Wales GP Contract 2025/26

Following 9 months of uncertainty, practices in Wales finally received confirmation of the 2025/26 contract uplift in December. The landmark agreement delivers a significant uplift to funding and a move away from one off cash injection towards recurrent funding instead. This provides multi‑year financial certainty and a renewed focus on transformation of primary care across Wales, helping to provide clarity for medium term financial decisions. 

The 2025/26 contract delivers £41.9 million of investment, equivalent to approximately 9% of the total contract value. The funding will be backdated to April 2025 and is recurrent. It was confirmed that 2026/27 would see a guaranteed uplift of 5.8%. 

The investment is broken down as follows:

Looking ahead, the 5.8% uplift for 2026/27 is estimated to be around £30 million and confirmed to be in addition to any pay and expense award in 2026/27. This is intended to allow GPs to play a fundamental role in the Chief Medical officer’s ‘Community by Design’ transformation work. The 2026/27 funding uplift is to be split equally across the Workforce, Change and  Continued from 2025/26 Resilience funds, with only the Resilience fund being invested directly into the Global Sum. Any underspend on the Workforce and Change funds will be paid out to practices within the health board.

They also confirmed commitment to a full review of the global sum allocation formula, for the first time in more than two decades. 

When looking at such large figures, it’s easy to lose sight of what the contract will actually mean to practices. 

The key points to consider include: 

• The contract value increased to £134.15, an uplift of 7.14% compared to 2024/25 recurrent funding. 1.63% when considering the non‑recurrent practice stabilisation payment for 2024/25.
• The SFE reimbursements have increase by 24.1%, to £2,151.96 from week 3 onwards.
• Partnership premium base rate increased to £1,105 per session, and £1,316 per session for over 16 years of service. An uplift of 10.5%. 

• Practices must use the 2025/26 funding to give a backdated 4% pay rise to all staff employed on 1 April 2025. This includes any staff members who have left. However, you will need to check the contracts for staff employed after 1 April 2025, as they may not necessarily be automatically covered. 

  The key theme here is that with the funding being recurrent and the guaranteed uplifts for 2026/27, this will give practices short term stability and mediumterm planning confidence. 

  With the end of the 2025/26 tax year looming, practice managers and finance leads should use this time to: 

   

• Update budgets for 2026/27. Ensuring that the estimate of pensionable earnings takes the increased funding into consideration.
• Evaluate the pay gap between the workforce and  consider the impact on the practice.
• Align the practice development plans with the ‘Community by Design’ transformation agenda. 

The 2025/26 England contact uplift headline was £889m, representing a 7.2% increase on 2024/25. However, not all of this was new money and significant sums were still directed through PCNs. The Welsh contract sees a 9% uplift direct to practices