NHS Jobs Scraper

Extract UK NHS job vacancies from jobs.nhs.uk — title, employer, location, salary, band, pay scheme, contract type, working pattern, closing date, full description and more. No cookies, no proxy, no rate-limits on datacenter IPs.

Features

• 20 output fields per vacancy — complete job data in a flat schema
• Search by keyword, or provide any jobs.nhs.uk search URL with filters (location, band, pay scheme, staff group, specialty)
• Full detail page enrichment — pay scheme, band, reference number, job summary, main duties, full description
• Parsed salary ranges (GBP min/max) in addition to the raw formatted text
• ISO-8601 dates for posted and closing dates
• Pagination — walks ?page=N until maxItems is reached
• No proxy required — jobs.nhs.uk is publicly accessible
• No nulls — every field has a typed default

Input

Field	Type	Description
startUrls	Array	NHS Jobs search-result URLs. Any filter applied in the URL (e.g., payScheme=AGENDA, payBand=Band+6, staffGroup=Nursing+and+Midwifery) is preserved.
search	String	Alternative shortcut — a plain keyword (e.g., "nurse") that builds a default search URL.
maxItems	Integer	Maximum number of vacancies to return (default 50, max 500).

Example Input

{
    "startUrls": [
        "https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/search/results?keyword=nurse&payBand=Band+6"
    ],
    "maxItems": 50
}

or with a free-text keyword:

{
    "search": "midwife",
    "maxItems": 20
}

Output

Each job has 20 fields. All fields are always present — empty strings or zero for missing data, never null.

Identity

Field	Type	Description
jobRef	String	NHS reference number (e.g., C9371-26-0259)
url	String	Full job advert URL
title	String	Job title

Employer & Location

Field	Type	Description
employer	String	Employing NHS Trust or organisation
location	String	Full location text
postcode	String	UK postcode

Pay & Contract

Field	Type	Description
salary	String	Formatted salary (e.g., "£39,959 to £48,117 a year")
salaryMin	Number	Minimum salary in GBP
salaryMax	Number	Maximum salary in GBP
salaryPeriod	String	Pay period (a year, per annum, per hour, etc.)
payScheme	String	Pay scheme (e.g., "Agenda for change")
payBand	String	Pay band (e.g., "Band 6")
contractType	String	Contract type (e.g., Permanent, Fixed term)
workingPattern	String	Working pattern (e.g., Full-time, Part-time)

Dates

Field	Type	Description
postedDate	String	Date posted (ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD)
closingDate	String	Closing date (ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD)

Description

Field	Type	Description
jobSummary	String	Short job summary (truncated to 2,000 chars)
mainDuties	String	Main duties text (truncated to 2,000 chars)
description	String	Full job description (truncated to 4,000 chars)

Metadata

Field	Type	Description
scrapedAt	String	ISO 8601 scrape timestamp

Example Output

{
    "jobRef": "C9371-26-0259",
    "url": "https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jobadvert/C9371-26-0259",
    "title": "District Nurse/Community Nursing Sister/Charge Nurse",
    "employer": "Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust",
    "location": "Community Nursing West Berkshire",
    "postcode": "RG18 3HD",
    "salary": "£39,959 to £48,117 a year",
    "salaryMin": 39959.0,
    "salaryMax": 48117.0,
    "salaryPeriod": "a year",
    "payScheme": "Agenda for change",
    "payBand": "Band 6",
    "contractType": "Permanent",
    "workingPattern": "Full-time",
    "postedDate": "2026-04-09",
    "closingDate": "2026-04-16",
    "jobSummary": "...",
    "mainDuties": "...",
    "description": "...",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-04-10T17:40:00+00:00"
}

FAQ

Q: Do I need a proxy? No. jobs.nhs.uk serves pages directly over HTTPS without bot protection. This scraper runs fine from Apify datacenter IPs.

Q: How do I filter by pay band or staff group? Apply the filter on the NHS Jobs site, then copy the URL from the address bar into startUrls. All query parameters (including payBand, payScheme, staffGroup, specialty, location) are passed through verbatim.

Q: Are closed / expired jobs included? Only currently-listed vacancies from the search results are returned. Historical closed jobs aren't accessible via search.

Q: What's the maximum throughput? NHS search pages return 10 results each. The scraper walks pages sequentially and enriches details in parallel (concurrency 4) — expect ~40 jobs/minute.

Q: Why are some salaryMin / salaryMax values the same? When a job has a fixed salary (not a range), both fields are set to the same value.

Use Cases

• Healthcare recruitment research — monitor NHS hiring trends by band, speciality, region
• Job alerts — daily runs to watch new nursing, medical, or admin postings in specific trusts
• Salary benchmarking — aggregate pay data across NHS bands and locations
• Workforce planning — pull open positions into HR/ATS systems
• Regional healthcare analysis — compare vacancy counts across regions or trusts