NHSScotland Workforce 30 September 2025
Quarter ending 30 September 2025
Official Statistics
Published: 02 December 2025
About this release
This release by NHS Education for Scotland (NES) provides the quarterly update, as at 30 September 2025. This includes the number of staff directly employed by NHS Scotland and the number of vacant posts there were for nursing and midwifery staff, allied health professions, and medical and dental consultants.
This release also includes data on the number of dentists and general practitioners working in Scotland, on student nurses, the pharmacy workforce and the National Treatment Centre workforce.
When describing the size of a particular staff group figures are presented as headcount (actual number of staff) or whole time equivalent (WTE) which adjusts the headcount to take account of part time working.
The GPs and Dentists included in the summary work mainly as contractors and are not directly employed by NHS Scotland. However, some of these staff, GP and Dental trainees, and some qualified GPs and Dentists are employed by NHS Scotland and are included in the figures presented above. This means that combining the NHS Scotland Workforce elsewhere in the summary with the Primary Care workforce will double count staff included in both sections.
Key Points
Background
Information on staff directly employed is sourced from each NHS Board’s human resources and payroll systems. These are dynamic, operational systems and data can change over time. Work is undertaken with NHS Boards to improve data quality and previously published information may change from one publication to the next to reflect these improvements.
Further Information
A Data Quality Report has been produced for the first time summarising ongoing and historic data quality issues and category and name changes.
Pre-release access to this official statistics release was granted for a period of 5 working days prior to the date set for its publication to those people whose organisations and job titles are listed in the attached document.
We are continually working on ways on making our publications better, details of current developments and improvements can be found on our Future Developments page
The next scheduled quarterly release of this publication will be 3 March 2026.
The list of available annual reports can be found on the Official statistics annual reports page on TDI.
Publications prior to 3 December 2019 can be accessed via the ISD Workforce publication page.