Following extensive negotiations, GPC Wales has reached an agreement for the GMS contract with Welsh Government and NHS Wales. The final deal, covering the current 2025-26 financial year and elements of 2026-27, was announced by the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care. 

This year’s talks were much delayed due to budget uncertainty, with the initial government funding offer falling short of our costed requirements. 

We threatened a formal contract dispute, and to begin preparations for a collective action ballot, prompting assurances from the Cabinet Secretary of a multi-year strategy and an improved funding settlement. On this basis, negotiations continued. The resulting outcome will see a £41.9m investment for 2025-26, and a guaranteed recurrent uplift of 5.8% to the contract for 2026-27. This provides practices with stability and certainty ahead of the Senedd Cymru elections in May 2026. 

This agreement builds on the momentum from last year’s contract referendum, where you told Welsh Government that the status quo was not good enough. This resulted in an improved offer, albeit one with non-recurrent funding elements. The investment from this negotiation round is entirely recurrent - and would not have been possible without a mobilised profession. 

A GMS Contract Implementation Group will meet to take forward the immediate outcomes, facilitate their implementation into the GMS contract and produce detailed guidance for practices. The contractual guidance will be published in due course alongside the Statement of Financial Entitlements on the Welsh Government website. 

Furthermore, a range of working groups will be established to take forward the commitments for 2026-27 and beyond, including the ‘Community by Design’ transformation programme, and scoping a review of the global sum funding allocation formula. We will produced detailed advice for practices on these areas as work progresses over the coming months. 

The Quality and Improvement Framework (QIF) is made up of two domains, Access and Quality Improvement.  The QIF points value has always applied to both access and quality improvement.  We have agreed to uplift the points value by 4% to ensure value preservation. The QIF points value will therefore increase from £199 to £206.96 backdated to 1 April 2025.  

There are no changes to the Quality Improvement projects for 2025-26, which were agreed earlier this year and already underway: 

As per the Cabinet Secretary’s correspondence, the 5.8% ringfenced uplift to GMS contract is intended to “provide practices with the certainty needed to invest in the necessary resources to enable GPs to play a fundamental role in the transformation programme.”.  

This refers to the ‘Community by Design’ transformation work being led by the Chief Medical Officer, with GPC Wales as a key partner. The ongoing Directed Collaborative Services discussions, which were part of the 2024/25 agreement, in theory will provide the practice-led structures for the resourced ‘Shift Left’ of services. 

The funding will be recurrent to GMS from April 2026 and is estimated at around £30m, based on 5.8% of the total GMS contract value. The exact uplift figure will be calculated based on the GMS allocation at end March 2026 

It has been clarified that this investment is additional and unrelated to any pay and expenses award in 2026-27, which would follow the consideration by the Welsh Government (pre- or post-2026 Senedd elections) of the DDRB’s recommendations.