2025-26 vs 2024-25
What's Changed From Last Year
Dispensing Pool
One-Off Backdated Payment
Subsequent Quarters Share
Overview
A big part of each pharmacy's workload is the dispensing of prescriptions for people on behalf of the NHS.
Whilst the reimbursement element of the financial package covers the cost of medicines, there needs to be a way of remunerating the pharmacy for the time and effort which goes into physically making prescriptions up and ensuring that medicines prescribed are safe and effective — i.e. the staff, expertise, and resource costs.
Each pharmacy gets a proportion of a monthly dispensing pool of £14.740m based on the number of prescriptions and instalments they dispense. If your pharmacy does 1% of the prescription work across the whole network, you receive 1% of the funding pot.
Instalment and standard dispensings, along with care home dispensings, are all given the same weighting — each counts as "1" when calculating a pharmacy's dispensing activity.
In August, eligible contractors will receive a one-off payment as a proportionate share of a £2.327m backdated payment pot to rebalance April to June 2025 dispensings in line with the year's Dispensing Pool annualised budget. Subsequent quarters will be paid as a proportionate share of the £176.879m pot.
Calculation Method
How the Quarterly Payment Is Set
It would be extremely challenging to calculate what percentage of total dispensing a pharmacy has done in a given month during the payment process — it's impossible to know how many prescriptions have been dispensed across the whole country until the very end of the process.
To manage this, the average of the last three months' activity is calculated for each pharmacy and used as a reference to set the Dispensing Pool payment for each quarter.
At a Glance
Key Facts
