Occupational therapist jobs in London

What a first post here looks like

Newly qualified occupational therapists 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 acute medicine and surgery, care of older people and frailty, stroke and neuro-rehabilitation, hand therapy, and community or intermediate care — 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 occupational therapists, and 15 approved courses 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. Between them, the 29 organisations here that publish a workforce return employ 3,134 full-time equivalent occupational therapists, which is the closest thing to a measure of how many posts exist in the region. 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 of £49,692 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.

One honest benchmark: the median full-time salary across all occupations in London is £49,692 (2025). A band 5 post at £32,073 therefore starts below the regional median , and reaches £39,043 at the top of the band — before any unsocial-hours enhancement, on-call payment or progression to band 6. That comparison is the reason regional cost of living matters more to this decision than the pay scale does: the scale is national, and the money it buys is not.