Nursing Allowance

Nursing Allowance is a flat monthly allowance for central government nursing staff, currently Rs. 7,200 plus the 25% dearness-allowance-linked rise.

Updated 2 August 2026

The Nursing Allowance is a flat monthly allowance paid to nursing personnel in central government service, over and above the basic pay of their level and the standard allowances such as dearness allowance and house-rent allowance. It recognises the demands specific to nursing work, the long shifts, the direct patient contact and the clinical responsibility, and unlike most allowances it is paid at the same amount to every nurse regardless of grade. A newly recruited Staff Nurse and a senior Nursing Superintendent draw the same Nursing Allowance.

The allowance is one of the defining features of a central government nursing pay packet. For a nurse on a Level 7 basic, it adds a fixed sum on top of the pay-matrix salary each month, and it is the reason a government nurse’s take-home is higher than the bare pay level suggests. It is separate from the general allowance framework and is administered by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, whose orders set the rate that other ministries and bodies then adopt for their own nursing staff.

This article sets out the current amount, the order that governs it, who is eligible, and the important boundary between the Nursing Allowance and the patient-care allowances that Group C and Group D hospital staff draw instead. The figures are drawn from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare Office Memoranda and the 7th Central Pay Commission framework. For the pay of the post the allowance attaches to, see the Staff Nurse salary page.

What the Nursing Allowance is

Nursing Allowance is a duty allowance tied to the nursing cadre rather than to a particular hospital or posting. Any member of the nursing service in a covered institution draws it as a matter of course while working in a nursing role, and it continues at the same flat rate as the nurse rises through the cadre. That flat design is unusual among central government allowances, most of which scale with the pay level or the city, and it reflects the view that the core demands of nursing fall on every nurse alike.

The allowance sits on top of the ordinary pay structure. A government nurse’s monthly pay is built from the basic pay of the level in the pay matrix, the dearness allowance on that basic, the house-rent allowance for the city, the transport allowance, and then the Nursing Allowance as a fixed addition. Because it is a flat amount, the Nursing Allowance is proportionally more valuable to a junior nurse than to a senior one, though both receive the same rupee figure.

The nursing cadre it covers runs from the entry grade, the Staff Nurse, now designated Nursing Officer, through the Nursing Sister or Senior Nursing Officer, the Assistant Nursing Superintendent, the Nursing Superintendent and the Chief Nursing Officer at the top. Every one of these grades draws the same Nursing Allowance, so the allowance does not change on promotion within the nursing line even as the basic pay and the level-linked allowances rise.

The current amount

The Nursing Allowance base rate is Rs. 7,200 per month, effective from 1 July 2017, fixed by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare through Office Memorandum No. Z.28015/50/2017-N dated 31 August 2017. That order set the amount and named the nursing personnel entitled to it across the central government’s health establishments.

The allowance is linked to dearness allowance. Under the 7th Central Pay Commission framework, this class of allowance rises by 25% each time dearness allowance crosses a 50% multiple. Dearness allowance reached 50% with effect from 1 January 2024, which triggered the first such rise, and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare authorised it through a further Office Memorandum of the same file number dated 17 September 2024. Applying the 25% increase to the Rs. 7,200 base gives a current Nursing Allowance of Rs. 9,000 per month. The September 2024 order restates the mechanism and points back to the 2017 rate rather than printing the new figure, so the Rs. 9,000 is the base of Rs. 7,200 plus the 25% uplift, not a fresh amount fixed in the order.

The dearness-allowance link means the Nursing Allowance keeps pace with prices without a separate revision each time. As dearness allowance climbs past each 50% milestone, the allowance takes another 25% step. No revision beyond the September 2024 increase had been issued as this article was written, so Rs. 9,000 is the amount in force.

What the 7th CPC recommended and the Government changed

The path to the Rs. 7,200 figure is worth setting out, because it is a case where the Government departed from the pay commission. The 7th Central Pay Commission, in Chapter 8.17 of its report, considered the nursing service’s demand to raise the allowance sharply, some representations sought to treble it, and declined. The Commission took the view that the allowance was already at an appropriate level and recommended retaining it at its then rate of Rs. 4,800 per month, with no increase beyond the dearness-allowance link.

The Government did not accept that recommendation as it stood. On the review of the Committee on Allowances, which examined the 7th CPC’s allowance recommendations before they were notified, the Nursing Allowance was raised from Rs. 4,800 to Rs. 7,200, one of the modifications the Government made to the Commission’s allowance proposals. The decision was notified through the Department of Expenditure Resolution No. 11-1/2016-IC dated 6 July 2017, which recorded the Government’s decisions on the 7th CPC allowances, and the Health Ministry then issued its implementing order of 31 August 2017.

So the accurate account is that the 7th CPC recommended no change, and the Government, on the Committee on Allowances’ review, raised the allowance by half again to Rs. 7,200. The distinction matters for anyone tracing the figure to its source, because the Rs. 7,200 is a Government decision recorded in the Resolution, not a number the Commission itself proposed.

Who is eligible

The eligibility is wide within the nursing service. The Health Ministry order extends the Nursing Allowance to all nursing personnel of all categories at all levels working in central government and Union Territory hospitals and dispensaries. It covers the Central Government Health Scheme, and the major central hospitals in Delhi such as Safdarjung Hospital, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital and Lady Hardinge Medical College and its associated hospitals, along with the nursing colleges attached to them.

It also reaches the centrally funded autonomous institutions. Nurses at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research at Chandigarh, the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research at Puducherry, the North Eastern Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Health and Medical Sciences and similar bodies draw it under the same framework. Because the amount is fixed centrally by the Health Ministry, other establishments that employ nurses, the Railways, the Central Armed Police Forces and research bodies such as the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, adopt the same rate through their own parallel orders, so a nurse in a railway hospital or a paramilitary hospital draws the same Nursing Allowance as one in a Health Ministry hospital.

The consistent thread is that the allowance follows the nursing role across the central government, at one flat rate, rather than varying by employer or institution.

Nursing Allowance, not Hospital Patient Care Allowance

An important boundary separates the Nursing Allowance from the patient-care allowances, and it is a common source of confusion. Central government hospitals also pay a Hospital Patient Care Allowance and a Patient Care Allowance, but these are not for nurses. They are paid to non-ministerial staff, the hospital attendants, sanitary staff, technicians and similar employees, whose work involves continuous routine contact with patients suffering communicable disease or with infected materials. The Hospital Patient Care Allowance is for such staff in hospitals, and the Patient Care Allowance is for the equivalents in health institutions other than hospitals. The coverage has moved twice since 2017: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare Office Memorandum No. Z.28015/119/2012-H dated 18 September 2019 extended both allowances beyond Group C and Group D to all Group A and Group B non-ministerial allied healthcare professionals, and Office Memorandum No. V.28017/23/2018-H-II dated 21 April 2023 withdrew them from ministerial staff of all groups. Nursing personnel remain excluded throughout.

The 7th Central Pay Commission, at paragraph 8.10.29 of its report, defined these two allowances and expressly excluded nursing personnel from them. Nurses are carved out because they draw the separate, cadre-specific Nursing Allowance instead. The two payments sit in different parts of the pay system: the patient-care allowances are placed in the R1H3 cell of the Risk and Hardship Allowance matrix, at base rates of Rs. 4,100 a month for Level 8 and below and Rs. 5,300 for Level 9 and above, which became Rs. 5,125 and Rs. 6,625 from 1 January 2024, while the Nursing Allowance is a flat Rs. 7,200 base outside the matrix.

The exclusion was argued and decided, not assumed. Paragraph 5.5.4 of the Report of the Committee on Allowances of 27 April 2017 records that the Ministry of Health asked for cell R1H3 for nurses and cell R1H2 for doctors, and that the Committee refused both: doctors draw non-practising allowance at 20% of basic pay, and nurses draw the Nursing Allowance, which the same Committee was raising by a factor of 1.5 to Rs. 7,200 a month.

The practical effect is that a nurse and a hospital attendant working the same ward draw from different sources: the nurse from the Nursing Allowance, the attendant from the Hospital Patient Care Allowance in the risk and hardship matrix. A nurse cannot draw both, and at Rs. 7,200 against Rs. 5,300 the Nursing Allowance is the higher of the two at the base rates.

Dress Allowance for nurses

Alongside the Nursing Allowance, nursing personnel draw a Dress Allowance for the prescribed uniform. The 7th Central Pay Commission simplified the earlier arrangement, under which a uniform allowance and a separate washing allowance were paid, by merging them into a single Dress Allowance. Paragraph 8.17.86 of the report records the figures: a uniform allowance of Rs. 750 a month and a washing allowance of Rs. 450 a month were subsumed, and a messing allowance of Rs. 75 a month was abolished outright as petty in nature. The general Dress Allowance framework was set out by the Department of Expenditure in Office Memorandum No. 19051/1/2017-E.IV dated 2 August 2017, and the Health Ministry fixed the nurses’ rate by Office Memorandum No. Z.28015/50/2017-N dated 31 August 2017.

The nurses’ Dress Allowance base rate is Rs. 1,800 per month, and like the Nursing Allowance it is linked to dearness allowance, so it rose by 25% after dearness allowance crossed 50%, taking it to Rs. 2,250 on the same base-plus-uplift basis, or Rs. 27,000 a year. The rate is expressed per month, but paragraph 4 of the Department of Expenditure Office Memorandum of 2 August 2017 directs that the Dress Allowance be credited to salary once a year in July and carries no exception for nursing personnel, so the monthly figure is the rate of accrual and the credit is annual. The Dress Allowance is separate from the Nursing Allowance and is paid in addition to it.

The nursing cadre and where the allowance sits

The central government nursing service is a graded cadre, and the Nursing Allowance runs flat across all of it. Entry is as a Nursing Officer, the designation that replaced Staff Nurse, at Level 7 of the pay matrix, with an entry basic pay of Rs. 44,900. From there the cadre rises through the Senior Nursing Officer or Nursing Sister grade, the Assistant Nursing Superintendent, the Nursing Superintendent and, at the head of a large hospital, the Chief Nursing Officer, with the pay level stepping up at each promotion.

The Nursing Allowance does not step up with the cadre. Because it is a flat Rs. 7,200 base, currently Rs. 9,000 with the dearness-allowance uplift, it is the same amount for a first-year Nursing Officer and for a Nursing Superintendent two decades senior. Its weight in the pay packet is therefore heaviest at entry and lightest at the top: on a Level 7 entry basic of Rs. 44,900 the allowance is about a fifth of basic pay, while on a senior grade with a basic well above Rs. 1,00,000 it is a much smaller share. This flat design is deliberate, and it reflects the view that the core clinical demands the allowance answers fall on every nurse alike, not only on the junior grades.

The allowance also survives the move between institutions. A Nursing Officer who transfers from a Health Ministry hospital to a railway hospital, a paramilitary hospital or a centrally funded institute carries the same Nursing Allowance, because each employer adopts the Health Ministry rate. What changes on such a move is the house-rent allowance, which depends on the city, not the Nursing Allowance, which is fixed nationally.

A nurse’s monthly pay: where the allowance fits

A worked example shows where the Nursing Allowance sits in the whole pay packet. Take a Nursing Officer at Level 7, at the entry cell of the matrix, in a city classed X for house-rent purposes. The basic pay is Rs. 44,900. On that basic the dearness allowance, at 60% from 1 January 2026, adds Rs. 26,940, and the house-rent allowance at the current 30% X-city rate adds Rs. 13,470. The transport allowance adds a further amount with its own dearness component. On top of all of these sits the Nursing Allowance of Rs. 9,000, a flat addition that does not depend on the basic, the city or the dearness rate.

Set against the Rs. 44,900 basic, the Rs. 9,000 Nursing Allowance is close to a fifth of basic pay, and it lands on the payslip in full every month regardless of how the level-linked components move. The Dress Allowance sits outside this monthly total, arriving once a year in the July salary. A reader who wants the full computed figure for a specific level, city and dearness rate can work it through on the salary by pay level tool, and the Staff Nurse salary page carries the complete breakdown for the entry grade. The point of the example here is narrower: the Nursing Allowance is a fixed, cadre-specific block of pay that sits on top of the standard level-driven salary, and it is the single component that marks a nursing payslip out from that of any other Level 7 employee.

Tax treatment

The Nursing Allowance is fully taxable. It is a personal duty allowance and is not among the allowances that Section 10(14) of the Income-tax Act, 1961, read with Rule 2BB of the Income-tax Rules, exempts from tax, so it is included in salary income and taxed at the employee’s slab rate. This is the position under both the old and the new tax regimes, since the allowance has no exemption to withdraw.

The Dress Allowance is treated differently. As an allowance granted to meet the cost of a uniform that must be worn on duty, it falls within the uniform exemption under Section 10(14)(i) read with Rule 2BB, and is exempt to the extent it is actually spent on the prescribed uniform. That exemption, like the others under Rule 2BB, is a feature of the old regime, and an employee weighing the two regimes should account for it. For the wider comparison see old versus new tax regime and income tax for central government employees.

Nursing Allowance and pension

Nursing Allowance is generally not reckoned as emoluments for pension. Under the CCS (Pension) Rules, the emoluments that count towards pension and gratuity are broadly the basic pay and the dearness allowance on it, together with the Non-Practising Allowance in the case of medical officers, and other allowances are usually excluded. On that basis the Nursing Allowance, being a duty allowance rather than pay, does not enter the pension calculation, so a nurse’s pension is worked out on the basic pay of the last drawn or average emoluments, not on the enhanced figure that includes the Nursing Allowance.

A nurse approaching retirement should confirm the exact treatment for their case against the CCS (Pension) Rules and their pay and accounts office, since the definition of emoluments is the governing text and the position can turn on the specific components drawn. For the pension framework itself see central government pension, and for the retirement gratuity see gratuity.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the current Nursing Allowance for central government nurses?

The base rate is Rs. 7,200 per month with effect from 1 July 2017. After dearness allowance crossed 50% on 1 January 2024, the rate rose by 25%, taking it to Rs. 9,000 per month. It is a flat amount paid over and above basic pay to all nursing personnel.

Is Nursing Allowance the same for all nurses?

Yes. Nursing Allowance is a flat monthly amount paid to all nursing personnel of all categories at all levels, from a Staff Nurse or Nursing Officer up to a Nursing Superintendent. It does not scale with the pay level, so a junior and a senior nurse draw the same Nursing Allowance.

Do nurses get the Hospital Patient Care Allowance?

No. Nursing personnel are expressly excluded from the Hospital Patient Care Allowance and the Patient Care Allowance, which are paid to Group C and Group D non-ministerial hospital staff. Nurses draw the separate Nursing Allowance instead, which is the cadre-specific allowance for the nursing service.

Which nurses are eligible for Nursing Allowance?

All nursing personnel in central government and Union Territory hospitals and dispensaries, in the Central Government Health Scheme, and in centrally funded institutions such as AIIMS New Delhi, PGIMER Chandigarh and JIPMER Puducherry. Railways, paramilitary forces and other bodies pay it through their own adoption orders.

Is Nursing Allowance taxable?

Yes. Nursing Allowance is a personal duty allowance that is not among the allowances exempted under Section 10(14) of the Income-tax Act read with Rule 2BB, so it is fully taxable as part of salary. The Dress Allowance is treated differently only in the old regime, where Section 10(14)(i) with Rule 2BB(1)(f) exempts it to the extent the uniform expenditure is actually incurred; under the default new regime it is fully taxable too, because the substituted Rule 2BB(3) does not retain that clause.

How was the Nursing Allowance set at its current rate?

The 7th Central Pay Commission recommended keeping the allowance at its then rate of Rs. 4,800. On the Committee on Allowances’ review the Government raised it to Rs. 7,200, notified through the Department of Expenditure Resolution of 6 July 2017 and the Health Ministry Office Memorandum of 31 August 2017.

Is there a Dress Allowance for nurses too?

Yes. Nursing personnel draw a Dress Allowance for the prescribed uniform, which the 7th CPC framework created by merging the earlier uniform and washing allowances into a single amount. It is credited once a year in July and, like the Nursing Allowance, rose by 25% after dearness allowance crossed 50%.

External references

References

Ministry of Health and Family Welfare Office Memorandum No. Z.28015/50/2017-N dated 31 August 2017: Nursing Allowance revised to Rs. 7,200 per month with effect from 1 July 2017 for all nursing personnel of all categories at all levels.
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare Office Memorandum No. Z.28015/50/2017-N dated 17 September 2024: 25% increase in the Nursing Allowance on dearness allowance reaching 50%.
Ministry of Finance, Department of Expenditure Resolution No. 11-1/2016-IC dated 6 July 2017: Government decision on the 7th CPC allowances, raising the Nursing Allowance from Rs. 4,800 to Rs. 7,200.
7th Central Pay Commission Report, Chapter 8.17 (Nursing Allowance) and paragraph 8.10.29 (Hospital Patient Care Allowance and Patient Care Allowance, excluding nursing personnel).
Department of Expenditure Office Memorandum No. 19051/1/2017-E.IV dated 2 August 2017: Dress Allowance framework merging the uniform and washing allowances.
Income-tax Act, 1961, Section 10(14), read with Rule 2BB of the Income-tax Rules, 1962: exemption for uniform allowance, and the absence of an exemption for the Nursing Allowance.