Training

How many medical and nursing training places are there?

The training of new staff is crucial to the NHS, helping it replace those leaving, meet increasing demand and cover vacancies. In England, at any one time there are in the region of 200,000 students in training and education to become clinicians and resident doctors in postgraduate medical education.

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Number of foundation and speciality training places ('resident doctors')

Chart

31/12/2025

1. Data are for foundation doctors and specialty registrars working in hospital and community health services and general practice in England. GP trainees include those on foundation year placements.

2. In September 2024, the British Medical Association changed the terminology used to refer to this group from ‘junior’ to ‘resident’ doctors.

NHS Digital’s NHS Workforce Statistics and General Practice Workforce Statistics

The number of foundation doctors has increased by 714 between September 2024 and September 2025. The number of doctors in core training or working as specialty registrars increased by 2,738 over the same period. Meanwhile, the number of GP registrars decreased by 111.

A fall in the number of students starting nursing training in England

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Number of nurse training places

Chart

31/12/2025

1. Data are a count of the number of applicants to nursing degrees reported at two time points (January and June).

2. All figures are based on students of any domicile placed at universities in England only.

3. The old definitions of subject areas used by UCAS were reclassified and new definitions were implemented from 2019-20. For example, some courses that were previously labelled as ‘Nursing’ are now categorised as ‘Health studies’. We have presented both the old data (as dotted lines) and the new data (as solid lines) in the chart, and any comparisons between the two should be treated with caution. For further information, please see here: https://www .hesa.ac.uk/support/documentation/hecos#Mapping

UCAS applicant figures, end of cycle analysis and daily clearing analysis.

Using the new definitions in the UCAS data, the number of applicants to nursing courses in June 2025 fell by 110 compared to the same point in 2024 and 12,290 fewer than the peak in applications in 2021.

The number of people actually accepting a nurse training place in 2025 has increased by 140 (or 0.7%) compared to a year prior, but has fallen by 4,755 (18%) since the peak in 2021.

Student bursaries for nursing were removed before the 2017-18 intake, but in December 2019, the last government introduced new maintenance grants for nursing students to support living costs, which came into effect in September 2020.