Who we help
Pharmacy Owners
A community pharmacy is not a retail shop with a dispensary bolted on. Your income flows from the NHS under the Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework as reimbursement and remuneration, not till takings, and three things a generalist accountant routinely gets wrong (the FP34 cash lag, retrospective Category M margin adjustment, and your VAT-mixed status) compound into material errors month after month. We work exclusively with pharmacy owners because the contract literacy cannot be faked.
Buying a Pharmacy
When you buy a community pharmacy you are not buying a shop. You are buying an NHS contract, and market entry is regulated under the NHS (Pharmaceutical and Local Pharmaceutical Services) Regulations 2013. The broker finds the deal; we do the work the broker cannot: financial due diligence on the contract income, the share-versus-asset structuring decision, goodwill tax treatment, and a set of accounts your lender will actually accept. Whether you are an existing owner adding a second store or a first-time buyer, the NHS-contract layer is where most acquirers get caught out.
Selling a Pharmacy
A pharmacy sale is usually a one-time event and the largest financial transaction of an owner's career. The tax on the disposal is the whole game: Business Asset Disposal Relief charges CGT at 18% for 2026/27 on qualifying gains up to the £1 million lifetime limit per person, and standard CGT rates of 18% or 24% apply above it, with the annual exempt amount frozen at £3,000. The rate stepped up from 14% in 2025/26, so timing a sale around BADR rate steps is real money. We provide the exit-tax planning, valuation input, and deal-structuring advice that a pharmacy broker does not.
Pharmacy Groups
Running two or more pharmacies through separate companies creates a corporation-tax exposure that does not exist at single-store level. The £50,000 small-profits rate threshold and the £250,000 main-rate threshold are divided by the number of associated companies, so a multi-store owner with separate entities loses lower-rate headroom and can push the whole group toward the 25% main rate without any increase in profit. Group structure, profit extraction, and multi-site VAT and payroll are the disciplines where a generalist accountant is genuinely outgunned by the combination of NHS-contract depth and group-tax mechanics.
Locum Pharmacists
HMRC publishes a locum-pharmacist-specific page in its Employment Status Manual, reference ESM4270, and its position is more restrictive than many locum pharmacists realise. Employment status for a locum pharmacist is decided by the facts of each engagement, not by what the contract says or what everyone else in the sector does. This page covers the tax and status questions that are specific to pharmacist locums, deduplicated from the generic locum guidance on medical and contractor sites. The only conversion on this page is the take-home comparator tool and, for locums thinking about ownership, the route into our buying-a-pharmacy guidance.