NMC fees rise on 1 October 2026

The NMC is putting its fees up on 1 October 2026. It is the first increase in eleven years, and if you are registering from overseas it touches two of the four fees on the route rather than just the annual one everybody is talking about.

The headline figure is the annual fee that keeps you on the register once you have a PIN. That goes from £120 a year to £143, a rise of 19.2%. The Council approved it on 28 April 2026 after a twelve week consultation that drew more than forty thousand responses, most of them against. The NMC's own argument for it is that the fee has been frozen since 2015 and would be about £168 today if it had simply tracked inflation.

Easier to miss is that the same 19.2% lands on the other registration fees too, and two of those you pay long before you hold a PIN. The qualification evaluation fee, which you pay at the very start so the NMC can assess your qualification and tell you what you will be asked to sit, goes from £140 to £167. The registration fee you pay at the end, once both parts of the Test of Competence are behind you, goes from £153 to £182.

Here is the whole route, before and after, so you can see which lines move and which do not.

So the mandatory fees on the Test of Competence route go from about £1,170 to about £1,226, a difference of £56. You can see the four fees and when each one falls due set out in full, which is worth doing before you budget, because they are not all paid to the NMC and they are not all paid at the same time.

The two exam fees are not part of this rise, and that is the bit worth holding on to. The computer-based test is paid to Pearson VUE and the OSCE is paid to your allocated test centre, and neither is an NMC registration fee, so nothing in the April decision changes them. If you see a figure claiming the whole route is going up by a fifth, that is the mistake behind it.

Which of these you actually pay depends on where you are. If you are already registered, the fee you pay is the one in force when your renewal falls due, so a renewal dated before 1 October is at £120 and one dated on or after it is at £143. If you have not started yet, the evaluation fee is the first thing you will pay and it is the one moving from £140 to £167, so starting before October saves you twenty seven pounds on that step. That is real money and it is not a reason to rush a decision this size.

Two caveats. The increase is subject to parliamentary approval, which is the usual route for a change to the NMC's fees rules and is not normally where these things fall over, but it is not the same as done. And at the time of writing the NMC's own fees pages still show the old figures, because they describe what you pay today rather than what you will pay in October. When they update, they are the authority and this post is not. Check anything you are about to pay against the NMC directly.

If the fee rise is what has prompted you to get on with it, the computer-based test is the step to start with. It is the only part of the route you can sit without leaving your country, it does not wait on your documents, and the order everything happens in is worth reading once before you spend anything at all.