I’m a midwife – I moved to Australia and I’m paid a lot extra for a similar job
A midwife who emigrated from the UK to Australia has revealed the striking pay bump she received when she moved nations, despite doing exactly the same job.
Sydney Graves, originally from Newcastle, said she earns ‘about a third extra’ after moving to Melbourne in the south east of the country, compared to what she made in the UK.
She claimed, in a TikTok video that’s had more than 100,000 views, that midwives and nurses get ‘automatically’ bumped up the pay scale if they’ve worked in a hospital for a certain amount of time, regardless of their skill set.
Australian recruitment websites suggest that the average entry level salary for nurses and midwives is roughly $77,000 per year (equivalent to around £37,500).
In the UK, newly qualified NHS midwives can expert to earn around £29,970 — roughly 20 per cent less than the Australian pay packet.
Ms Graves, who posts under the TikTok name @ukmidwifedownunder, added that pay grades may differ depending on the part of Australia you live in.
‘The best advice I would give is to go onto Google, type in midwife or nurse pay scale for wherever you want to go, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, wherever,’ she said.
‘And it will give you an outline on what you would get paid depending on how many years qualified you are.
‘If you were qualified two years a go it will be in Year 2 and then every year you work, it will go up,’ she explained.
The midwife described how pay scales are organised in England, with newly qualified NHS nurses working on a Band 5 salary and only moving to a Band 6 once they have been ‘signed off for competencies.’
‘But that’s not a thing in the hospital I’m in,’ she added.
‘You just automatically get bumped up pay scales, doesn’t matter about suturing, doesn’t matter about cannulation, any of those types of things.
‘Yes, they are desired but they aren’t a must like they are back home.’
Since moving down under last year, Ms Graves has published several TikTok clips revealing her experience of emigration — and the stark differences between Australia and the UK.
In one video she described ‘a couple of odd things’ she’s noticed about the nation.
‘Food shops, like, the equivalent of Asda and Tesco, are open on a Sunday until late at night,’ she said.
Midwives in Australia are said to earn between 20 per cent to 30 per cent more than those in the UK
‘I feel like in England, even the 24-hour ones close on a Sunday…but they’re just open here all the time.’
In another recent video, she spoke about the misconceptions that surround midwifery.
‘People think that our job is only is delivering or helping with the birth of a baby.
They don’t realise that midwives don’t just do one role, they don’t just do labour care, they also do antenatal care, and this is a huge part of our job as well as postnatal care.’
Last November, analysis from the UK’s nursing union the Royal College of Nursing found that between 2021 and 2024, the number of nursing staff leaving the register in England increased by 43 per cent.
