hour error per shift sounds trivial and isn’t. The additional-hours line pays only the excess over 40 hours a week, so a 1% error in your average weekly hours moves that line by roughly 10%. Shift times are by far the most common source of a pay estimate that looks wrong.

We ask which nation you work in directly (England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland) rather than inferring it from a hospital pick, because you always know this with certainty and no hospital list, however large, could substitute for it. Your nation alone determines which pay contract applies (England's 2016 contract, or the 2002 contract used in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and which NHS pension scheme you're in.

One subtlety worth knowing: your pay contract and your pension scheme don't always follow the same national boundary. Wales uses the devolved 2002 pay contract, but sits inside the same NHS Pension Scheme as England, never a separate Welsh table. We handle this automatically from your nation alone; nothing else needs to be picked for it.

If you're in England, we additionally ask whether you work in or around London, because that's the one thing that genuinely depends on where, not just which nation: a fixed £ London-weighting supplement applies to Inner, Outer, and Fringe zone sites, and a Trust can span more than one zone, so we look up your specific hospital or site rather than your Trust. If you're not in England, or you're in England but not in or around London, no hospital pick is needed at all.

For England (2016 contract, Schedule 3), we check:

• No more than 72 hours worked in any rolling 7 days.
• A 48-hour average over your rota period, averaged over whole weeks, so a normal Monday–Friday rota doesn't get falsely flagged by a part-week at the edges.
• 13 hours as a maximum single shift.
• A maximum of 4 consecutive night shifts, and at least 46 hours' rest after any run of nights, even a short one. (A "night" here is a shift working 3+ hours between 23:00 and 06:00, or one your rota explicitly codes as a night.)
• A maximum of 5 consecutive long shifts (over 10 hours), or 4 if any of them finishes after 23:00, with at least 48 hours' rest after a run of 4 or more.
• A maximum of 8 consecutive days with rostered shifts of any kind, then at least 48 hours' rest.
• Rostered for no more than 1 weekend in 2, only checked once we can see at least 4 weekends of your rota, so one busy weekend in a short window isn't misread as a pattern.
• A minimum 11-hour rest between any two shifts.

For Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (2002 contract, "New Deal"), we currently check only the limits confirmed common to both contracts (minimum rest and the 48-hour average), rather than applying an England-specific rule to a contract it may not match.

Non-resident (home) on-call availability doesn't count towards these hour limits. See the on-call section below for why, and for the one thing that means these checks can't see.

Break entitlement (roughly 30 minutes per 5 hours worked) isn't something we can check from rota data at all. It's shown as a standing reminder, not a rule we can flag a breach against.

Your basic pay is set by your nodal point (grade). On top of that:

• Additional rostered hours (40–48/week) are paid at your basic hourly rate.
• Night enhancement adds 37% of your hourly rate for hours worked between 21:00 and 07:00, and a rostered night shift (8+ hours starting between 20:00 and 23:59) is enhanced for all its hours, so a 20:30–09:30 night pays the full 13 hours at the enhanced rate.
• Prospective cover: work schedules pay your enhanced hours over the weeks you're actually at work (52 minus your leave entitlement: annual leave, bank holidays and study leave, in weeks), because your rota builds in cover for colleagues' leave. We apply the same uplift to the night-enhancement line, using your annual leave entitlement (27 days under 5 years' NHS service, 32 after; confirm it in the panel if we ask). Tip when auditing your own work schedule: check whether your trust included study leave in this divisor, since leaving it out quietly shrinks the enhanced-hours figure you're paid.
• Weekend allowance is a percentage of your full-time basic pay, banded by how often you work weekends, from 15% (1 in 2) down to 3% (1 in 8).
• On-call availability allowance is a flat 8% of basic pay, but only if you're genuinely non-resident on-call. A resident night or long-day shift is paid through the night enhancement above, never this allowance. See the on-call section below for how we tell the two apart.
• London weighting is a fixed amount (not a percentage) if your hospital is in a designated zone.
• Flexible pay premia apply to certain specialties (e.g. GP, emergency medicine, psychiatry).
• An LTFT allowance applies if you work less than full time.

2026 pay reform: the pay deal accepted in June 2026 raised the England pay scale and split the old nodal points into sub-points, backdated to 1 April 2026, so your basic pay may have risen mid-year, with back-pay in a later payslip. We always apply the current scale for today's dates (and the older scale for past dates). A second stage of the reform lands in April 2027; we'll update the figures when that circular is published.

Whether an on-call shift is resident (you're in the hospital) or non-resident (available from home) changes both your pay and your compliance checks, and a shift code like "OC" doesn't always say which it is. So here's what actually happens: we spot every distinct on-call code in your rota, show you our best guess for each one (for example, a bare "OC" or a "2nd on-call" is guessed as non-resident; "1st on-call" or "ROC" as resident), and ask you to confirm each code once in the Compliance & Pay panel on your dashboard. Your answer is remembered and always wins over our guess.

Non-resident on-call time is paid as an availability allowance (England's flat 8%, or via banding in the devolved nations), not as worked hours, so it doesn't count towards your average hours, LTFT fraction, or the safe-working hour limits. The honest trade-off: if you're called in or do work from home during a non-resident on-call, that work is invisible to your rota data. We under-count rather than over-count, which keeps compliance flags trustworthy but means a genuinely busy home on-call pattern can look lighter here than it feels.

The 2002 contract works differently: instead of itemising night/weekend/on-call pay separately, your basic pay is multiplied by a single band, determined by your average weekly hours and how much of that is unsociable (nights and weekends), from no band (up to 40h/week) through to Band 3 (a 2× multiplier, for over 56h/week).

A doctor whose shifts are at least a third unsociable (19:00–07:00 on weekdays, or any time on a weekend) falls into the higher-supplemented sub-band; less than a third, the lower one. A separate band (1C) applies if you're mostly on a low-frequency, home-based on-call rota rather than working resident shifts. This threshold is well-corroborated from historical NHS Employers guidance but the original circular text couldn't be read directly to confirm it word-for-word.

England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland each run their own separate NHS pension scheme, with different contribution tiers. Your contribution rate is based on your tier of actual pensionable pay, not what you'd earn full-time, so if you work less than full time, you may sit in a lower tier than your grade's full-time rate would suggest.

Not every pay element counts towards your pension: broadly, your basic pay, on-call availability allowance, and London weighting are pensionable; night enhancement, weekend allowance, and additional hours pay are not. You can record that you’ve opted out of the pension in your details on the Compliance & Pay panel.

Net pay applies standard UK Income Tax and National Insurance to your gross pay, plus your student loan repayment plan if you have one (Plan 1, 2, 4, or 5, with an optional Postgraduate Loan on top, or "no student loan"). Your pension contribution is deducted before tax is calculated, but not before National Insurance, and student loan repayments are worked out on the same pay as National Insurance, so your pension doesn't reduce them either.

If you work in Scotland, we apply Scottish income tax: six bands with different rates and thresholds from the rest of the UK. One honest approximation: the tax you actually pay follows where you live, not where you work, and we don't know where you live, so we assume you live in the nation of your contract. That's almost always right, but if you live across a border (say, working in Scotland while living in England), your real payslip will use the other nation's bands. National Insurance and student loans are the same UK-wide either way.

• It's your rostered hours, not your actual hours. Everything is computed from what the rota says. Overruns, swaps and extra hours you actually worked are invisible. Your employer's own records are the authoritative account of hours worked, and your payslip is the authoritative record of pay.
• Inaccurate shift times on your linked rota(s), by a wide margin the most common cause.
• Locum, bank, or any work outside your linked rota(s) isn't counted.
• If your linked rotas clash on the same day, anywhere in your stored history, hours may be double-counted for that period. We'll flag it.
• An on-call code gets a best-guess resident/non-resident classification until you confirm it, and work done during non-resident on-call is invisible to rota data (see the on-call section above).
• Shifts that appear on your rota only as all-day codes with no times (study days, some leave codes) carry no hours, so they're left out of both pay and compliance. If one should count, give it real times in the timings editor.
• Annual and study leave don't reduce your estimate. Leave days are paid as if you'd worked your average week, so we take leave-marked weeks out of the averaging entirely (they don't sit in the maths as zero-hour weeks). The averages therefore describe the weeks you actually work. If your leave happens to displace unusually heavy or light weeks of your rota cycle, the estimate can drift slightly either way.
• You don't need to have booked your leave. The prospective-cover uplift comes from your entitlement, not from what's on the rota, so a rota with no leave booked is priced off your full working pattern — the same basis your trust assesses a work schedule on. Expect the figure to move a little (we measured about 1–3% on a typical rota) as leave goes on, since the averages then describe the weeks the leave doesn't displace.
• Do write your leave on the rota, though. If a week off is simply left blank we can't tell it apart from a week you worked nothing, and it drags your average down — which costs far more than the drift above, because the additional-hours line pays only the excess over 40 hours and so amplifies any error about nine-fold. We read the usual codes (AL, A/L, annual leave, sick, HOL, holiday, LV, vacation, and a day off in lieu as DOIL or TOIL). If your rota uses something we've missed, tell us and we'll add it.
• Clock changes are invisible: a night shift spanning the switch to or from BST counts its nominal hours, not the hour gained or lost. That is at most an hour out, twice a year.
• Scotland's and Wales's 2026/27 rates and Northern Ireland's 2025/26 rate are calculated from a confirmed pay-award percentage applied to a verified baseline, rather than transcribed from the exact circular table: high-confidence, but not guaranteed to the pound.
• Northern Ireland's 2026/27 pay award has been accepted UK-wide but isn't yet implemented (it's waiting on a Stormont budget). We show the 2025/26 rates, which are what's actually payable today. Expect back-pay once it's implemented.
• Devolved-nation (Scotland/Wales/NI) banding thresholds use a well-corroborated but not verbatim-primary-sourced definition of "unsocial hours". See the full methodology for detail.

Every figure the calculator uses is taken from a published official source, and every figure in our methodology is recorded alongside a link to the exact document it came from. The source types: NHS Employers and devolved health department pay circulars (the official pay scales for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), gov.uk / HMRC (income tax, National Insurance and student loan thresholds), NHS pension scheme contribution tables (NHSBSA, SPPA and HSC Pension Service), Scottish Government tax factsheets (Scottish income tax bands), and BMA contract guides. The key documents:

• BMA: Pay scales for resident doctors in England
• BMA: Guide to the accepted June 2026 pay offer (England 2026/27 scale)
• BMA: Understanding your payslip (2016 contract)
• BMA: Pensionable service guide for secondary care doctors
• NHS Employers: FAQs for the 2016 doctors in training contract
• Scottish Government: NHS Circular PCS(DD)2025/01 (Addendum – Residents)
• Welsh Government: NHS Wales pay circular MD(W) 01/2025
• Welsh Government: NHS Wales pay circular MD(W) 01/26 (2026/27 uplift)
• NI Department of Health: Pay and Conditions Circular HSC(TC8) 01/2025 R4
• NHSBSA: NHS Pension contribution rates 2025/26 (England & Wales)
• NHSBSA: Will I pay tax or National Insurance from my NHS Pension?
• SPPA: NHS Pension Scheme (Scotland) member contributions
• HSC Pension Service: Northern Ireland contribution rates
• gov.uk: Income Tax rates and Personal Allowances
• Scottish Government: Scottish Income Tax factsheets
• gov.uk: Repaying your student loan