The independent Industrial Relations Commission of NSW found the nearly 70,000 employees were entitled to a pay rise over three years, with a significant hike in the first year backdated to July 2025.
"The work of nurses, midwives and assistants in nursing are currently undervalued, and they deserve as a result a one-off increase," the commission's president Justice Ingmar Taylor said on Thursday.
"They are essential, integral and irreplaceable to the system's function and effectiveness."
Over a three year period, registered nurses and midwives are set to receive 16 per cent, 18 for enrolled nurses, and a whopping 28 per cent for nursing assistants.
The two subsequent years of the agreement will see three per cent annual increases.
Nurses and midwives make up about half of all employees of the NSW health service with 90 per cent of them women.
Justice Taylor said the gendered nature of the profession was a factor in how employees had been financially undervalued for decades.
"Nurses and midwives perform invisible skills and there is at least a real possibility that their work is undervalued for gender reasons," he said.
The annualised workforce cost is about $7.5 billion.
The commission estimated that for every 1 per cent increase in pay the NSW government needed fund an additional $74.5 million per year.
But the full bench of the commission argued this was a worthwhile and necessary investment to keep up with inflationary pressures the workforce has been facing.
"Nurses and midwives are the DNA of the NSW health system," Justice Taylor said in his judgement.
The last major arbitration of nursing wage rates in 2002 and 2003 lifted rates by a combined 9.5 per cent.
23°C