The prescription fee cap explained

A prescription fee is what a practice charges for prescribing a medicine, separate from the cost of the medicine itself. Today, in most of the UK, there's no legal limit on what that fee can be — it varies a lot between practices, and it's one of the charges pet owners have historically found hardest to see coming or compare in advance.

The Competition and Markets Authority's draft Veterinary Services Market Investigation Order 2026 changes that. Once it takes effect, a practice will be capped at £21 (inclusive of VAT) for prescribing the first medicine in a consultation, and £12.50 for each additional medicine prescribed in that same consultation. Large veterinary businesses (broadly, groups with 15 or more first-opinion practices or out-of-hours centres) have to comply roughly 6 months after the Order takes effect — expected around March 2027 — with smaller businesses given roughly 12 months, around September 2027.

It's worth being precise about what the cap does and doesn't cover. It applies to the prescription fee itself — the charge for writing the prescription. It doesn't cap the price of the medicine, the consultation fee that got you in the room in the first place, or a separate dispensing fee (the charge for actually handing over the medicine from the practice's own dispensary, which is a distinct line item from the fee for prescribing it). A bill can still add up to a meaningful total even once this cap is in force — the cap just puts a ceiling on one specific, previously uncapped, charge.

Until the cap takes effect, comparing this fee between practices — and knowing that a fee this size is coming with a legal ceiling on it — is one of the more concrete ways to sanity-check a bill today.