Dental training pay 2026 — DFT, DCT & StR salaries (England)

Basic full-time salary by training stage, England, from 1 April 2026 — indicative; always verify with the employing trust.

DFT salary 2026 (foundation dentist)

The national foundation dentist salary is £43,893 — about £3,658 a month before deductions. It is the same on every one of the 72 DFT schemes, wherever you are placed, and applies for the whole DFT year from 1 April 2026. The DFT payment is set through the General Dental Services Statement of Financial Entitlements Directions rather than the medical and dental pay scale, and is reproduced in the pay circular for information.

DCT1 and DCT2 salary 2026

DCT1 and DCT2 are paid the same. Both sit on nodal point 3 — DCT1 on 3a and DCT2 on 3b — at £55,355 basic, about £4,613 a month. On-call, nights and weekends are paid on top, and London weighting applies where relevant — so what you actually take home depends a lot on the rota, which is listed per post across the 665 DCT places in 143 hospitals and community services.

DCT3 salary 2026

DCT3 is the step up: nodal point 4a, £67,325 basic — about £5,610 a month, before out-of-hours supplements and London weighting.

StR (specialty training) pay

Dentists enter specialty training at ST1 after dental core training rather than at ST3/ST4, so the pay circular places every dental StR from ST1 onwards on nodal point 4 or above. Dental ST1 therefore starts at £67,325 — not on the lower core-training points — rising to £77,348 by ST5. Dentists in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery training programmes are the exception: they are paid on the doctors’ scale, not the dentists’ table. Academic (ACF) trainees are paid on the clinical scale for their stage, with NIHR-funded research time. See the 17 specialty training centres and the 2026 DST vacancy numbers.

On top of basic pay

On-call and out-of-hours work attracts enhanced rates and availability supplements — the DCT post listings flag on-call, weekend and long-day patterns per post. London weighting applies where relevant.

TERS — Targeted Enhanced Recruitment Scheme

An additional incentive payment advertised on selected hard-to-fill posts (the amount is stated in the post descriptor). Posts carrying it are badged "£ TERS" here and on the map — currently the Cumbria DCT posts.

Where these posts are

• Dental Foundation Training — all 72 UK schemes, with places, study days and competition history
• Dental Core Training — 665 places across 143 hospitals and community services, DCT1 to DCT3, with rotation and on-call detail
• Specialty training (StR / DST) — 17 centres and the 2026 vacancy numbers by specialty
• Academic Clinical Fellowships — 14 NIHR posts with 25% protected research time

Recruitment opens at different points in the year for each — see the timelines page.

Sources & caveats

Figures: NHS Employers Pay and Conditions Circular (M&D) 1/2026 R2, published 24 July 2026 — Annex A, Section 1, “Dentists in training basic pay”, effective 1 April 2026. Taken from the circular itself: the dentists’ table is not reproduced on the BMA or NHS Health Careers pay pages, and mapping dental grades onto the doctors’ nodal points gives the wrong answer.

R2 restructured the nodal points from five to ten (3a/3b, 4a/4b/4c, 5a/5b/5c) following the agreement between the government and the BMA, and recalculated the on-call and weekend allowances with them. Any dental pay figure published before 24 July 2026 uses the old five-point structure and will not match the table above.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland set their own scales and do not align point-for-point with England — see the BMA nations pay pages. Pay changes every April, and this circular was itself revised twice between May and July 2026, so check the current version before relying on any figure.

Spotted something wrong? Corrections are very welcome — email me and I will fix it.