NHS Business Services Authority
GP Prescribing in England (EPD)
Every medicine prescribed by every GP practice in England, month by month — what was dispensed, how much of it, and what it cost. Around 18 million rows a month, with the practice's name, address and postcode on each one.
At a glance
- Publisher
- NHS Business Services Authority
- Updates
- Updated monthly
- Cost
- Free — open data
- Last checked
- 2026-07-16
Healthcare & life sciencesProfessional & B2B servicesHealth & care
What your business can use it for
- Sales prospectingIf you sell to primary care, this tells you exactly which practices prescribe what you are adjacent to, in what volume — a ranked target list rather than a guess.
- Territory planningSize and split territories on actual prescribing volume and spend per practice, instead of on headcount or postcode geography.
- Market analysisTrack how a therapy area is moving nationally or in your patch, month by month — the same data the pharmaceutical analysts use, free.
Works with data you already have
- Your territory or catchment postcodesPostcodesEvery row carries the practice POSTCODE, so you can map to LSOA/LAD via the free ONS lookup with no extra join
How to get it
- English Prescribing Dataset with SNOMED codePortalNo account needed. One CSV per month, around 7.5 GB each. Published about the 20th, roughly two months after the month it covers.
- NHSBSA open data API (CKAN)APILists the current download links. Worth using, because the per-file URLs are not guessable and change with each release.
- OpenPrescribing — the friendly way inAPIA free curated API over the same data from the Bennett Institute. Start here unless you genuinely need all 18 million rows a month.
What's involved in using it
- Each month is a separate file of around 18 million rows and 7.5 GB, so even one month is far beyond a spreadsheet and has to be read in chunks or in a database; a full year is roughly 90 gigabytes needing proper database tooling.
- The data is published about two months in arrears — January's prescribing appears around March — so it's always a look at the recent past rather than the current month: fine for planning, useless for anything live or time-sensitive.
The technical detail, for whoever sets it up (5)
- England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland publish separately on different rules.
- Rows flagged as unidentified could not be matched to a practice — exclude them for practice-level work, keep them for national totals.
- Two cost columns, and they mean different things: net ingredient cost is list price, actual cost adjusts for pharmacy discounts. Use actual cost for spend.
- Prescribed is not the same as dispensed or taken — this is what left the practice, not what reached the patient.
- History before December 2020 sits in the older, non-SNOMED version of this dataset.
Ask us about GP Prescribing in England (EPD)
Ask a factual question about GP Prescribing in England (EPD) — 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.