NHS England (Organisation Data Service)
GP Practices & Registered Patients
The official register of every GP practice, pharmacy, dentist and optician in England — name, address, postcode and status — alongside how many patients are registered at each practice, by age and sex.
At a glance
- Publisher
- NHS England (Organisation Data Service)
- Licence
- Open Government Licence v3 — Attribution required: "Information from NHS England, licenced under the current version of the Open Government Licence." · what this means
- Updates
- Updated monthly
- Cost
- Free — open data
- Last checked
- 2026-07-16
Healthcare & life sciencesProfessional & B2B servicesPropertyHealth & care
What your business can use it for
- Sales prospectingA free, current, national list of every practice and pharmacy with its address — the target list, if you sell to primary care.
- Territory planningWeight territories by registered patients rather than by practice count, so a patch with a few large practices is not mistaken for a small one.
- Site selectionRegistered patient numbers by age are one of the better free proxies for the resident population around a location — including who they are, not just how many.
Works with data you already have
- Your territory, catchment or site postcodesPostcodesThe practice register carries a full postcode per organisation; link to LSOA/LAD via the free ONS lookup
How to get it
- GP practice register (epraccur) — direct CSV, no loginBulk downloadOne row per practice: ODS code, name, address, postcode, open and close dates, status. Regenerated nightly. Equivalent files exist for pharmacies, dentists, opticians and trusts.
- Organisation Data Service — the other organisation filesPortalWhere to find the sibling registers. The bulk XML pack via TRUD needs a free account; the CSV exports above do not.
- Patients registered at a GP practicePortalMonthly patient counts per practice, by single year of age and sex. The breakdown by small area (LSOA) appears only in the quarterly editions — January, April, July and October.
What's involved in using it
- The practice list and the patient-count files are separate downloads that you have to join together yourself on the practice code before you can see, say, how many patients sit near your sites.
- The register is regenerated fresh every night and the old snapshots are gone, so if you want to track change over time you have to save each download yourself — nobody keeps the history for you.
- The neighbourhood-level patient breakdown is only published four times a year, not monthly, so a monthly process expecting it will come up empty three months out of four.
The technical detail, for whoever sets it up (5)
- England and Wales for the practice register; the patient counts are England only.
- The register lists organisations, not buildings — a practice with branch surgeries may appear as one row.
- Registered patients are not residents. Lists are inflated by people who moved away and never de-registered, and the count is taken at the practice, not where patients live.
- The CSV exports are generated live and always reflect the current register.
- Status matters — the file carries inactive and dormant organisations too. Filter before counting.
Ask us about GP Practices & Registered Patients
Ask a factual question about GP Practices & Registered Patients — what it covers, how often it changes, whether it matches the records you keep — and we will answer, free. Or tell us what you are trying to work out, and we will tell you what it would take to get this data working next to the numbers you already have.