NHSScotland Workforce 31 March 2025
Quarter ending 31 March 2025
Official Statistics
Published: 03 June 2025
About this release
This release by NHS Education for Scotland (NES) provides phase one of the quarterly update, as at 31 March 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. When describing the size of a particular staff group figures are presented as headcount (actual number of staff).
Revision on 19 August 2025: The medical agency expenditure for the year ending 31 March 2025 was published on 19 August in the NHS Scotland workforce Official Statistics. These data were not released as planned on 3 June 2025 due to concerns over quality raised during the Early Release for Quality Assurance period by an NHS Board. Data providers, NHS National Services Scotland (NSS), worked with NHS Boards to validate the data sourced from NHS Scotland's Finance Platform. Compared with the original extract provided to NES, there were minor changes made to the expenditure for four NHS Boards.
Medical agency expenditure data for the year ending 31 March 2025 is included in the annual report and dashboard (not the summary). There are no other changes to the NHS Scotland workforce official statistics publication released on 3 June.
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.
The GPs and Dentists 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 above with the Primary Care workforce will double count staff included in both sections.
Further Information
The next scheduled quarterly release of this publication will be 2 September 2025.
Publications prior to 3 December 2019 can be accessed via the ISD Workforce publication page.
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.