NATS Trainee Air Traffic Controller: Eligibility, Stages and Pay (UK)

NATS handles air traffic from airport towers and from two radar control centres, Swanwick and Prestwick, and it recruits trainee controllers onto a Level 5 apprenticeship that needs no prior aviation experience. Its process is long, with four assessment stages on its own page, and it has a reapplication rule applicants should note: if you do not pass a stage you cannot reapply until the next recruitment campaign, and NATS does not say when that will be. This guide takes the eligibility rules, the stages, the pay and the timings from NATS’s own pages, shows the places where those pages are unclear, and says what NATS does not publish about its tests.

ProSyllabus is an independent study site. It is not part of the FAA, the US Department of Transportation, Pearson VUE, NAV CANADA, NATS or EUROCONTROL, and their advice appears only where it is attributed to them by name; our own comments are marked as ours. Every rule, date and figure below is taken from the pages listed under Sources, each read on 24 October 2026. Where we noticed two pages of the same body giving different figures, the guide shows both.

NATS, Training to be an Air Traffic Controller, read 24 Oct 2026.

NATS says that because you will be “commencing training in a safety critical role,” you must meet its eligibility requirements, and that if you do not, “we will reject your application from the outset.” These are the requirements as listed.

Notice what is not on the list: no age ceiling, no degree and no aviation background. NATS’s own December 2025 news release says it plainly: applicants “don’t need any prior aviation knowledge,” and a controller’s job needs “the ability to work well as a team, show adaptability and personal resilience.”

If you pass Stage 4, you receive a conditional offer, subject to security and medical clearances. Once you have your Class 3 medical clearance, NATS assigns you to the next available start date “from late 2027,” and the security clearance process begins approximately nine months before the start date. That timeline is worth reading twice: for the campaign the page describes, the start dates are more than a year after the assessment centres begin.

Stages 1 and 2 are “virtually proctored to validate test-taker identity.” NATS’s consent note says that where you give consent, the camera on your device “will be activated to take regular photos throughout the course of the assessment to check that the face in every photo is the same,” and that your microphone is accessed “to detect the presence and duration of audio, possibly indicative of a conversation.” It advises that you take the assessments “in clear, direct view of your device’s camera,” avoid covering your face with objects such as hands or clothing, and “limit detectable noise (e.g. speaking out loud).” The practical reading, which is ours, is that you need a webcam, a microphone and a quiet room before the invitation arrives, not after.

NATS has said in its own words that it added “a new realistic work sample exercise as part of the assessment process.” According to a NATS blog post of 2 March 2026 by its Head of Talent Assessment Standards, the exercise “puts the candidate in the seat of an operational controller, managing a simulated section of airspace in real-time.” Candidates are briefed, “encouraged to talk through their thinking” and assessed “across a series of short runs,” with assessor feedback between runs and observation of how they respond and adapt. The post says the structure is deliberate: “Air traffic control training isn’t about being perfect on the first attempt; it’s about learning, applying feedback and building safe, repeatable habits.” Assessment decisions “remain human-led.”

A separate NATS news item of 19 January 2026 describes a digital-twin powered platform, BLADE, built from Project Bluebird (a collaboration between NATS, The Alan Turing Institute and the University of Exeter) and used “during the Autumn 2025 trainee air traffic controller assessments.” Candidates were evaluated against “key performance metrics including safety, efficiency and task completion.” None of these pages says which of the four stages contains the exercise. They describe assessment criteria but give no numerical scoring formula or pass mark, so we do not guess; the Stage 4 description on the trainee page names only “a practical exercise.”

The last row is a warning, not a verdict: we report the conflicting messages and cannot say which one NATS intends. If a campaign is not clearly open when you read this, register your interest, which is what NATS’s FAQ suggests, and check again before you build plans around a date.

NATS lists the places controllers work, any of which could be your posting: Aberdeen, Belfast City, Belfast International, Bristol, Cardiff, Farnborough, Gatwick, Gibraltar, Glasgow, Heathrow, London City, Luton, Manchester, Southampton and Stansted airports, and the Prestwick and Swanwick control centres. The December 2025 news release gave the trainee starting package as £31,136, while the trainee page quotes £34,611.60 at 2026 rates; both are shown here because the pages do not explain the difference. It describes three kinds of controller, Aerodrome (Tower), Area and Approach, and about 1,800 controllers in all. The December 2025 release adds that NATS offers “a lump sum to help cover travel and medical assessment costs for candidates from lower income backgrounds or with caring responsibilities.”

That is why we offer no “NATS Stage 1 practice test.” The NATS pages we read do not name the individual Stage 1 ability tests or describe any practice material, so we have no official description of the tests to base one on. What the pages do give you are examples of the skills in Stage 1: NATS says the tests are designed to assess skills such as spatial awareness, logical thinking, numerical ability, sense of direction and reaction speed. For the later stages we have written our own material around what NATS does describe: Stage 2 listening and judgement practice, interview preparation, and a revision kit of aviation fundamentals whose topics are our choice, since NATS publishes no syllabus for its knowledge tests. All of it is our material, not NATS’s.