How a rates bill is actually built
Two numbers make your bill. The rateable value is the Valuation Office Agency’s estimate of the annual rent the property would fetch on the open market, and it was reset on 1 April 2026 on rental values as at 1 April 2024. The multiplier is pence in the pound, set by government. Multiply them together and you have the bill before any relief.
From April 2026 there are five multipliers rather than two: 38.2p and 43p for retail, hospitality and leisure property below and above a £51,000 rateable value, 43.2p and 48p for everything else, and 50.8p for any property at £500,000 or more whatever it is used for.
Why you do not get the retail rate
From 1 April 2026 there are two permanently lower multipliers for retail, hospitality and leisure property — 5p below the ordinary rates. GP surgeries do not get them: the guidance excludes medical and health services by name.
That is not an oversight to appeal. The published guidance excludes these uses by name, and the test is the use of the property rather than the size or type of the business. The shop two doors down pays 5p in the pound less than you do on the same rateable value, permanently.
What is worth your attention instead is the rateable value itself, and small business rate relief. For most practices this matters far less than it would elsewhere, for the reason immediately below.
Small business rate relief is the one that matters most
Below a £12,000 rateable value there is nothing to pay. Between £12,000 and £15,000 relief tapers away in a straight line. Above £15,000 there is none. It applies to one property, with narrow exceptions for additional properties under £2,899 rateable value where the total stays under £20,000, or £28,000 in London — and if you took on a second property you keep relief on the first for twelve months, extended to thirty-six months where it was taken on from 27 November 2025.
Relief is not always applied automatically. If you believe you qualify and you are being billed, apply to the billing authority; it can usually be backdated.
Most practices do not carry this cost themselves
Business rates on GP premises are reimbursable under the NHS premises costs arrangements, alongside water and clinical waste. Maintenance, repairs, insurance and energy are not. That makes the rates line unusual: it is a cost the practice pays and then claims, rather than one it absorbs.
The consequence is that the number this calculator produces is the figure to reconcile against what you actually received, not the figure to budget as a net cost. Two things go wrong in practice. Reimbursement is claimed on the bill as issued, so if the bill is wrong the reimbursement is wrong. And where part of the premises is used for something outside the contract — a let room, a private service, a pharmacy — that share is not reimbursable and the apportionment is the practice’s to get right.
Check the claim against the bill each year. It is one of the more common places we find a practice quietly out of pocket.
If the assessment looks wrong
The rateable value is challengeable through the Check, Challenge and Appeal process, and the ground is that the valuation does not reflect the property. Floor areas measured wrongly, space you no longer occupy, or a layout from before the last refit are all ordinary reasons. Rates agents will cold-call you offering to do this on a contingent fee; some are good and some are not, and the ones that ask for money up front are not.