Your practice is a public authority for IR35. Nobody told you.

Yes, and this is the point practices most often get wrong. A GP practice with a registered patient list is a public authority for the purposes of Chapter 10, the off-payroll working rules. There is no small-client exemption for a public authority — the size test that lets small private companies out simply does not apply. So a two-partner GMS practice engaging a locum through a personal service company must determine that locum's status and issue a Status Determination Statement. This has been the position since 6 April 2017, not April 2021, which is why some practices have a longer exposure than they realise.

£130.07 per weighted patient from 1 April 2026, up from £123.34. Read the word weighted carefully: it is applied to your Contractor Weighted Population under the Carr-Hill formula, not to your raw list size. The London Adjustment of £2.18 is different again — it is per registered patient with a Greater London Authority postcode, and it is a separate addition rather than something already inside the £130.07. Practices that model on raw list size and assume London is baked in get both ends of that wrong.

Eleven months after the scheme year end, which means 28 February. The trap is which year. The Estimate of Pensionable Profits for 2026/27 was due 28 February 2026 — before the year began. The Annual Certificate for 2026/27 is not due until 28 February 2028. Those are two years apart, they are frequently confused, and the consequence of missing the certificate is that your pensionable pay is settled on estimates that may bear little relation to what you actually earned.

For GMS, legally yes — within the share-ownership constraint. At least one share must be owned legally and beneficially by a general medical practitioner, and other shares held by medical practitioners must be held by general medical practitioners or specified NHS-employed practitioners. That narrowness is deliberate and it largely excludes outside investors. PMS and especially APMS are more permissive. Whether you should is a separate question from whether you can. The commercial case usually turns on how much profit is being retained rather than drawn, and for most partnerships the honest answer is that it is not worth the complexity.

Yes, and this contradicts the assumption most partners arrive with. NHSBSA publishes a Limited Company Annual Certificate of Pensionable Income precisely for this case, and states that dividends from a company qualifying to hold a GMS, PMS or APMS contract and meeting the employing authority criteria may be pensioned, provided they are wholly in respect of NHS work. The certificate computes an NHS income ratio, the NHS element of salary and a maximum actual pensionable dividend, capped by reference to share of profit after tax and the net dividend actually received. A shareholder who is also a partner elsewhere completes the main certificate as well.

The annual allowance is £60,000 for 2026/27, with a threshold income of £200,000 before tapering is considered. For a GP the difficulty is rarely the rate and almost always the timing: pension growth is driven by pensionable pay that is not finally certified until long after the year has closed, so a charge can surface against a year you had already treated as settled. Scheme Pays exists for this, and knowing whether yours is the mandatory or voluntary route matters because the deadlines differ.