Good news for locally employed doctors (LEDs): permanent contracts are now the default, and your trust has to show it this month

What's happened

The June deal said that from August 2026 employers would be expected to move locally employed doctors onto substantive contracts, unless there was a legitimate reason for a fixed-term one. This is the guidance on how that works. Transitions start this month, and trusts have to be able to show progress in September. A trust that drags its feet is breaking the deal it signed.

Who it covers

This is for you if you're a locally employed doctor or dentist paid at a pay point that exists on the 2016 or 2002 resident doctor contracts. So the trust grade, the clinical fellow, the LED post that isn't a training post. It doesn't touch SAS contracts, and the guidance says it shouldn't stop anyone moving into one. If you've done 24 months at the same trust in a role comparable to a SAS doctor, there's a separate route onto a permanent SAS contract, with a window to ask that runs until 31 March 2027, and your trust has to tell you if you're eligible.

What you're owed

• A choice, on the same terms. If you're already an LED, your trust has to offer you a substantive contract on terms equivalent to your current job: the same hours, full time or less than full time, and the same pay point. An offer that doesn't match doesn't count. You can say no and stay fixed-term; if you do, it's recorded, and the next doctor in your post is offered permanent by default.
• No interview. Your trust doesn't re-interview you or run a recruitment process. It's your existing role being made permanent, not a new post.
• New posts too. Every new LED contract is permanent by default, from now.
• Fixed-term only for a listed reason. Covering maternity, paternity, adoption or shared parental leave; long-term sickness; a named doctor's secondment or time out of programme with a return date; a post paid for by outside funding; and posts the deal is converting into training posts. Short-term surges count too, capped at 6 months, but only after the trust has tried flexing rotas, using its existing LEDs and the bank. Winter isn't a reason: the guidance calls winter pressure predictable. And if a post's outside funding has been renewed 2 years running, it's permanent.

The exception that matters

Recurring gaps on a training rota, where training posts keep going unfilled, can still be covered with a fixed-term contract of 6 to 12 months, after the same steps. If the gap is still there when the contract ends, the doctor in it gets a permanent offer. The guidance is blunt about why this exception exists: it calls the spread of fixed-term contracts "a symptom of a failure to workforce plan effectively at national level", and says it is time limited: at the review next February it is either removed or replaced with a cap on how many fixed-term LED contracts a trust can hold.

How it's policed

Trusts have to record how many LEDs they have, what share are fixed-term against permanent, and the reason for every fixed-term contract, and report it to their board and their local negotiating committee. In February 2027 the Resident Doctor Industrial Relations Committee reviews all of it and sets a national benchmark. Any trust below the benchmark is audited. The guidance also reminds trusts that a doctor employed continuously for 2 years or more may already have statutory protection against unfair dismissal.

What it isn't

It's separate from the deal's other LED promise, the move onto the repurposed 2016 contract, and both have to happen: you can turn down the 2016 contract and still be owed a permanent one, and a fixed-term post still has to be offered the 2016 terms. Guidance on that move is due soon, and the new national LED contract is due by April 2027. Has your trust contacted you yet?