We’ve partnered with Doctors Paycheck to provide a comprehensive webinar on Understanding Resident Doctors’ Pay. The session aims to equip doctors with essential knowledge about their salary, common pay errors, and strategies to optimise their take-home pay. They’re also offering our audience an exclusive code for 20% off their calculators at the end of this article – the calculators are well worth checking out because it makes spotting errors really easy!

Key Topics Covered

• Understanding your salary under the 2016 Terms & Conditions (England)
• Breaking down your payslip
• Deductions: taxes, pensions, and student loans
• Understanding the 2024 resident doctor pay uplift
• Identifying common payroll errors
• Money-saving tips and tricks
• Optimising your take-home pay

Watch the full webinar

Key Takeaways from the Webinar

1. Ensure You Have a Work Schedule

Without a work schedule, there is no way to check if your pay is accurate. Trusts must provide you with a generic work schedule six weeks before starting a placement. If you work LTFT, you must receive both a generic work schedule and your bespoke LTFT work schedule. If you haven’t received them, email your HR department to request these.

2. Match Your Work Schedule with Your Rota

You are paid for the exact shifts on your work schedule, so if these don’t match your departmental rota, your pay won’t be correct. Make sure all shifts are documented on the work schedule, that your start and finish times are accurate, and that time for teaching and handover is included in the shift times. Work schedules must display all rostered duties before any leave is taken.

3. Verify Salary Calculations

There are many pay elements to check, each of which has different methods of calculation and gets especially complex if you work LTFT. Common errors include missing or incorrect adjustment of hours for prospective leave, incorrect calculation of enhanced (night) hours, incorrect weekend frequency or on-call allowance, incorrect London weighting allowance, incorrect flexible pay premia, and many more.

If you wish, Doctors Paycheck can do all these calculations for you in a few simple steps. By simply entering your personal, rota, and shift details, they’ll tell you exactly how much you should be paid. They’ll show you where there are errors in your work schedule, and any inaccuracies in your pay. Doctors Paycheck can also account for all contractual updates and pay uplifts, so you can check your pay all the way back to August 2016.

4. Regularly Check Your Payslip

Payroll errors can still occur even if your work schedule is correct at the time payslips are generated – particularly during job rotations or after industrial action. It is important to check your payslip every month to make sure it remains accurate.

You can also use Doctors Paycheck to help you with this – they show your monthly payslips exactly as they should appear so you’re able to easily compare. You can also adjust the interactive payslip to account for part months for when you rotate in or out of placements or see the impact of industrial action on your pay.

5. Confirm Your 2024 Pay Uplift & Backpay

In 2024, there was a two stage uplift to resident doctors’ pay which was backpaid to April 2023. This should have been done automatically, with previous trusts contacting you if you had moved on to another hospital – but there were many logistical and calculation errors which may have led to significant errors in pay.

Doctors Paycheck also includes an uplift calculator that shows you the exact back pay you should have received for each job you worked since April 2023 accounting for the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 pay uplifts – to help you check you’ve not been incorrectly paid.

6. Claim Tax Relief on Professional Expenses

Many doctors don’t claim tax back on expenses such as GMC Membership, Royal College Fees, Professional Indemnity, Examination Fees, Stethoscopes and other work equipment. You will get a refund at the highest rate of tax you pay (usually 20 or 40%). Check out our detailed article ‘Claiming Tax Relief’ on what you can claim for and how to claim.

7. Check Your Pension Contributions

NHS Pension Total Reward Statements often don’t make much sense for rotational doctors. Instead, you can email [email protected] to request a single document outlining all of your pensionable pay and contributions made since joining the scheme, called a “Statement of Pay & Contributions”. Check this carefully because sometimes trusts don’t communicate your pay or payments to the NHS pension accurately!

You shouldn’t be paying pension contributions for any of your locum work. Often, doctors are automatically enrolled into the NHS Pension scheme on their locum assignment number when joining a trust, meaning you pay inappropriate contributions. You can opt out of pension payments on your locum assignment number by completing an SD502 form stating you wish to remain enrolled in your substantive role but opt-out on your locum role.

8. Monitor Student Loan Repayments

Occasionally your student loan payments are not communicated between the trust and the student loan company. Particularly, when you start or finish paying deductions. Make sure you check your payslip monthly and log into your student loan repayment portal to check all the payments are accounted for!

9. Avoid Overpaying National Insurance (NI) on Locum Work

Doctors who work locums across multiple trusts often end up paying too much in National Insurance Contributions. You can opt to defer your NI contributions on your secondary and other locum posts to ensure you pay the lower/appropriate rate. Find out more here.

Exclusive discount code for Doctors Paycheck

Doctors Paycheck is offering a discount code of 20% off your first year’s subscription for Mind The Bleep users. Simply enter “MTB20” when signing up to Doctors Paycheck for 20% off, bringing the price to only £28.80/year (that’s only £2.40/month!). You can see our full list of exclusive discount codes on our discount page.

Written by Dr Hermione Leach & Dr Dominic Carr (Doctors Paycheck)
Reviewed and Edited by Dr Sithhipratha Arulrajan (FY3)