State of UK Community Pharmacy 2026: A Data Report

Executive summary

As of May 2026, the UK has 13,043 active community pharmacies across all four nations, sourced from a combination of NHSBSA, Public Health Scotland, BSO Northern Ireland and Google Maps geographic discovery (Wales, in the absence of an open NHS Wales contractor directory). The headline takeaways:

• England dominates at 10,508 active pharmacies (81% of the UK total), with Scotland at 1,283, Wales at 738 and Northern Ireland at 514.
• The UK has lost over a thousand community pharmacies since 2017, driven by chain restructures, independent owner retirement without succession, and a real-terms erosion of the NHS global sum.
• The four nations have diverged sharply on prescription charges (free in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; £9.90 per item in England in 2026) and on service contracts (Pharmacy First in England, NHS Pharmacy First Scotland, Common Ailments Service in Wales, Pharmacy First NI).
• Patient satisfaction signals are notably high: median Google ratings are 4.1 or above in every nation, peaking at 4.5 in Northern Ireland.
• We hold confirmed bank-holiday rota data for 681 pharmacies across all four nations for Spring Bank Holiday 2026. This is the first holiday on record where every UK nation has at least one published-rota source.

The numbers

On the 100-hour flag: the 33 in England is a conservative floor, not a true population. It is the count of pharmacies where the NHSBSA Consolidated Pharmaceutical List sets the 100-hour boolean explicitly. The real number is several hundred to over a thousand based on contemporaneous Pharmaceutical Journal coverage of the 2005–2012 boom. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do not operate a directly equivalent contractual category. See our companion piece on 100-hour pharmacies for the historical detail.

The English prescription charge of £9.90 per item is set out on NHS.uk and applies regardless of medicine cost. Wales abolished prescription charges in April 2007, Northern Ireland in April 2010, and Scotland in April 2011.

The contraction story

The UK community pharmacy network has been shrinking since approximately 2017. The most comprehensive contemporary source for tracking this is Community Pharmacy England’s Pharmacy Pressures Surveys and its annual state-of-pharmacy reports. The headline England figure widely cited in both CPE’s reports and contemporary BBC coverage is a net loss of approximately 1,200 community pharmacies between 2017 and 2024.

The drivers are well-documented:

• Chain restructures. The Lloyds Pharmacy estate, sold by Walgreens Boots Alliance to private equity in 2017 and again restructured from 2023, exited the UK community pharmacy market almost entirely between 2023 and 2024. Day Lewis consolidated its estate over the same period. Boots announced strategic closures in 2023 affecting approximately 300 branches.
• Independent succession. Roughly 40% of UK community pharmacies are independents. Many owners reached retirement age in the late 2010s and early 2020s without a viable succession buyer; the goodwill value of a single-pharmacy NHS contract has fallen sharply in real terms.
• Real-terms NHS funding erosion. The global sum paid to English community pharmacy was set at £2.592 billion in 2019 and has been frozen or only modestly uprated since, against double-digit cumulative inflation. Per-item dispensing fees have not kept pace.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all seen the same pressure but with smaller absolute closure numbers because their networks are smaller. Scotland has been somewhat protected by NHS contract structures that tie funding more closely to clinical services.

The four-nation divergence

Each devolved nation now runs its community pharmacy contract differently enough that “UK community pharmacy” is increasingly a misleading single category. Four short contract summaries:

• England. The most market-driven of the four contracts. Pharmacy First (NHS England, launched January 2024) allows pharmacists to treat seven clinical conditions without a GP referral for a per-consultation fee. 100-hour contracts remain in force from the 2005 reform. £9.90 prescription charge.
• Wales. The Common Ailments Service predates and is broader than Pharmacy First England, covering around 30 conditions. Prescriptions free since April 2007. Local Health Boards (LHBs) commission services rather than the regional ICBs used in England.
• Scotland. NHS Pharmacy First Scotland has operated since 2020 and is the broadest minor-ailments service in the UK, including a Pharmacist First Plus pathway for prescribing-qualified pharmacists. Prescriptions free since April 2011.
• Northern Ireland. Pharmacy First NI operates a similar consultation model. Prescriptions free since April 2010. The network is smaller (514 pharmacies) and is dominated by independents and regional groups rather than the national chains that dominate the GB market.

One implication for patients: cross-border medication access involves charge differentials. An English resident filling a prescription in a Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish pharmacy is liable for the English £9.90 charge (it follows the prescriber’s nation, not the dispensing pharmacy’s); a Welsh, Scottish or NI resident with a local prescription pays nothing wherever in the UK they dispense it.

Geographic coverage in our directory

Find a Pharmacy holds geocoded data for 12,982 of the 13,043 active pharmacies (99.5%). The remainder failed postcode geocoding, usually a newly-allocated postcode that isn’t yet in our reference table. We hold Google Place IDs for approximately 3,250 pharmacies and Google-sourced opening hours for around 2,800.

A coverage caveat by nation. Our directory is most complete in England (NHSBSA Consolidated Pharmaceutical List, monthly sync), Scotland (Public Health Scotland Dispenser Location Contact Details, monthly sync) and Northern Ireland (BSO Dispensing-by-Contractor, monthly sync, CC-BY via OpenDataNI). Wales is the outlier: there is no equivalent open NHS Wales contractor directory, so our Welsh records were sourced via Google Maps geographic discovery across 39 town and city anchors. The Welsh dataset therefore has higher field coverage in some respects (every Welsh row has a phone number and 95% have a rating, because every row came from Google) but lower regulatory authority. We cannot guarantee the list is exhaustive of every NHS-contracted Welsh pharmacy.

You can browse the directory geographically at /areas, grouped by the 124 UK postcode areas. The largest single area in our data is Manchester (M) with 36 records inside the M postcode area, followed by Sheffield (S) with 33 and Birmingham (B) with 31. Full data-source documentation sits at /data-sources.

Bank-holiday coverage

For Spring Bank Holiday 2026 (Monday 25 May), we ingested 681 confirmed designated-rota entries from 13 publishing bodies across all four UK nations. The breakdown:

• England: 628 entries from 11 sources (NHS England London aggregate, NHS Greater Manchester, NHS Birmingham & Solihull, and 8 Local Pharmaceutical Committees including Black Country, Thames Valley, West Yorkshire and others)
• Scotland: 34 entries from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, the first ever Scottish published-rota source ingested
• Wales: 12 entries from Aneurin Bevan University Health Board and Swansea Bay UHB, the first ever Welsh published-rota sources ingested
• Northern Ireland: 7 entries from BSO’s aggregated rota PDFs covering Armagh, Ballycastle, Belfast, Cookstown and Downpatrick, the first ever NI published-rota source ingested

This is partial coverage, and we are transparent about that. Approximately 30 other configured rota publishers either had not published their Spring BH document by ingest time or do not publish on the public web at all. For pharmacies in those uncovered regions we apply our standard conservative default: where no published rota entry exists for a bank holiday, we show the pharmacy as closed. This is deliberately stricter than the reality (some pharmacies open on bank holidays without being formally on a rota), but we will never direct a patient to a pharmacy that might be shut. NHS 111 (or NHS 24 in Scotland) is the safety-net fallback for any patient who can’t find an open pharmacy.

You can browse local bank-holiday status through our area hub pages (/areas) and city pages.

The out-of-hours pattern

The out-of-hours picture in 2026 is sparser than the public realises:

• Zero verified 24-hour pharmacies in our directory. A handful of pharmacies advertise themselves as 24-hour but most are in practice 100-hour pharmacies opening 7am–11pm. True 24-hour community pharmacy dispensing has effectively disappeared from the UK high street; what remains is hospital pharmacy and the rota system.
• 33 NHSBSA-flagged 100-hour pharmacies in England. A conservative floor; the real population is several hundred. See the 100-hour pharmacies article for the methodology note.
• NHS 111 remains the universal safety-net route for any patient needing urgent medication when no pharmacy is open. NHS 111 operates in England, Wales and Northern Ireland; NHS 24 (also dialled as 111) covers Scotland.

Quality signals

Patient-reported quality is consistently high across all four nations. Aggregating Google ratings across the 9,430 UK pharmacies with at least one rating in our dataset:

• England: avg 3.97, median 4.1 (7,466 rated pharmacies)
• Scotland: avg 4.22, median 4.3 (907 rated)
• Wales: avg 3.90, median 4.1 (700 rated)
• Northern Ireland: avg 4.44, median 4.5 (357 rated)

Median ratings of 4.1 to 4.5 are notably high for a healthcare service. The gap between average and median (typically 0.1–0.3) reflects a small distribution tail of poorly-rated pharmacies pulling the mean down, likely the same chain-branch outliers that dominate complaint volumes. Northern Ireland’s noticeably higher score is consistent with its independent- dominated network: independent pharmacies tend to score higher on patient satisfaction than national chain branches.

What changed since 2025

The previous twelve months in UK community pharmacy:

• Pharmacy First England completed its first full year (it launched January 2024) and consultation volumes were widely reported through 2024–25 as below initial NHS England forecasts but rising.
• Lloyds Pharmacy restructure entered its final phase, with the bulk of remaining branches transferred to other operators or closed by the end of 2024.
• Pharmacist independent prescribers grew in number as cohorts of recently-qualified UK pharmacists completed prescribing courses; the General Pharmaceutical Council made prescribing-qualified status part of the foundation pharmacist year for the 2026 intake.
• Welsh Local Health Board pharmacy reforms continued under the Welsh Government’s 2022–2027 community pharmacy framework, with all seven LHBs expanding the Common Ailments Service condition list.
• Scotland’s NHS Pharmacy First service recorded its highest annual consultation volume to date; data is published by Public Health Scotland.

What to watch in 2027

• England 2025–2028 community pharmacy strategic framework hits its midpoint. Expect the NHS England commissioner’s mid-cycle review to recalibrate Pharmacy First payment rates and to set out the next evolution of clinical service contracts.
• Scotland’s “Achieving Excellence in Pharmaceutical Care” 2026 review is in progress; the eventual published version is expected to set the direction for Scottish community pharmacy to 2030.
• Welsh LHB rota standardisation. Bank-holiday rota publication varies sharply between Welsh LHBs at the moment. A move toward a single all-Wales rota publication standard would significantly improve patient out-of-hours information.
• Northern Ireland prescription-charge debate. NI has been charge-free since 2010; periodic Department of Health NI consultation documents have floated reintroducing a charge. Watch the Assembly’s health committee.
• Continued contraction remains the base case. We will publish the State of UK Community Pharmacy 2027 report against this 2026 baseline.

About this data

Find a Pharmacy’s directory is sourced from:

• NHSBSA Consolidated Pharmaceutical List (England): Crown Copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0. Synced monthly.
• Public Health Scotland Dispenser Location Contact Details (Scotland): synced monthly.
• BSO Dispensing-by-Contractor (Northern Ireland): published via OpenDataNI under Creative Commons Attribution. Synced monthly.
• Google Maps geographic discovery (Wales): used as a stop-gap in the absence of an open NHS Wales contractor directory. Disclosed at point of display on each Welsh pharmacy page.
• Bank-holiday rota publications: aggregated from approximately 44 configured ICB, LPC, PHS and BSO publishers using automated document discovery and Claude Haiku document extraction. See /data-sources for the full list.