“Staggering” competition for some NHS specialty training posts has laid bare a “crisis facing medical training” that is leaving many resident doctors “in limbo,” leaders have warned.
Doctors said that newly released NHS statistics on 2025 competition rates—which show that demand for some specialties has almost quadrupled—were “indicative of a broken application system.”
The data show that a total of 91 999 applications were made in England for the 12 833 specialty training posts available at all training levels,1 giving an overall competition ratio of 7. This means that there were seven applications overall for every specialty training post in 2025, a rise from 4.7 last year2 and over three times the level in 2019 (1.9).
However, some specialties have faced competition of a far greater magnitude (table 1). For example, psychiatry saw 22 applications for every post (10 677 applications for 489 posts), up from 10 applications per post last year.
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The 10 most competitive specialties in 2025
The greatest competition was seen in applications for general practice and public health medicine, with 167 applications for every post (2173 applications for 13 posts). The second most competitive post was community sexual and reproductive health, with almost 99 applications per post—nearly quadruple the competition ratio last year (26).
Other specialty training posts have also gained a huge number of additional applications year on …
