All the headlines from the 2026/27 GP contract

The Government released the details of the unilaterally imposed 2026/27 GP contract in England today. Here are all the major headlines

An uplift of £485m to the GP contract has been promised, representing a 3.6% cash increase – or 1.4% in real terms. This includes a pay assumption of 2.5% for this year, to revisit in light of pay review bodies’ recommendations.

There will also be a £292m practice-level reimbursement scheme to help recruit additional GPs, or fund additional sessions from existing GPs to support clinical same day urgent access. This will be funded by the removal of the PCN Capacity and Access Payment (CAP).

Practices were told in a letter from Dr Amanda Doyle, NHS England’s national director for primary care and community services, that the GP contract will be amended to specify that require practices deal with ‘clinically urgent’ patients on the same day.

The current advice and guidance (A&G) enhanced service will be embedded into core practice funding, with practices ‘required’ to use A&G ‘prior to or in place of a planned care referral where clinically appropriate’. 

PCNs will be required to work with ICBs to ‘achieve greater alignment’ between PCN and neighbourhood areas, through the amendment of the Network Contract DES.

The additional roles reimbursement scheme (ARRS) has been revised to allow PCNs to hire experienced GPs; previously the scheme’s funding had only been available to hire newly-qualified GPs.

GP practices will be contractually required to provide ‘timely’ data related to their online consultation services to NHS England to enable ‘consistent monitoring of access, patient experience and system performance’.

‘Refinements’ to the QOF were also laid out for 2026/27, including the addition of two new obesity-related indicators to ‘support referrals into structured weight management programmes and medicines optimisation’ which was previously announced by the Government.

NHS England said that these changes will be supported by an additional 18 QOF points (c £25m) with the intention of enhancing clinical outcomes, modernising the scheme and ensuring that ‘indicators reflect current evidence and best practice’.

Practices will be mandated to work with ICB performance improvement measures, in an effort to reduce ‘unwarranted variation‘ in areas such as on-the-day patient access and patient-to-GP ratios.

The new contract will also provide ‘improvement incentives’ for childhood vaccinations, which NHS England has said will benefit practices in deprived areas.