NHS pension for a Foundation Doctor — your pension starts accruing from day one of FY1.

Foundation doctors join the NHS pension scheme from their first day as an FY1, typically aged 23–25. Following the 2024 resident-doctor pay deal, basic pay is £38,831 for FY1 and £44,439 for FY2 (2025/26). Banding supplements and on-call intensity payments — typically around 20–40% on top of basic — push total pensionable pay for many foundation doctors into the high £40,000s to mid £50,000s range; this calculator pre-fills at £48,000 as a representative figure. 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 £65,000–£90,000 range including supplements, and many will eventually reach consultant salaries above £109,000. Every year of CARE accrual at foundation level is revalued at CPI + 1.5% during active membership, so each pension slice 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.