CMA Written Prescription Rules for UK Vet Practices

What the CMA will require on written prescriptions

Order made; these duties apply from 2027. The CMA made the Veterinary Services Market Investigation Order 2026 on 22 September 2026, and it came into force the next day. Under Article 3 of the Order, the written-prescription duties in Articles 14 to 17 have a compliance date of 22 June 2027 for larger businesses (15 or more first-opinion practices and/or out-of-hours centres) and 22 September 2027 for smaller ones, and practices must comply from the next working day after that date.

The CMA Order gives pet owners a clearer route to buy prescribed medicines somewhere other than the practice. It places two distinct kinds of obligation on the practice: a standing requirement to publicise the right, using standard materials in set places, and a per-consultation requirement to offer it. These are easy to conflate, and the difference matters for getting compliance right.

This guide separates the two obligations, sets out exactly what the Order requires you to show and say, and — just as important — what it does not.

The standing obligation: publicise the right

The first requirement is to make the right to a written prescription, and the option to buy elsewhere, generally known. The CMA's guide for small veterinary businesses states that "You must inform Pet Owners of their ability to request a written prescription (which they can use to buy medicines elsewhere) and that medicines may be cheaper elsewhere." Article 14(1) of the Order puts the same duty in binding form: owners must be made aware of their ability to request a written prescription and of the savings they could make by buying from an authorised online retailer or another third-party retailer.

One detail saves practices a lot of wasted effort here: you will not be writing this material yourself. The guide states that the information and materials "will be made available to you by the RCVS and the CMA" and that "You will not need to develop these materials yourself." The practice's job is placement, not drafting. The Order now fixes exactly where each item goes:

• RCVS written-prescription literature — given (as a link or a copy) to every new client at registration, and to existing clients within six months of your compliance date. It must also be displayed on your website, within two clicks of the homepage (Article 14(2) to (4)).
• The Standard Written Prescription Notice — a poster, at least A3, displayed clearly and prominently in each waiting area (or reception, if there is no waiting area) and in each consulting room, showing your current prescription fee (Article 14(6) and (7)).
• Booking confirmations — every email, text or other electronic message about an upcoming consultation must carry the Standard Electronic Message, which the Order sets as "‘Written prescriptions are available. See the RCVS website for further information.’" (Article 14(10) and (11)).
• Invoices and receipts — where medication is sold, the invoice or receipt footer must carry the Order's standard notification. It states the practice's fee for a written prescription and that the owner may be able to buy medicines significantly cheaper elsewhere. It must be in the same font as the main text and no smaller (Article 14(12) to (14)).
• Ongoing medication — when an ongoing medication is first dispensed (or, if that is not practicable, the second time), the owner must be given the Standard Flyer for Ongoing Medication. It can go with the medication as an A5 flyer, be printed on the dispensing bag, or be emailed on request. It must show your current prescription fee (Article 16).

When the RCVS or CMA updates any of these materials, you have one month from being notified to put the new version in place.

The per-consultation obligation: offer it out loud

Separately, the Order places a duty on the vet at the point of prescribing. Article 14(15) requires that "if a medication is prescribed during a consultation, the Veterinary Professional prescribing that medication makes an oral offer to the Pet Owner of a Written Prescription."

Read that carefully:

• It is oral — the offer is made out loud in the consultation, not left to a poster or a footer on the invoice.
• It is every consultation in which medicine is prescribed — not the first, not on request, but each time a medicine is prescribed.
• It is an offer — the owner is offered the option of a written prescription, which they can accept or decline.

There is one exception, and it matters clinically. Article 14(16) says the offer "does not apply in the case of any medicine where there is a clinical need for it to be administered by a Veterinary Professional or for the Pet to start taking it urgently." That is two limbs, not one: medicines that clinically have to be given by a vet or nurse, and medicines the pet has to start straight away. The exception is clinical, not commercial — it turns on the medicine, not on the consultation being busy.

Outside that exception, this is the obligation most dependent on team behaviour, because it lives in the consult room. A poster in reception does not discharge it; the vet has to make the offer each time.

When an owner asks for a written prescription

Article 15 sets how fast you must deliver one. You must either hand over a paper copy by the end of the consultation, or prepare a digital copy by the end of the second working day after the consultation and then send it promptly to the owner or to an online retailer the owner names. The same two-working-day rule applies to requests made outside a consultation. Two limits apply. The digital route does not apply to controlled drugs, and the duty does not apply where there is a clinical need for the medicine to be given by a vet or started urgently.

What you do not have to say

The reforms draw one boundary that is worth stating plainly, because it stops practices over-engineering the consult-room script. While you must publicise generally that medicines may be cheaper elsewhere, the CMA's guide is clear: "You do not need to say, during the consultation, that the medicine may be cheaper elsewhere."

So the two obligations split cleanly:

• Publicise that medicines may be cheaper elsewhere — yes, through the standard literature, notice, messages, invoice footer and flyer.
• Say in the consultation that this particular medicine may be cheaper elsewhere — not required.

What the vet must do in the consultation is offer the written prescription. The "may be cheaper elsewhere" message is a publicising duty, not a line the clinician has to deliver at every prescribing moment. One further spoken duty applies only to own-brand medicines: when a vet prescribes one, they must tell the owner it is an own-brand product and that the reference product can be bought from third parties (Article 17).

Making both obligations reliable

Because the two duties have different homes — one in your standing information, one in clinical behaviour — they need different controls:

1. Plan for placement, not drafting. Work out now which of the Order's placements you can change and who changes them: the website, booking-confirmation templates, the invoice footer, consulting-room walls, dispensing bags and the new-client registration pack. Several of these live in your practice management system, so check what your vendor can configure.
2. Build the oral offer into the consult. Make "offer a written prescription" a standard step whenever a medicine is prescribed, so it does not depend on the individual vet remembering. Brief the team on the two-limb clinical exception at the same time, so it is applied as a clinical judgement rather than as a general excuse.
3. Keep prescription handling tidy. The right to a written prescription connects to the prescription fee caps — what you can charge for issuing one — and to your itemised bills, where the prescription fee should appear as its own line.
4. Set up the two-working-day digital route. Decide who prepares and sends digital prescriptions, and how requests from online retailers are handled.
5. Train new starters on both. A new vet needs the per-consultation offer in their onboarding, and the front desk needs to know where the standing information lives.

When this starts to apply to your practice

The written-prescription requirements sit in Part 4 of the Order, and its Article 3 table gives Articles 14 to 17 these compliance dates:

Your practice	Order compliance date (Article 3)
15 or more FOPs and/or out-of-hours centres ("Large Veterinary Business")	22 June 2027
Fewer than 15 FOPs and/or out-of-hours centres ("Small Veterinary Business")	22 September 2027

Note that the prescription fee cap (Article 18) runs on a different date for larger businesses: 22 March 2027 rather than 22 June 2027. For a smaller practice both land together on 22 September 2027, so the two can be planned as one piece of work.

How this fits the wider CMA package

The written-prescription rules are part of the CMA's medicines-transparency workstream, sitting alongside published price lists, written estimates, prescription fee caps, ownership disclosure, and a documented complaints process. Sequencing the whole package is what the CMA preparation timeline is for, and the CMA compliance self-assessment tool flags which remedies your practice still has open. Run as one workstream inside your governance cycle, the package is manageable for an independent practice.

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Reviewed 26 October 2026. The CMA made the Veterinary Services Market Investigation Order 2026 on 22 September 2026 and it came into force on 23 September 2026. The placements, wording, timings and compliance dates above are taken from the Order itself, not from the draft consulted on in July and August 2026. The Standard Written Prescription Notice and the Standard Flyer for Ongoing Medication were produced by the CMA and are set out in Schedules 2 and 3 of the Order; the RCVS written-prescription literature is to be produced by the RCVS. The RCVS will provide all three to practices. This is general compliance information, not legal advice. Verify the current position against the Order and its Explanatory Note and the CMA's guide for small veterinary businesses (14 or fewer practices) or large ones (15 or more), and consult your defence body for practice-specific advice.