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Sarah Neville and Amy Borrett in London

PublishedJanuary 15 2026

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Saff Davies, a learning disability nurse in England’s NHS, has recently navigated the tortuous process of becoming a first-time homeowner in her mid-40s.

At 39, Matt Pearson, a final-year trainee nurse, has received his last maintenance payment and is at a loss to know how he will find next month’s rent. Unlike two of his cohort, he has so far managed to avoid the “last resort” of a food bank, but budgeting is “a massive struggle”. 

Meanwhile, newly qualified nurse Stacey, who has just started her first job and did not wish to give her full name, has found that after years of shouldering the education and living costs of training, her pay is swallowed up by an overdraft the moment it hits her bank account.

Excitement at earning her first proper salary has quickly evaporated. “I cannot even enjoy it because I have all these debts to pay. I’m someone that thinks ahead. I want to be able to own my own house. But I don’t have much left to save,” she says. 

Their circumstances may be different but all three have something in common beyond their vocation: a desire to know how best to manage their finances in a profession where fixed-income bands and salaries have failed to keep pace with inflation. 

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Reflecting on her journey to home ownership, Davies says she and her partner, who has recently left his job as an NHS technician after opting for self-employment in part to boost his earnings, were bringing in decent salaries. Yet “we couldn’t save because of the cost of living, the cost of rent”.  

The couple, who have a seven-year-old daughter, were only able to muster a deposit thanks to an inheritance. Without it, Davies says she may have had to consider opting out of the NHS pension scheme. 

With more information about securing a mortgage earlier in her career, she “would just have felt a little bit more prepared for the last few years, which financially have been difficult”. 

Support the FT’s Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign (FT FLIC)

The FT-backed Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign is aiming to shine a light through the financial fog by producing an array of materials aimed specifically at the approximately 1.5mn people who work for the NHS — the country’s biggest employer.

Aimée Allam, the charity’s executive director, acknowledges that financial education is not a cure-all. But she says that, like many people, NHS staff may need advice on budgeting and understanding a payslip, as well as “how to use credit more judiciously”.

They also face some distinct challenges. Many undertake additional freelance or “bank” shifts to supplement earnings, and need to know how “to operate as a freelancer [with] professional registrations”. 

NHS pensions can be fraught with complexity, while tailored offerings such as special mortgage and life insurance rates and the Blue Light Card, which gives discounts on shopping and entertainment to public sector workers, can also be difficult to access or understand.

The demanding nature of healthcare roles can make it harder for staff to carve out headspace to keep tabs on their finances in off-duty hours. Meanwhile, money worries drive some to leave the health service altogether, according to managers.

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Liz Gilbert, who oversees two large administration teams, says many staff members are buoyed by the “sense of enormous well being” that working for the NHS imparts. But at the end of the day, “if you can’t heat your house or you can’t get enough food . . . to support your family, then you have to go and look somewhere else. And we do lose good staff.” 

By this token, greater financial knowledge may benefit not simply the workers themselves but the entire NHS, and by extension millions of patients, suggests Johnny Runge, acting director of evaluation at the Policy Institute at King’s College London, who is working with FLIC to measure the impact of the programme. “Happier, more satisfied employees” may be less inclined to quit the NHS, he argues, which would help ease the NHS’s recruitment and retention crisis.

Since 2020, Manish Pareek, clinical professor in infectious diseases at the University of Leicester, has led an 18,000-strong study of NHS workers to examine how they are coping with stresses such as the cost of living crisis. Those with the greatest financial concerns were up to seven times more likely to meet screening criteria for depression. “The downstream effect of that, if you’re working in the NHS, is you may have to take time off work . . . and so the NHS loses valuable staff,” he says. 

The study discovered that nurses, in particular, were at higher risk, Pareek said. When the survey began at the end of 2020, about 44 per cent said they had no financial concerns, but by October 2022 just 22 per cent felt free of money worries.

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Deepa Korea, chief executive of the RCN Foundation, is at the sharp end of these financial stresses. A charitable arm of the Royal College of Nursing, it administers hardship grants to nurses and is expecting the number of applications it receives to have increased by more than 60 per cent in 2025 compared to 2024.

Korea says demand outside traditional spikes, such as the school summer holidays and Christmas, has “grown quite exponentially, to the extent where we have not been able to process the applications as fast as they’ve been coming in”. 

The rise in need has in part been driven by migrant workers finding they have “no recourse to public funds” — a rule preventing recent arrivals to the UK from accessing welfare benefits.

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As well as welfare restrictions, a lack of credit history limits the financial options available to NHS workers from overseas. Almost a quarter of workers registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council were educated overseas, including about 42,000 who joined in the two years ending March 2025. 

Danny Mortimer, chief executive of NHS Employers, argues better financial education will have a ripple effect far beyond the NHS. “We need to make an impact in communities around financial wellbeing. The NHS is a great vehicle for doing that because [staff will] take that information out to their friends and their families. There’s definitely a virtuous cycle there.” 

For Davies, FLIC’s provision of bespoke financial education for NHS staff is in tune with the health service’s purpose and ethos. “There is something about that collective knowledge [and] being able to support each other,” she says. “It is the culture of working for the NHS. You feel a part of something.”