NHSScotland Workforce 31 December 2025
Quarter ending 31 December 2025
Official Statistics
Published: 03 March 2026
About this release
This release by NHS Education for Scotland (NES) provides the quarterly update, as at 31 December 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) or whole time equivalent (WTE) which adjusts the headcount to take account of part time working.
The data source for this release has changed from previous releases, with the primary source for employment data now being sourced from electronic Employment Support System (eESS). More detail about the impact of this change can be found in the Data Quality Report.
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 is available summarising ongoing and historic data quality issues and category and name changes.
A 5-day pre-release access list is available detailing all the roles who had early access to this publication.
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 2 June 2026.