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Community Pharmacy Wales (CPW) has suspended contractor levy payments in a bid to ease financial pressures on the sector.
The payments that were due on 1 October 2026 and 30 October 2026 were not collected, while the 1 December 2026 payment is also suspended, CPW confirmed to The Pharmaceutical Journal.
Across Great Britain, levies are collected to support negotiations and other services performed by national negotiating bodies.
A spokesperson for CPW told The Pharmaceutical Journal on 5 November 2026: “Recognising the serious financial pressures facing community pharmacies across Wales, CPW’s Board agreed to suspend the contractor levy for three months. This provides practical support to contractors without compromising CPW’s core negotiating and support activities.
“CPW recognises that the saving for individual contractors is modest and will not resolve the wider funding challenges facing the sector. Nevertheless, every little helps, and the Board felt that providing this relief was the right thing to do.
“The levy holiday offers some immediate support while we continue to press Welsh government for the substantial additional investment needed to secure the future of community pharmacy services.”
In September 2026, CPW shared results of a survey, which found that almost half (47%) of community pharmacy contractors in Wales said they had reduced staffing levels as part of measures to keep their business afloat.
In the same survey, almost two-thirds (63%) of respondents said that their business was in a worse financial position compared with the same period the previous year.
James Wood, director of member and local network support at Community Pharmacy England (CPE), told The Pharmaceutical Journal on 6 November 2026: “The committee considers levies and the pressure they put on LPCs [local pharmaceutical committees] every year, balancing this against the work that needs doing to represent the sector.
“CPW collects levies directly from pharmacy owners, whilst here they pay levies to their LPCs and a portion of that is sent by the LPC to us. As CPE is structured differently from CPW, we therefore do not have a mechanism to directly suspend or reduce pharmacy owners’ levy payments.”
A spokesperson for Community Pharmacy Scotland (CPS) told The Pharmaceutical Journal on 5 November 2026 that a levy suspension is not something CPS has needed to consider for its members.
