Children's Nurse jobs in London

What a first post here looks like

Newly qualified children's nurses in London are appointed at band 5, and that band means the same thing in every organisation in the region: £32,073 at the bottom, £39,043 at the top, under the England pay circular for 2026/27. No employer here can outbid another for you on basic pay, which changes what you are really choosing between.

The post itself is usually rotational: you are appointed to the department rather than to one clinical area, and you move through a sequence of placements — commonly general paediatric medicine, surgical and specialist children’s wards, within a children’s hospital or a general trust’s children’s unit — before settling on a specialty. This is where the choice between employers in London actually bites. A large acute organisation holds more of those rotations in-house; a specialist or community organisation may hold only some, and you would need to change employer to get the rest. Read the rotation list in the advert, not the job title, and ask which rotations are guaranteed rather than aspirational.

London has both sides of the market: 29 NHS organisations that plausibly employ children's nurses, and 1 approved course producing graduates into it. That matters when you are judging how hard a first post will be to get. Where local course provision is heavy relative to the number of employers, expect more applicants per advert and more weight on where you did your placements — students who placed with a trust are known quantities when a band 5 post opens there. A further 2 NHS organisations in the region are of a type that rarely holds posts in this profession, so they are left out of the list below.

London is the one place where the band figure understates the salary. Posts inside the Inner London zone attract a high cost area supplement of 20% of basic pay , with a floor of £5,794 and a ceiling of £8,746 . It is not a bonus and not discretionary — it is part of the contractual salary for posts in that zone, and it is pensionable. It is also not free money: London’s whole-economy median full-time salary is the highest of any UK region, and housing costs track it. Weigh the supplement against rent before you treat a London post as the better-paid option.