Data analysisPayWorking conditionsIreland

Why Irish NCHDs are striking: the numbers

On 14 October, hospital doctors across Ireland joined a strike by about 300,000 public servants[1]. Here is what eighteen years of pay, prices, rent and rosters look like for the doctors who keep hospitals running at night.

BetterCall·20 October 2026·11 min read·Every figure sourced

What happened

The public service pay agreement expired on 30 June 2026 with no successor in place. The Irish Medical Organisation balloted consultants, NCHDs and public health doctors in September, and 94% voted for industrial action up to and including strike[12]. The grounds were the lapsed pay deal and local bargaining claims, owed under the last agreement, that were never settled[13].

On 14 October NCHDs worked a rota equivalent to Sunday staffing until 5pm, with cancer, dialysis and palliative care continuing and maternity at Sunday staffing plus one[14]. There were pickets at more than 30 locations, and a work-to-rule began the next day: contracted hours only, no extra or voluntary duties[15]. A second strike day planned for 21 October was suspended on 16 October once Government agreed a route to talks at the Workplace Relations Commission, which opened on 19 October[16, 17].

So this is a public sector dispute, not an NCHD-only one. But NCHDs bring their own grievances to it, and the numbers behind them go back to 2008.

Eighteen years without a real pay rise

Between 2008 and 2025, average earnings in Ireland rose 43% while prices rose 23%[3, 4]. Most workers got a real pay rise. Intern pay rose 19%, and inflation is now back up to 4.1%[18].

It fell first. In September 2008 an intern was paid €35,534 plus a Living Out Allowance of €62.85 a week, about €38,814 a year. The FEMPI cut came in 2010, a new-entrant intern rate 10% lower in 2011, and in February 2012 the allowance was abolished for all interns. Interns starting in 2012 earned €30,257, 21% less than in 2008 after inflation. A merger of the intern scales in late 2013 lifted that to €31,938, and pay then stood still until 2017, when the allowance was folded back into the scale[2]. Those interns lost twice: the allowance was also withdrawn from SHOs and registrars who were not already receiving it, so doctors who qualified from 2012 onwards went without its €3,193 a year until mid-2017. The calculator below leaves the allowance out, so for this group the real loss is larger than it shows. The pay deals since have brought intern pay back to roughly where it started: an intern's €47,127 in 2026 is 4.3% below the 2008 salary after inflation, and the top of the specialist registrar scale is 5.4% below.

Measured against the rest of the country, the gap is wider. Had it kept pace with average earnings, an intern's salary would be about €58,000 this year, not €47,127. The chart shows both comparisons for every NCHD grade.

This is not only about doctors falling behind tech salaries. Earnings in health and social work, which includes nurses, care staff and doctors, rose 20% for full-time staff, close to the 19% for intern pay. The gap is between the health service and the rest of the economy.

What has it cost you?

Those figures are for one post. Your own loss depends on when you started and how long you spent at each grade. Enter your career below to see how your basic pay compares, year by year, with what the same grade and point paid in 2008 once it is grown in line with prices.

What housing costs a junior doctor

Interns rotate through posts across their training network, not necessarily in the same hospital[20], and about a third of NCHDs outside training schemes move site each year[11]. Average Dublin rents are up 70% since 2008[21]. The average Dublin rent registered with the RTB took 39% of an intern's gross salary in 2008, and 56% in 2025.

Those RTB figures average every home of every size, from studios to family houses, so they show how rents have moved against pay rather than what one doctor pays. For that, listed rents are clearer. After income tax, USC and PRSI, an intern on €47,127 takes home about €3,170 a month[7, 22, 23]. A one-bed apartment in Dublin was listed at an average of €2,042 a month in mid-2026, which is 64% of take-home pay. A double room in a shared house was €896, or 28%[6]. Living alone costs more than 30% of take-home pay in every part of the country.

Aren't doctors well paid?

Consultants are, and that is the usual reply. But an intern starts on about what a newly qualified teacher earns[24, 25], after five or six years of unpaid study, or four on top of a first degree for graduate entry. Interns are typically 25, and the median doctor only starts a permanent consultant post at 39[11]. The strike is about the years in between.

1. Intern

   €47,127 · Median age 25

2. Senior house officer

   €55,292 to €75,623

3. Registrar

   €70,276 to €82,756

4. Specialist registrar

   €78,786 to €98,091

5. Consultant (2023 contract)

   €238,221 to €286,151 · Median age 39

Compared with abroad

What stands out is how many leave: on average 53% of intern cohorts since 2015 left the Irish health system the year after internship. For the 2023 cohort it was 60%, and 58% were still not working in Ireland two years later[11].

In euro, Irish first-year pay sits mid-table among the places they go, and English FY1s now earn slightly more after their own strikes[26]. But Ireland is expensive: its consumer price level is the sixth highest of the 38 OECD countries, and only Switzerland and New Zealand have higher housing costs[27]. Allow for that and Ireland drops towards the bottom.

Many do come back. 77% of the 2016–2020 intern cohorts had started basic specialist or GP training in Ireland by 2025[11]. But every year away is a year the Irish system pays to train a doctor who is working somewhere else.

The hours, and why they matter for patients

Pay is only half of it. The 2022 NCHD agreement limited rosters to two 24-hour shifts per fortnight unless the doctor agrees to a third, and banned consecutive weekends[28]. It also brought in fines for hospitals that breach working-time law[28]. An IMO survey reported in 2026 suggests much of that is still not happening[8]:

Much of that time is not paid. In the IMO's 2022 survey, every NCHD surveyed reported working beyond their rostered hours, and 54% said they were not paid for all of them[9]. At its AGM in April, the IMO said NCHD hours were still above legal working limits[29], and talks on a new NCHD contract, which effectively collapsed during 2025, only restarted in March 2026[8]. More than half of NCHDs are not on a formal training scheme at all[30], which makes the hours harder to justify as training.

Long hours are a patient safety issue, not just a working conditions one. In the Medical Council's Your Training Counts survey, 44.9% of trainees working more than 59 hours a week had been involved in an adverse event, against 9.5% of those working 39 hours or less[10]. A survey shows an association rather than proof that each event was caused by fatigue, but it is the reason working-time limits exist.

What doctors are asking for

• A new public pay agreement that covers the cost-of-living losses since 2021, which is the first item at the WRC talks[31].
• The NCHD local bargaining claims from the last deal: shorter SHO, specialist registrar and senior registrar scales, a higher top point on the registrar scale, and GP trainees in their fourth year moved to the specialist registrar rate. These would be backdated to 1 September 2025[8].
• A new NCHD contract, with the 2022 limits on hours, weekends and rosters actually enforced.

The bottom line

Irish doctors are not asking for a return to the Celtic Tiger, or to be the best paid in the world. Since 2008 the rest of the economy got a real pay rise and NCHDs did not. Living alone near any hospital now costs more than 30% of what an intern takes home, and nearly two-thirds in Dublin. Most NCHDs still work past the legal limit, often unpaid, in conditions linked to patient harm. And six in ten interns now leave the Irish health system after their first year.

The question at the WRC is whether Ireland will pay and roster the doctors it trains well enough to keep them.

How we worked this out

References

1. 1.Irish Times, 14 Oct 2026
2. 2.HSE consolidated salary scales, 2008–2026
3. 3.CSO EHA05 (annual earnings)
4. 4.CSO CPA01 (CPI, annual)
5. 5.CSO EHQ03 (weekly earnings)
6. 6.Daft.ie Rental Report 2026 Q2
7. 7.Revenue, tax rates and bands 2026
8. 8.IMO Annual Report 2025
9. 9.IMO NCHD ballot information, 2022
10. 10.Medical Independent on Your Training Counts 2019–20, Dec 2021
11. 11.HSE NDTP Medical Recruitment and Retention Report 2025
12. 12.RTÉ, 22 Sep 2026
13. 13.Medical Independent, 22 Sep 2026
14. 14.Irish Medical Times, 13 Oct 2026
15. 15.RTÉ, 15 Oct 2026
16. 16.Irish Times, 16 Oct 2026
17. 17.RTÉ, 19 Oct 2026
18. 18.CSO CPI September 2026
19. 19.Public Service Pay Commission, Module 1 report, 2018
20. 20.HSE NDTP, the intern year
21. 21.CSO RIA02 (RTB average rent, Dublin)
22. 22.Revenue, USC rates and thresholds 2026
23. 23.Citizens Information, paying PRSI
24. 24.HSE pay scales, 1 June 2026
25. 25.TUI post-2011 common basic scale
26. 26.BMA resident doctor pay scales (England) 2026/27
27. 27.OECD price level indices, 2024 (all OECD countries)
28. 28.IMO, NCHD agreement key points (agreed Dec 2022, in force Jan 2023)
29. 29.Irish Medical Times, 14 Apr 2026
30. 30.Medical Council Workforce Intelligence Report 2024
31. 31.RTÉ, 17 Oct 2026

Each chart lists its own data sources underneath it.