Your own volumes and your own current charge against a cap you can move — because the cap figure is not settled yet. It shows the gap per prescription, the fee income at risk on a like-for-like basis, and what that is worth in courses of in-house dispensing.
What you charge today for writing a prescription. The CMA's cap figures are stated including VAT, so use the same basis.
Count prescriptions, not medicines. If you genuinely do not know, your practice management system will — and the number is usually higher than the front desk thinks.
The cap is higher for the first medicine prescribed within a consultation and lower for each additional one in the same consultation. The rest are treated as additional.
£21 is the final-report figure. In the draft Order it sits in square brackets for CPI uplift between 24 March 2026 and the Order date, then annual indexation — so the binding figure will be higher. Change it and see.
£12.50 is the final-report figure, bracketed in the draft Order on the same basis as the first.
Roughly what you make on dispensing one course in-house, after the cost of the product. Used to express the fee income at risk in courses of dispensing, not to predict client behaviour.
Illustrative figures on 2026/27 rates and simplified assumptions. This is information, not advice, and it is no substitute for a proper calculation on your practice's real numbers. Ask us for the accurate version — it's free.
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The CMA's final report of 24 March 2026 set a maximum fee for providing a written prescription at £21 including VAT for the first medication prescribed within a consultation, and £12.50 including VAT for each additional medicine in the same consultation, to be adjusted annually for inflation. Those are the figures the modeller starts with, and they are the correct starting point.
They are not the legal figures. In the draft Order published for consultation on 21 July 2026, both appear inside square brackets, defined as the stated amount adjusted for inflation between the date of the Final Decision Report and the latest monthly CPI figure available before the Order is made. So the binding number will be higher than £21, and nobody — including the CMA — can say by how much until the Order is made. That is exactly why both cap fields above are inputs rather than constants: put a higher figure in and see what it does.
The other thing worth knowing about the cap is that it applies to all veterinary businesses providing first opinion services, including out-of-hours premises, under draft Article 18. The compliance window for it is six months from the Order for a Large Veterinary Business — 15 or more first opinion practices and out-of-hours centres — and twelve months for a Small one. That is the one remedy where the gap is six months against twelve rather than three months longer, so an independent practice has double the lead time, not a quarter more.
The revenue at risk line is your current fee income on this volume less the same volume charged at the caps. It is deliberately a like-for-like comparison: same prescriptions, same mix, different price. It is not a forecast, because a forecast would need an assumption about how many more clients ask for a written prescription once draft Articles 14 to 16 require you to tell them the option exists and to hand over a flyer for ongoing medication. Nobody has published a reliable figure for that, so we have not invented one.
What the CMA does publish is the context. Current prescription charges start at around £10 at the lowest, and the final report says significant numbers of first opinion practices charge over £30, with some considerably in excess of that. If your fee is at the upper end, the gap per prescription is the number to look at first — it tells you how much of your current fee is above the line, per transaction, before any volume effect at all.
The dispensing margin figure does a different job. It converts the annual fee income you would lose into the number of in-house dispensing courses that would have to replace it. That matters because the same set of remedies that caps the fee also publishes your parasiticide prices next to a link to the VMD's Register of Online Retailers, and the CMA found pet owners could save £200 to £300 a year on average buying commonly prescribed medicines online, with online prices 50% to 60% below first opinion practice prices for some products. So the fee line and the dispensing line move in the same direction, and replacing one with the other is harder than it looks.
Three things, in order. First, know the gap per prescription. If you charge £32 for the first medicine and the cap lands somewhere above £21, you can size the reduction now rather than when somebody asks. Second, work out what proportion of your total practice income the fee line actually is — for most practices it is small in percentage terms and large in cash terms, which is precisely the combination that gets ignored until it is urgent. Third, look at where the recovery comes from, and be honest about whether it is a consultation fee, a procedure price, or a cost line.
That third question is the one to answer alongside the four publication duties, because a consultation fee you raise this year is a consultation fee that appears on a published price list next year, priced by weight band, next to everybody else's. The CMA compliance and pricing page sets out all eighteen obligations and the windows they arrive in, and the practice pricing guide is about setting a number you can publish and still defend.
It does not tell you when you have to comply, because no calendar date exists. The CMA has to make its Order by 23 September 2026 — that is its own deadline for writing the Order, not a date any practice complies with — and the obligations land three to twelve months after the Order is made. Every compliance date in the draft Order is a month count next to a bracketed month name that has not been fixed.
It also does not model VAT separately: both cap figures are stated by the CMA as inclusive of VAT, so enter your fee on the same basis. And it makes no allowance for the cost of actually producing prescriptions — the hard copy by the end of the consultation or the digital version within 48 hours that draft Article 15 requires, and the standard flyer under Article 16. Those are process costs rather than revenue, and they sit in your overheads. For the version of this run on your own ledgers rather than typed in from memory, ask us — it is free.
These tools use sensible simplifications. A free conversation gets you the accurate version — and usually two or three things worth fixing before your year end.
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