England's Resident Doctors Accept Pay Deal, Ending Two Years of Strikes

The longest pay fight in the recent history of the NHS is over. England's resident doctors voted to accept the government's latest offer on pay and jobs, the British Medical Association said Monday, drawing a line under a dispute that produced 15 separate rounds of strikes since 2023.

The result was close. In the BMA referendum, 53% of eligible members backed the deal on a turnout of 57%, with 32,932 doctors casting a vote. It was enough. The union's resident doctors committee called off the walkout it had scheduled for 15 to 19 June and confirmed the industrial action is now at an end.

What the doctors accepted is a package the BMA values at an average 6.6% pay uplift, fully in place by April 2027. It combines a 3.5% award for 2026, backdated to April, with a further average 3.1% spread across the following 10 months. Beyond the headline figure, the offer promises 4,500 specialty training posts over three years to ease a bottleneck that has left qualified doctors competing for too few jobs, and it funds the first two attempts at each Royal College exam.

For all that, the union framed acceptance as a pause, not a settlement. Resident doctors committee chair Jack Fletcher said members had decided the offer was "sufficient to continue on the road to pay restoration, and sufficient to address the absurd lack of jobs in the NHS. The strikes will now end." Then came the warning: "We are putting the pay review process on notice."

The grievance underneath the numbers is erosion. The BMA's long-running claim is that resident doctors' pay, once inflation is accounted for, has fallen sharply since 2008, and the committee says even after recent rises it remains "nearly a fifth" below that level. A 6.6% rise, on that reading, narrows the gap without closing it.

The government tells the story differently. Health Secretary Wes Streeting thanked NHS staff who worked through the strike rounds and has pointed to a cumulative 28.9% rise for resident doctors since the government took office, alongside the cost and disruption each walkout brought to patients. Ministers will count ending the strikes as a win for a service still clearing the backlog the stoppages helped build.

The reprieve is also partial. It settles England, but not the rest of the country: resident doctors in Northern Ireland staged a 24-hour walkout the same day, a reminder that the underlying argument over how doctors are paid has not been resolved so much as relocated. It is the same tension that produced this week's NHS news on where scarce health funding goes — staffing or treatments, today's pay or tomorrow's care.

Fletcher left little doubt the union sees this as a stop on a longer road. If the pay review process fails to keep delivering, he said, "we risk once again falling back into dispute." The picket lines have come down. Whether they stay down is now a question for the next pay round.