Thousands of resident doctors in England are to stage a five-day walkout in the run-up to Christmas in an escalating dispute over pay and jobs that threatens fresh disruption to NHS services already under intense winter pressure.
The British Medical Association (BMA) said resident doctors – the workforce previously known as junior doctors – will withdraw their labour from 7am on Wednesday 17 December until 7am on Monday 22 December. It will be the 14th strike by this group of medics since March 2023.
The action, called by the BMA’s Resident Doctors Committee (RDC), comes after a series of stoppages in 2023, 2024 and 2025 which have forced hospitals to postpone large volumes of planned care. NHS leaders have warned that further strikes this winter could undermine attempts to cut record waiting lists and maintain urgent services during one of the busiest periods of the year.
Resident doctors are demanding a multi-year deal to “restore” their pay to 2008 levels and structural reforms to address what they describe as a growing jobs and training crisis. The BMA says basic pay for this group has fallen by more than a fifth in real terms since 2008 and is now seeking an additional 26 per cent increase over the next few years on top of rises already awarded.
Ministers insist that resident doctors have already received about a 29 per cent pay increase over three years, including a 22.3 per cent deal agreed in 2024 covering 2023–24 and 2024–25. For 2025–26, the government has imposed an average 5.4 per cent rise, which the BMA rejected as a further real-terms cut.
Alongside pay, the union is pressing for a major expansion of specialty training places and for UK medical graduates to be given priority for those posts. It points to more than 30,000 applicants chasing about 10,000 training positions this year, with some foundation year two doctors – in only their second year after qualification – reporting they did not even receive an interview.
A recent BMA survey found that 34 per cent of resident doctors expected to have no substantive employment or regular work from August 2025, rising to 52 per cent among those finishing their foundation training. The union argues it is “farcical” that newly qualified doctors are unable to secure posts while NHS waiting lists remain historically high.
Dr Jack Fletcher, chair of the BMA’s Resident Doctors Committee, said the government had left doctors with “no choice” but to announce fresh strike dates. “Ministers have offered neither a credible plan on jobs nor on pay,” he said. “Resident doctors do not want to be on picket lines before Christmas, but we cannot accept a future of real-terms pay cuts and unemployment while patients sit on waiting lists.”
The pre-Christmas stoppage follows a five-day strike in November and another in July. According to NHS England and government estimates, more than 1.5 million outpatient appointments and operations have been rescheduled across the health service as a result of industrial action by resident doctors and other staff groups since late 2022, at a direct cost of at least £300m. Recent five-day resident doctor strikes alone have been put at roughly £240m each in lost activity, overtime and cover.
Announcing the December dates, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, condemned the move as a “cynical attempt to wreck Christmas” and said there was “no moral justification” for further walkouts. He argues that resident doctors have already received “the highest pay rises in the public sector for two years running” and that the BMA’s demand for a further double-digit uplift is unaffordable.
Streeting has offered non-pay concessions, including 2,000 extra specialty training places over three years – doubling an earlier pledge – with half of those new posts due to be created in 2025–26, and a commitment that the NHS will cover exam and professional membership fees for doctors in training. He has accused the BMA of acting like a “cartel” and claimed it refused to put his most recent offer to a vote of its members.
The Conservatives seized on the announcement to accuse Labour of failing to deliver on its promise to end NHS strikes. The shadow health secretary, Stuart Andrew, said patients were facing “a nightmare before Christmas” and argued that Keir Starmer’s government had not rebuilt relations with staff as it had pledged.
Hospitals are now expected to draw up contingency plans to protect emergency, maternity and critical care services during the walkout, with routine and non-urgent treatment likely to bear the brunt of cancellations. The English NHS waiting list stood at about 7.39 million treatments, covering 6.24 million patients, in September 2025. Streeting has promised that by the end of the parliament 92 per cent of non-urgent treatments will start within 18 weeks, but repeated industrial action is widely seen as putting that pledge at risk.
The BMA will meanwhile open a fresh ballot on 8 December to extend resident doctors’ strike mandate, which is currently due to expire in January 2026. If members back further action, the mandate would run to August 2026. Union leaders have signalled they are prepared to call monthly strikes next year if no agreement is reached on pay and jobs, raising the prospect of prolonged confrontation between doctors and the Labour government.