Does city matter more than NHS band for cost of living?

[JKNoshilling]

I have been building a salary tool for NHS workers and wanted to share something that genuinely surprised me.

Band 5 nurse disposable income after rent per month:

London: £312
Manchester: £687
Glasgow: £812
Sheffield: £902

Same band. Same job. Sheffield nurses have nearly three times the spending money of London nurses every single month.

The London weighting exists but it does not come close to covering the rent gap. A Band 5 in London needs to reach Band 7 before their disposable income matches a Band 5 colleague in Sheffield.

Full breakdown across all bands and 12 cities at salarydex.com if useful.

Has anyone else found the city made a bigger difference than the band to their actual quality of life?

Housing is more expensive in London so it will affect the quality of your life.

Not sure why this would surprise anyone.

When I have visited friends there the way they have to live just to get by is shocking, adults on what should be a decent wage forced to spend a fortune for a single room in a shared house.

One four bedroom flat I visited had 6 individuals living in it, one in each bedroom, one in the lounge and one in the corridor. No one seemed to think this was unusual. The ones without a bedroom were off the books.

This is a result of us as a nation choosing to treat housing as a get rich scheme for a few, not as a basic need.

I am half a Londoner and I think it's a fantastic place to live if your housing is sorted, but I could never afford to live there.

It has always been thus, it’s nothing new,

Both DH and I left the overheated SE 35 and 33 years ago and met in Birmingham as relatively fresh faced junior staff in higher education. So similar pay grade dependant all over the UK. He then had the chance of an amazing job at Imperial College just after we got married in 1999, we had also relocated much further in to the North. We were looking for a house to buy, the comparison was off the scale. We bought a house in one of the most desirable roads in our town for 63k, you could still buy small terraces for 19k up the road in the ex pit village we live near.

I mean it’s only got much worse since then but it’s nothing new. In the same house now currently worth about 300k. Wages for junior staff doing the same job were 26k back then and are now 47k. If I picked up this house and dumped it where DH grew up which is in Surrey it wojkd be worth almost a million, where I grew up on the South coast about 550k.

The SE is just overheated and always has been, regionals differences have always been there.

No surprises there - London is obviously expensive - but so are other cities eg Cambridge, Bristol, Edinburgh etc and your money only goes so far!

Actually that did surprise me! I knew there would be a difference but not that much.
id definitely choose Sheffield 😂

I genuinely wonder how people can afford to be a nurse, junior teacher etc in London.

Nolongera the six people in a four bedroom flat thing is so common and so rarely talked about honestly. The idea that a Band 5 nurse or a junior teacher is living like that on what should be a professional salary is genuinely shocking when you say it out loud.

Are people in London so detached from the rest of the country that they're surprised by this?

On those salaries in London you're stuck renting shared housing. In other cities, where you can still have a good quality of life, lots of culture, jobs, diversity and everything that people value in London and people on average salaries, such as nurses and teachers, have a realistic opportunity to save a deposit and buy a family house in a nice enough area in a reasonable timescale.

And yet people still say they 'have' to live in London.

Everything is more expensive in London. Other regions have much more disposable income than Londoners - whether working or on benefit. 🙄

ViciousCurrentBun that historical comparison is fascinating. The wages have roughly doubled since 1999 but the house prices in the SE have gone up four or five times over the same period. The gap has just kept widening.

JustAnUdea honestly a lot of them cannot afford it long term which is part of why London NHS trusts have such high turnover and vacancy rates. The data shows a Band 5 in London needs to reach Band 7 before their disposable income after rent matches what a Band 5 colleague has in Sheffield or Glasgow. That is a significant chunk of a career just to break even on quality of life. I will update the figures on salarydex.com as rent data changes. Worth bookmarking if you are ever facing a city decision.

Twoshoesnewshoes that is the reaction most people have when they see the actual numbers rather than just knowing vaguely that London is expensive. £312 versus £902 for the same job is hard to ignore.

Many or most people with reasonably well paid jobs well away from London can still afford to buy a home, North East England and £150k will buy something reasonable.

Having said that, my first flat was 10k and I was earning 10k a year. Same job pays 30k now but flat is 80k.

I have given up trying to explain to people that high house prices are not a good thing for most people, they just don't get it.

It doesn't surprise me sadly but would love to know more about the tool.

ChilledProsecco you are absolutely right that it is not just London. Bristol is around £520 left after rent, Edinburgh around £540. Both significantly better than London but nowhere near the northern cities. The further you get from the M25 the more the numbers improve.

Midnights92 glad it is useful. The tool is at salarydex.com and it covers all NHS bands from Band 2 through to Band 8a across 12 UK cities. For each band and city it shows the gross salary, take home after tax and NI and pension, then what is left after typical rent and bills for that area.
The city comparison is probably the most eye opening part. You can put two cities side by side and see the disposable income gap in real terms. A Band 5 in Sheffield versus a Band 5 in London is nearly £600 a month difference in what you actually keep. Same job, same pay scale, completely different financial reality.
There is also an affordability section where you can enter a specific salary and see whether it realistically covers costs in a given city, and a section breaking down what each band actually buys you in day to day life rather than just the headline number.
Happy to answer any questions here too if you want to dig into specifics for a particular band or city.

None of the people who are surprised have said they live in London. It's as likely to be non-Londoners surprised at how expensive London is.

Unsurprising I guess, everyone knows London housing is expensive.

Is there a version that includes band C council tax? Because your real take-home only happens after you've paid all your taxes. And in London council tax can be a lot less than in Sheffield.

It's not surprising but it is appalling. The so called London weighting needs adjusting and expanding! If vacancies want to be filled then big changes need to be made.

We live in Essex and actually that has larger vacancies than in London. Simply because people who live here have ++ house prices so if they work for the NHS they are more likely to travel into London for the extra 10/20% than work closer to home and get fringe or nothing on top of salary.

I'm not sure how it's gone on so long without it being addressed 😭

Public transport in London is much better and far cheaper than the regions though, so you can live 40-50 miles away and your commute will take the same time as someone else commuting 8 miles in a city like Leeds.
Most band 5 nurses will not be living in central London but areas further out and commuting in. My DSIS is a nurse and she lived in nursing accommodation when she was a new band 5 which is very common and it is (or was) fairly heavily subsidised and close to the hospital. Wherever you live as a newly qualified band 5 you are going to struggle on your own. When I first started work in Bristol 20 years ago I paid £580 pm for my room in a shared house (my salary was £15,000pa). we moved from Bristol to NE as we couldn’t afford to buy a family sized house on the salaries we earned.

That would just cause the same problem in the hospitals in commuting distance to your Essex hospital that are outside the increased area.
I think there are 2 ways they could improve it, split the weighting so 50% goes on your home postcode and 50% on your workplace postcode, but acknowledge there are expensive areas to live outside London that should be included, these include areas of the Lake District and other tourist hotspots where housing is outside the reach of average families.
Or remove the London weighting completely but increase wages across the country to try and prevent the distortion of wealth and the income concentration in the capital. The regions are increasingly being left behind and a lot of it is down to higher wages and house prices. The second option would be so unpopular it would never happen, but if you want to make London more affordable, you need to bring the rest of the country up, not increase wages to try and make it more affordable as that will widen the gap further. If London continues to pull away it will make it harder and harder for anyone without family help or a stellar job (or both) to live and work there, we will become such and unequal country, with less social mobility - which will be based far more on where you were born and where your family live than academic achievements, work ethic and entrepreneurial success.