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.
Healthcare & life sciences Professional & B2B services Health & care
| Publisher | NHS Business Services Authority |
|---|---|
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3 what this means |
| Updates | Updated monthly |
| Cost | Free — open data |
| Last verified | 2026-07-16 |
What your business can use it for
Sales prospecting
If 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 planning
Size and split territories on actual prescribing volume and spend per practice, instead of on headcount or postcode geography.
Market analysis
Track 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
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Your territory or catchment postcodes
Postcodes
Every 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
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Portal
English Prescribing Dataset with SNOMED code
No account needed. One CSV per month, around 7.5 GB each. Published about the 20th, roughly two months after the month it covers. -
API
NHSBSA open data API (CKAN)
Lists the current download links. Worth using, because the per-file URLs are not guessable and change with each release. -
API
OpenPrescribing — the friendly way in
A 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 several gigabytes, so even one month is far beyond a spreadsheet, and a full year is roughly 90 gigabytes needing proper database tooling.
- The data is published about two months in arrears, so it's always a look at the recent past rather than the current month — worth knowing before you build anything time-sensitive on it.
- There are two different cost columns (a list price and a discounted actual cost) and some rows can't be traced to a specific practice, so you have to know which figure to use and which rows to exclude before the totals are trustworthy.
Worth knowing before you start
- It runs about two months behind — January's prescribing appears around March. Fine for planning, useless for anything live.
- England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland publish separately on different rules.
- It is big: roughly 18 million rows and 7.5 GB per month. Read it in chunks or in a database, not a spreadsheet.
- 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.