Is a 3% Pay Rise a Pay Cut for Australian Doctors in 2026?

If you are a doctor in a Victorian public hospital, you have probably seen the two numbers side by side: nurses and midwives on 28.4%, doctors on 3%. It is a striking contrast, and it is the reason a lot of people concluded the medical workforce had been treated worse than every other group in the health system.

The contrast is real, but it is smaller and more specific than those two numbers suggest. Here is the arithmetic, with the sources, so you can judge it yourself.

Is 3% below inflation in Australia right now?

Yes. The Australian Bureau of Statistics monthly CPI indicator recorded annual inflation of 4.3% in September 2026, up from 4.0% in August, released on 28 October 2026.

So a 3% increase leaves a specialist about 1.3 percentage points behind the cost of living over the same period. For doctors in training the offered figure was 6%, which is ahead of inflation.

That split matters and it is often lost. The interim deal was not one number. It was two, and they land on opposite sides of the inflation line.

Why the comparison with nurses is not like for like

This is the part worth slowing down on.

The nurses and midwives figure is a four-year total. The Victorian Government announced that nurses and midwives would receive 28.4% compounded over the life of a four-year agreement, endorsed in June 2024. It was never a single-year rise.

Inside that agreement, the increase landing in 2026 is much smaller. The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation's Victorian branch puts the 2026 increase at between 3% and 4.09% compounded, depending on classification.

Set against that, the doctors' 3% for specialists is close to the bottom of the range nurses are receiving this year, not a fraction of 28.4%.

What did Victorian doctors actually ask for?

The pay claim has been reported at various figures and none of the mainstream coverage pins it down, so treat any single percentage you see with caution. What is documented is the rest of the claim, and it is not mainly about money.

Doctors asked for shifts capped at 12.5 hours, night shifts capped from a maximum of seven in a row down to four, and at least three guaranteed days off each fortnight.

One metropolitan hospital doctor put the shift question plainly: "Instead of having to do 14 hours straight shifts, we want to do 12 and a half hours."

That is the context the percentages sit inside. A dispute reported as a pay fight was, in the claim itself, substantially a fatigue and rostering fight.

What does the interim agreement settle?

Both branches accepted a twelve-month interim memorandum of understanding on a 51.73% majority, which cancelled a twelve-hour statewide stoppage planned for the following morning.

It includes changes to working hours, addresses overtime for doctors in training, and sets up an occupational health and safety working group and a workload working group. Both unions said on the same day that it does not resolve pay or systemic understaffing.

StatDoctor wrote about what the agreement leaves unfunded in a separate piece on the Victorian understaffing question.

The numbers side by side

Why locum rates do not follow enterprise agreement rates

This is the part that changes what you can actually do about it.

An enterprise agreement rate is set by negotiation inside a government wages policy. A locum rate is set by something else entirely: whether a specific shift, at a specific hospital, on a specific weekend, gets filled. When it does not, the rate moves, and it moves without waiting for a bargaining round to conclude.

That is why a doctor's total earnings can move in a year when their base rate does not. It is also why the two numbers should never be read as the same market.

If you want to see what shifts are actually advertised at rather than what an agreement says, StatDoctor publishes what locum shifts actually pay from its own platform data.

Should you pick up locum shifts while your agreement is unresolved?

That is a personal decision and it depends on your training stage, your tax position and how much notice your current employer requires. Two things are worth weighing.

The first is that an interim agreement is, by definition, temporary. A twelve-month arrangement that neither union regards as settling pay means the question returns in 2027, and it returns during a bargaining round rather than between them.

The second is that locum work is the part of your income that is not waiting on that outcome. Whether that is worth doing depends on what the shifts near you are paying, which is a question with an answer rather than a forecast.

The bottom line

A 3% increase against 4.3% inflation is a real-terms reduction, and calling it anything else does not help. But the 28.4% figure is a four-year total, and using it as this year's benchmark overstates a gap that is already real enough without it.

What Victorian doctors do not have, and what nurses have had since 2024, is a settled multi-year agreement. That, and the rostering limits that were most of the original claim, is the difference worth arguing about.