NHS pension for a Foundation Doctor — your pension starts accruing from day one of FY1.
Estimate your NHS pension as an FY1 or FY2 foundation doctor earning around £39,000 including banding. See projected pension and career trajectory.
Foundation doctors join the NHS pension scheme from their first day as an FY1, typically aged 23–25. The basic salary is modest, but total pensionable pay including banding supplements and on-call intensity payments pushes it to around £39,000. What makes foundation training unique from a pension perspective is the certainty of rapid pay progression: within seven or eight years, most doctors will have moved through core or specialty training into registrar-level pay in the £50,000–£60,000 range, and many will eventually reach consultant salaries above £100,000. Every year of CARE accrual at foundation level is revalued at CPI + 1.5%, so that £720 of annual pension earned in FY1 will have grown significantly in real terms by retirement. Foundation doctors who qualified as mature students — having worked in other NHS roles first — may already hold legacy 1995 or 2008 benefits from their earlier service, making their pension position more complex than their peers.