From 1 April 2026 England has five business rates multipliers instead of two, and two of them are lower rates for retail, hospitality and leisure property. A veterinary practice is not one of those, so the coverage describing April 2026 as a business rates cut does not describe your bill.
Article · 20 July 2026
If you read that business rates were cut from April 2026 and wondered why your practice's bill went the other way, this is why. England moved from two multipliers to five on 1 April 2026, and two of the new ones are reduced rates for retail, hospitality and leisure property. A first opinion veterinary practice is not retail, hospitality or leisure property. It pays the standard or the small business multiplier, and those are the higher pair.
On the same day the 2026 revaluation took effect, so most practices received a new rateable value at the same time as the multiplier changed. Two moving parts on one bill is a good way to lose track of which one did what.
| Multiplier | 2026/27 | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | 48.0p | Rateable value £51,000 and above |
| Small business | 43.2p | Rateable value not exceeding £50,999 |
| Standard retail, hospitality and leisure | 43.0p | Qualifying RHL property |
| Small business retail, hospitality and leisure | 38.2p | Qualifying RHL property |
| High value | 50.8p | Rateable value £500,000 and above |
Statutory constraints hold the structure together: the high-value multiplier may be at most 10p above the standard multiplier, and the RHL multipliers must be at least 20p below the small business multiplier. All the figures above are England only.
The two reduced multipliers exist for retail, hospitality and leisure property — shops, pubs, restaurants, cafés, hotels, gyms and similar. A veterinary practice is a professional and clinical service operating from consulting rooms, a preparation area, kennels and a dispensary. It is not a shop, even though it sells food, parasiticides and accessories from a counter at the front.
So the reduced rates do not reach it, and the practical effect is that a practice pays 48.0p or 43.2p where a similarly sized retail unit in the same street pays 43.0p or 38.2p. Every piece of reporting that framed the April 2026 changes as a cut was describing the other two columns.
One qualification, and it is a useful one. Which multiplier is applied to your property is a decision for the billing authority against the government's definition, and it is stated on the bill itself. Read it off the bill rather than inferring it — if a practice with a substantial retail frontage has been given something unexpected, that is a conversation with the billing authority, not an assumption to make either way.
Two illustrative practices, on the multipliers above.
Note the cliff edge between those two examples. The small business multiplier applies where the rateable value does not exceed £50,999. Cross that by £1 and the whole bill is calculated at 48.0p rather than 43.2p — on a £51,000 rateable value that is £24,480 instead of £22,032, so £2,448 more for a pound of extra rateable value. Where a revaluation has taken a practice from just under to just over the line, that is the first thing to look at.
At the other end, the 50.8p high-value multiplier applies from a rateable value of £500,000. A first opinion practice will not normally reach that, but a large veterinary hospital, referral centre or a multi-service site under a single assessment can, and the step up is 2.8p above the standard rate.
The 2026 revaluation took effect on 1 April 2026. New rateable values are based on rental values at the antecedent valuation date of 1 April 2024 and were published on 26 November 2025.
Two things follow from the antecedent date. First, your new rateable value reflects the rental market as it stood in April 2024 — not today's market and not what you actually pay. Second, because the list was published in November 2025, the figure has been available for months, which matters if the increase is large enough to be worth challenging.
A redesigned Transitional Relief scheme phases revaluation increases over three years, so a practice facing a substantial rise should not see the whole of it in year one. How the phasing applies to a particular property depends on the size of the increase and the scheme's bands.
Everything above is England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland set their own poundage or multipliers, and the figures here do not carry across. You may also see a reference to a Transitional Relief Supplement being added to the multipliers for 2026/27. It does not appear in the government's own notification of non-domestic rating multipliers for 2026/27, so no figure for it is stated here — the five multipliers in the table are what that notification gives.
Rates are one of the fixed costs that a practice cannot price its way around in the short term, and they are landing in the same year as several other increases: employer National Insurance at 15% above a £5,000 secondary threshold, the National Living Wage at £12.71 from 1 April 2026, and the dividend rise on extraction from 6 April 2026. On the CMA's own sample of 36 small independent veterinary firms, EBIT margins fell from 15% in 2021 to 9% in 2023, and 24 of the 36 saw margins decline across the three years. A £1,700 or £3,100 rates differential is not decisive on its own; it is one line in a cost base that has been moving against practices for several years, which is the argument for knowing each line rather than the total.
Compare your own margin against that sample with the practice profitability calculator. Property costs, fit-out and equipment interact with capital allowances — the Annual Investment Allowance is £1,000,000 and full expensing gives an incorporated practice a 100% first-year allowance on new and unused main-rate plant and machinery — which is covered in the capital allowances guide. The accounts and management-reporting side is practice accounts and tax, and the other cost changes landing on staff are in the payroll and employment rights guide. Rating valuation itself is a surveyor's discipline, not ours, and a material challenge should go to one.
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No. England moved to five multipliers on 1 April 2026 and two of them are reduced rates for retail, hospitality and leisure property, at 43.0p and 38.2p. A veterinary practice is not retail, hospitality or leisure property, so it pays the standard multiplier of 48.0p where the rateable value is £51,000 or more, or the small business multiplier of 43.2p where it does not exceed £50,999. A high value multiplier of 50.8p applies from a rateable value of £500,000. Coverage describing April 2026 as a cut was describing the retail, hospitality and leisure columns.
Five pence in the pound of rateable value, which scales quickly. On an illustrative rateable value of £34,000 the small business multiplier of 43.2p gives £14,688 a year, against £12,988 at the small business retail, hospitality and leisure rate of 38.2p — a difference of £1,700. On a rateable value of £62,000 the standard multiplier of 48.0p gives £29,760 against £26,660 at the standard retail, hospitality and leisure rate of 43.0p, a difference of £3,100. Those figures are England only, and the multiplier actually applied to your property is stated on the bill.
Because the 2026 revaluation took effect on the same day, 1 April 2026. New rateable values are based on rental values at the antecedent valuation date of 1 April 2024 and were published on 26 November 2025. So the figure reflects the rental market as it stood in April 2024 rather than today, and it is not your actual rent. A redesigned Transitional Relief scheme phases revaluation increases over three years, so a practice facing a large rise should not meet all of it in the first year. Two changes landing together is why the bill can be hard to reconcile.
Selling products from a counter does not convert a veterinary practice into retail, hospitality or leisure property. The premises as a whole are a clinical and professional service — consulting rooms, preparation area, kennels, a dispensary — with a retail element attached. The decision on which multiplier applies to your property is made by the billing authority against the government's definition, and it is stated on your bill, so the sensible step is to read it off the bill rather than assume in either direction. If what you have been given looks wrong, raise it with the billing authority.
It is the boundary for the small business multiplier, which applies where the rateable value does not exceed £50,999. Above that, the whole bill is calculated at the standard multiplier of 48.0p rather than 43.2p — it is not a taper. On a rateable value of £51,000 that means £24,480 instead of £22,032, so £2,448 more than a property assessed at £50,999. A revaluation that moved a practice from just below the line to just above it therefore costs far more than the change in rateable value suggests, which makes it the first thing to look at on a new assessment.
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