Senior doctors end 19-month pay battle with Health NZ as 5.9 per cent deal lands two $4,000 lump sums
After 19 months of industrial action, ratification ballots and one of the most public health-sector disputes in years, New Zealand’s senior hospital doctors have finally settled with Health New Zealand. The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, which represents about 5,500 senior medical and dental officers, confirmed this week that members had ratified a new collective agreement with Te Whatu Ora.
The deal delivers a cumulative pay rise of 5.9 per cent over two years, two one-off lump sum payments of $4,000, and the restoration of personal grievance work rights. It also enshrines Te Mauri o Rongo, the New Zealand Health Charter, into the collective agreement and lifts the continuing medical education fund used by senior doctors to keep their clinical skills current.
The first slice of the pay rise, 2.9 per cent across the board, is backdated to January 2026, meaning eligible specialists will see a backpay bump in their next pay cycles. A second tranche kicks in from 6 July and is structured to reduce a long-running anomaly inside the salary scale. Doctors at the top of the scale will receive 2.5 per cent, while specialists at the lowest steps will receive 4 per cent. The structure is intended to fix a quirk of the previous agreement where, in some cases, registrars who had just completed years of training and qualified as specialists were finding themselves earning less than they had as senior trainees.
In an indicative ballot run by the union before formal ratification, 94 per cent of members backed the proposed terms, and the agreement was then signed off in the days that followed.
ASMS executive director Sarah Dalton described the deal as the end of a long, draining process. Speaking to RNZ, Dalton said members had “had to fight tooth and nail just to stop sliding backwards”, and acknowledged that a string of safe staffing concerns raised during the bargaining round remain unresolved. She noted that workforce planning, retention and the size of senior medical teams in many hospitals would continue to be a focus for ASMS in the months ahead.
The dispute had stretched across two governments, multiple rounds of strikes, two ratification ballots and an unsuccessful application by Health New Zealand to the Employment Relations Authority. Te Whatu Ora had asked the authority in late 2023 to effectively impose a settlement, arguing that the bargaining process had reached an impasse. In November 2025 the authority declined to do so, sending both parties back to the table.
Senior doctors held the first nationwide strike in their union’s history during the dispute. Most non-urgent procedures and outpatient clinics were postponed during those strike days, with hospital management asking patients to attend emergency departments only if their condition was urgent. The union had argued throughout that pay had failed to keep pace with inflation, that vacancies were rising in many specialties, and that an ever-widening gap with Australian salaries was making it harder to retain experienced consultants in New Zealand hospitals.
Health New Zealand has framed the settlement as a turning point. The agency confirmed that the new agreement covers approximately 5,500 senior medical and dental officers across the country, including those working in mental health, paediatrics, general medicine, surgery, anaesthesia and emergency medicine. Health NZ says the deal will help restore stability in the senior doctor workforce after a difficult 18 months of strike action.
The lump sum payments and the salary scale rebalancing are likely to be felt most strongly in regional hospitals where vacancy rates have been highest. Specialists in places such as Whanganui, Tairāwhiti, the West Coast and parts of Northland have repeatedly told the union that they have been carrying heavier on-call rosters than colleagues in larger centres because their teams are short-staffed.
For patients, the immediate practical effect is straightforward, and that is the end of strike-related cancellations of senior doctor clinics for the term of the new agreement. Hospitals had been working through a backlog of postponed elective procedures and specialist outpatient appointments built up across several strike days during 2024 and 2025. With doctors no longer in industrial action, planners can now schedule those rebookings without worrying about another walkout.
Beneath the headline rates of pay, several quieter changes in the agreement may matter just as much over the long run. The restoration of personal grievance work rights returns a statutory protection that had been narrowed in earlier amendments. The codification of Te Mauri o Rongo gives senior doctors a formal mechanism inside their collective agreement to raise concerns about culture, safety and tikanga inside hospitals. The expanded continuing medical education fund will pay for conferences, courses and skills updates that help specialists keep up with rapidly moving fields such as oncology, cardiology and image-guided surgery.
ASMS has signalled that its next bargaining round, which will start before the current agreement expires, will lean heavily on the workforce planning clause now built into the contract. The clause commits the parties to working together on staffing levels in each specialty, and the union plans to use it to push back against vacancy gaps that it argues have been the underlying cause of much of the recent industrial action.
For now, after 19 months of stop-start bargaining, picket lines outside Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin hospitals, and a series of ratification votes, both sides are willing to call this round done. The next test will be whether the new agreement actually holds the line on retention through to its 2027 expiry.
What do you think of the senior doctors settlement, and is it enough to keep experienced specialists working in New Zealand hospitals? Share your views in the comments below.