Nurse & Midwife Pay Rates NSW — NSW Health Pay Scales

What a registered nurse earns in New South Wales

On the Registered Nurse/Midwife scale, the bottom step (1st year) pays $81,468 a year and the top step (8th year and thereafter) pays $114,379. Those annual figures are weekly rate x 52, which is what 26 fortnightly pays comes to — the award itself publishes no annual figure. Base pay is only part of the picture: nursing is a rostered, round-the-clock job, and shift and weekend loadings routinely add a double-digit percentage on top.

Those buttons go to the nearest published take-home page, which is rounded to the closest $5,000. For your exact figure — including HECS-HELP, salary packaging and extra super — use the take-home pay calculator.

What makes NSW different

• Registered nurses and midwives share one scale in NSW — there is no separate midwifery pay ladder.
• The night shift loading rose from 15% to 20% from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2025.
• Weekend ordinary hours pay time and a half on Saturday and time and three quarters on Sunday, and those rates replace the shift loading rather than adding to it.
• The award prints a further increase for 1 July 2027, so the figures on this page have a known expiry.

NSW Health nursing and midwifery pay scales

Each table below uses the classification names the instrument itself prints. Classifications are not the same between states and this page does not translate them: a Queensland Nurse Grade 5 and a Tasmanian Registered Nurse Grade 3 are both entry registered nurse roles, but they are not the same classification and they are not on the same money.

Which agreement covers you

Nurses Award 2020 vs the NSW agreement

The Nurses Award 2020 (MA000034) is a federal minimum wage instrument, not a pay scale for public hospital staff. It sets the floor below which no nurse in Australia may lawfully be paid. Almost nobody in New South Wales's public health system is actually paid on it, because the instrument above pays well over the floor. The award is what governs pay in private hospitals, GP and specialist clinics, aged care and agency work where no enterprise agreement applies.

Award rates above are the minimum rates operative from 1 July 2026 (PR799315) for employees other than aged care employees. The award now carries a second, higher set of minimum rates for aged care nurses, operative from 1 August 2026 (PR812118) — an aged care registered nurse level 1 in their first year is on $1,571.60 a week, well above the $1,219.50 general rate. If someone quotes “the Nurses Award rate” without saying which of the two streams they mean, the number is unusable.

Full award pay-guide style tables for other awards are on the award pay rates page.

Shift penalties and weekend loadings in New South Wales

Nursing pay is penalty-driven. A nurse on a rotating roster with regular nights and weekends can be paid materially more than the base rate on this page, and the difference does not show up in any “average nurse salary” figure. Check these against your payslip line by line.

To model a specific roster — a fortnight of nights, a weekend block, an overtime call-back — use the overtime pay calculator, and read the overtime and penalty rates guide for how loadings interact with ordinary hours.

Moving up a step, and what each step is worth

Two different things move nursing pay. Within one classification you move through increments — usually annually for full-time staff, and by accumulated hours for part-time and casual staff. Between classifications you move by being appointed to a position, not by time served: nobody becomes a clinical nurse consultant or a unit manager by waiting.

The increments are worth checking. On the NSW registered nurse scale, the gap between consecutive steps is a real pay rise every year that you should be able to see land on a specific pay period. If your increment date has passed and the rate has not moved, that is a payroll question worth asking. Use the pay rise calculator to see what a step is worth after tax, and the back pay calculator if the increment was applied late.

Salary packaging, and why it changes your take-home but not your grade

Public hospital employees can salary package living expenses out of pre-tax income under the public hospital fringe benefits tax exemption. On a nursing salary that is worth several thousand dollars a year in extra take-home pay, and it is one of the largest single differences between public and private sector nursing pay once you look past the base rate.

What it does not do is change your classification, your increment or your gross pay. It changes how much of your gross pay is taxed. That distinction matters when you are comparing a public hospital offer against a private one, and when you are checking whether your payslip has the packaging deduction applied correctly. The mechanics, caps and eligibility are in the salary packaging guide; the salary sacrifice calculator shows the effect on a specific salary.

What this page does not show

This is a money page, so it says what it left out rather than filling gaps with estimates.

Published, but not reproduced here

These rows exist in the source and can be read at the link in the sources below:

• Nurse/Midwife Manager Grades 1–7 (Table 1)
• Nurse/Midwife Educator Grades 1–3 (Table 1)
• Registered Mothercraft Nurse 9th year — a closed classification for staff employed before 31 December 1988
• Table 2 allowances: in-charge, on-call, continuing education, uniform, Justice Health and remote-hospital rates

Not published anywhere we could verify

Nothing below appears on this page in any form. No figure here has been estimated, interpolated or carried across from another state:

• Public holiday penalty rates and overtime multipliers, which sit in clauses outside clause 15
• The 1 July 2027 non-salary allowance column, which the award prints as "TBC" pending the March 2027 CPI

Nurse pay in the other states

Every state runs its own classification structure and its own agreement. Comparing the raw numbers across states is misleading unless you also compare the classifications and the penalty structures.

Not yet published: Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory. Their instruments have not been read, and we would rather publish nothing than a guess.

Frequently asked questions