Submit NHS placement tariff hours with confidence

Reconciling tariff hours in spreadsheets?

Every few months, placement offices across England run the same exhausting cycle, which can look like: export placement data. Merge with timesheet records. Cross-check against placement provider figures by email. Reformat everything into the NHSE Placement Activity template. Upload. Hope the portal doesn't reject it. Repeat three more times before July.

It works... just about. But it's three weeks of your placement team's time, every cycle. And when a trust comes back to query a figure months after submission, the best you have is a spreadsheet that may or may not reflect what was actually uploaded.

We built the MyProgress Tariff Extension because health educators told us this process was the most expensive admin task in the placement office. It didn't have to be.

The problem isn't your team, it's the tools

NHSE SDCT submissions are high-stakes. The 2025/26 tariff rate sits at £5,866 per FTE, adjusted for your regional Market Forces Factor, and payment is based on verified, delivered hours. A rejected row, a mismatched provider name, a missing year-of-study field: these aren't just admin errors, they represent real money that doesn't reach the placement trust.

The core difficulty is that the data lives in three places at once: your placement management system, your timesheets in MyProgress, and the NHSE template. Getting them to agree, every cycle, requires manual work that your placement office has simply absorbed as a cost of doing business.

And then there's the placement provider relationship problem. Your NHS partner trusts, the Practice Education Facilitators and Practice Education Leads overseeing your nursing students on placement, have no visibility of student hours until after the submission file has been uploaded. If there's a discrepancy, they find out too late to do anything about it except raise a dispute.

What the Tariff Extension does

From 1 September 2026, the Tariff Extension brings NHS placement tariff reporting into MyProgress — end to end, for the full NHSE SDCT cycle.

The placement allocations, timesheets, and sign-off records your students are already generating in MyProgress become the direct source of the submission file. No export, no merge, no reconciliation against a parallel system.

The reconciliation summary is the heart of the extension. At a glance you see how many courses and providers are in scope, how many are fully set up (here 3 of 6 courses and 6 of 9 providers), and a readiness checklist that tells you exactly what still stands between you and a clean file.

The workflow follows the four phases that every NHSE cycle already has:

Validate & Reconcile

A data administrator works through an automatically generated issue worklist: mismatched provider names, missing programme attributes, unset year-of-study fields. Every issue is linked directly to the relevant MyProgress admin screen. What used to take days of searching now has a clear to-do list.

Phase 1, the Validate tab. A three-step stepper (Validate → Review → Submit) anchors the whole cycle. Each course or provider that needs work is flagged — here a "Missing" Qualification field — with a "Fix details" button that jumps straight to the screen where it's corrected. The cross-cycle progress strip shows what's been resolved versus the prior cycle.

Provider mapping is the part that most often trips up a manual submission. Here each in-house trust name is matched to its NHSE canonical name and placement type — Acute, Community, Secondary — and marked "Complete" so you know the file will use the names NHSE expects.

Review & Adjust

Pre-submission review available to placement providers and HEIs showing the composition of hours that will be submitted to NHSE in this submission. Your placement office lead and placement providers see per-provider scorecards: hours recorded, target hours, pro-rated target, sign-off rate, readiness status. If a placement provider has a different approach to absence inclusion than the MyProgress default, manual adjustments can be applied with a reason that's captured permanently in the audit trail. Adjustments can happen prior to submission.

Phase 2, the Review tab. The placement lead gets the headline numbers — total delivered hours and achievement against pro-rated target — alongside the same reconciliation summary, so the people approving the submission see exactly what the data administrator has been working from.

Manual adjustments are deliberate and accountable. Every change needs a course/trust, a year, an hours delta, and a required comment explaining why — and each one is written to a permanent log (here a −3 hour adjustment to a University Hospitals Sussex row). Nothing changes silently.

Generate & Sign Off

Generate and signoff initial SDCT submission to NHSE. This submission can still be changed. Once generated, an immutable snapshot is preserved for seven years. If any provider is unmapped, any allocation is missing required fields, or any programme attribute is unset, the gate names the problem rows and blocks generation. The file only exits when it's clean. Once generated, an immutable snapshot is captured: content hash, manifest, and all line items, preserved for seven years.

The pre-generation gate in action. The readiness checklist makes each rule explicit: providers mapped (pass), allocations missing YearOfStudy (fail), cohorts not marked tariff-reportable (warning), and the SDCT preview shows the exact rows that will be written, validated against the NHSE Placement Activity template with zero errors before anyone clicks generate.

The Submit step makes the consequences unambiguous. If rows are still unresolved, you're told exactly how many will be left out, and you must tick to acknowledge it and record a sign-off reason before the file can be generated and the cycle closed.

Post-Submission Review

The closed period's snapshot is always there. Amend data post submission, create a record while preserving the original. Providers and HEIs can see each other's figures, turning disputes into a shared reconciliation.

The feature that changes the placement provider relationship

The biggest shift the Tariff Extension introduces isn't the workflow, it's what happens on the placement provider side.

The placement provider-facing Provider Dashboard. A PEF signs in to a read-only view of their own students' hours — 287 distinct learners, 1,210 hours, 100% verification rate in this example — and can drill down by provider, ward and individual learner. Crucially, the banner makes clear it is read-only: trusts can see, but not edit.

During the open cycle, before the submission file exists, your NHS trust partner's PEFs can sign in to a read-only view of their students' hours. They see which wards are running behind on sign-off, which programmes have verification gaps, and where hours are tracking significantly below pro-rated target. They see this while there's still time to do something about it.

The conversations that would otherwise happen by email after a rejected submission, or not happen at all, turning into formal disputes, can now happen as informal check-ins weeks before the deadline.

Student names are redacted by default; a name only becomes visible to a placement provider user who is the named assessor on that record, and every reveal is logged. Placement provider users access the system through their existing MyProgress account, your System Administrator grants the TariffTrustValidator role via the same screens used for every other role in the platform. No new passwords, no new sign-up flow.

Built against real data, not a slide deck

The Tariff Extension has been built with input and review from several UK HEI nursing programmes.

The SDCT preview is generated straight from live placement data. Each row carries the fields NHSE requires — course title, qualification, placement type, canonical provider name, ward, intake and per-year hours — calculated on the official NHSE formula: TariffEligibleHours ÷ 1,530 × £5,866 × trust MFF. The gate enforces it, so the file emits verified, delivered hours, not target hours.

The figures the tool generates are calculated on the official NHSE formula: TariffEligibleHours ÷ 1,530 × £5,866 × trust MFF. The pre-generation gate enforces this, the SDCT file emits verified, delivered hours, not target hours.

Available for the October 2026 submission cycle

The Tariff Extension goes live on 1 September 2026, in time for the OCT 2026 NHSE SDCT window. Onboarding typically runs about twelve weeks from discovery call to live submission, which means the window to get set up for October is open now.

If you're currently managing tariff submissions through exported spreadsheets and email threads, we'll start with a free assessment — we run our audit prototype against an anonymised cut of your placement data to surface the cleanup work and give you a realistic picture of what the submission would look like before any commercial commitment.

Contact us to learn more.