One in ten GP partners earn at least £250k a year

HMRC figures show a growing disparity between the pay of family doctors who own their practice and salaried GPs

Hundreds of family doctors are earning at least £300,000 a year from the NHS, their take-home pay having increased by more than 20 per cent in real terms over the past decade.

Figures from HM Revenue & Customs show that one in ten GPs who run their own practice are paid at least a quarter of a million pounds a year, while one in 20 earn more than £300,000. 

That figure is higher than the pay for the vast majority of NHS chief executives running hospitals and a third more than the highest NHS salary for a hospital consultant. 

Despite their earnings rising in real terms since 2013, GP partners are holding “work to rule” collective action as part of a formal dispute with the government over what they describe as underfunding.

Since May the British Medical Association (BMA) has encouraged GPs to take steps to reduce their workload, including refusing requests from hospitals to take on the care of patients with prostate cancer and heart conditions. The BMA is threatening to keep escalating collective action unless the government commits itself to providing an extra £3.5 billion for GP services. 

The pay statistics were published in a report by the Health Foundation think tank that also highlighted how general practice has in effect become a two-tier service in which salaried GPs earn on average half the amount made by their partner-level colleagues.

Nearly half of GPs are partners, meaning they own their own practices, which they run as private businesses. They are contracted to provide services to the NHS and employ other GPs on a salary.

The average income of a GP partner in 2023-24 was £163,751, compared with £74,498 for salaried GPs, the report found. More than 80 per cent of salaried GPs earned less than £100,000, compared with 21 per cent of those who were partners in their practices.

In the last decade the average salaries of GP partners has increased by more than 18 per cent, while the wages of GP employees has gone up by less than 4 per cent.

There are also big gender disparities in pay for all types of GPs, even after adjusting for working hours. For example, male partners in their fifties earn £184,594 on average, while women in their fifties earn £148,996. 

The latest NHS workforce data, for June, showed there were 17,831 GP partners in England. About a thousand earn more than £300,000, while nearly 4,000 earn more than £200,000.

The Labour government has pledged to hire thousands more GPs and shift more care from hospitals to GPs as part of a “neighbourhood health service”.

The Health Foundation’s report looked at the state of general practice and found that the sector’s share of the NHS budget declined from 8.8 per cent to 8.3 per cent between 2015 and last year, despite repeated policy commitments to increase it. It found that government funds GPs to the tune of about £219 per patient each year — substantially below the average cost of a single ambulance or emergency care episode.

Dr Luisa Pettigrew, senior policy fellow at the Health Foundation, said pay disparities were one of a number of problems, alongside rising demand, growing workload and a funding model that had not kept pace with the role successive governments expected it to play.

“Despite repeated commitments to shift care into the community, general practice’s share of the NHS budget fell in the decade to 2024-25,” she said. “If the government is serious about improving neighbourhood health services and shifting more care out of hospitals, a clear, multi-year commitment to increasing general practice funding as a share of overall NHS spending is required.

“Without this, general practice and neighbourhood health ambitions are being set up to fail, and aspirations to shift care closer to home and reduce costly, avoidable pressure on services like A&E will be left unrealised.”

Dr Clare Bannon, chair of the BMA GPs committee, said: “The Health Foundation report shows that only around one in ten of all GPs are on incomes over £200,000. The vast majority earn significantly less. Real-terms earnings have in fact dropped over the last 20 years, according to this report, which confirms any additional funding is going into services, not GP pay. It does show salaried GPs need an increase in pay and this requires increased core contract funding.” 

An NHS England spokesperson said: “Thanks to record NHS investment in general practice, staff are delivering record activity, with the number of appointments delivered in June 2026 up almost 50 per cent on the same period in 2019, while patient satisfaction with their practice has started to increase, with more than three quarters of people rating their experience of their GP practice as good.”

Behind the story

In 1948 more than eight in ten GPs in the British Medical Association voted against the founding of the NHS (Eleanor Hayward writes). They were furious at the prospect of losing their financial independence and ability to run their own surgeries. 

As a result, Nye Bevan, the Labour health minister, ruled out the introduction of a salaried GP service and allowed doctors to continue to buy their own practices, operating as small business owners.

This partnership model that GPs fought so hard to retain remains today. It means the majority of GPs, unlike other doctors, are not employed directly by the NHS. Instead, GP partners — also known as contractors — are self-employed and own a share of their practices, which hold contracts with the NHS. They employ other staff including salaried GPs. Because GP partners are allowed to keep surplus NHS income, they earn about twice as much as salaried GPs.

For the past two decades, however, the proportion of GPs who are partners has been falling. Currently about half of GPs are partners, compared with two thirds in 2015. This is linked to there being fewer, larger practices, as well as a higher proportion of younger doctors reluctant to take on the financial risk of buying into a partnership.