Most prescribed medicines in England, by month
The 500 most-dispensed chemical substances in English primary care each month, with items and cost.
In the current release
Coverage
Latest data month
About this dataset
Monthly counts of NHS prescription items dispensed in English primary care for the 500 most-prescribed chemical substances, with the net ingredient cost of each, derived from the NHSBSA Prescription Cost Analysis. One row per substance per month, ranked within the month. Updated monthly.
How it is derived
Prescription Cost Analysis records are aggregated from BNF presentation level up to chemical substance level, summing items and net ingredient cost across every presentation and every dispensing contractor in England. Substances are then ranked by items within each month and the top 500 kept. Ranking is by volume, not cost, so a cheap high-volume medicine outranks an expensive rare one.
What this data cannot tell you
- 1 Items count prescriptions dispensed, not patients, packs or days of treatment. A patient on a repeat prescription contributes one item per dispensing.
- 2 Net ingredient cost is the list price of the drug before discounts, clawback and dispensing fees. It is not what the NHS finally paid.
- 3 Primary care only: medicines issued by hospitals do not appear here. For those, see the hospital medicines dataset.
- 4 Personally administered items and some appliances are recorded differently and can distort comparisons between chapters.
NHS prescription items dispensed in England, by month
All primary-care prescribing, from the NHSBSA Prescription Cost Analysis.
Source: NHSBSA English Prescribing Dataset OGL v3.0
Use this chart on your site
Free to reuse anywhere, including commercially — on your own site, in a report or in an article. Keep the credit link with it and you are done.
A live chart that updates itself when next month's data lands. The credit line is part of the snippet.
An SVG with the title and credit built in. Vector, so it stays sharp at any size in a slide deck or a print layout, and it opens in Illustrator, Figma, Inkscape or any browser.
Paste this beneath the chart if you are using the image rather than the embed.
Chart licensed under CC BY 4.0 — attribution link to PharmaInsight required. Underlying data © NHSBSA, Open Government Licence v3.0.
Preview
The first 20 rows of 33,000.
| month | rank | bnf_chemical_substance_code | bnf_chemical_substance | items | net_ingredient_cost_gbp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-01 | 1 | 0212000B0 | Atorvastatin | 4174018 | 7260633.47 |
| 2021-01 | 2 | 0103050P0 | Omeprazole | 2888531 | 7718655.36 |
| 2021-01 | 3 | 0602010V0 | Levothyroxine sodium | 2728719 | 5986649.63 |
| 2021-01 | 4 | 0206020A0 | Amlodipine | 2642100 | 3497650.27 |
| 2021-01 | 5 | 0103050L0 | Lansoprazole | 2503504 | 4254858.92 |
| 2021-01 | 6 | 0205051R0 | Ramipril | 2452386 | 3739399.9 |
| 2021-01 | 7 | 0204000H0 | Bisoprolol fumarate | 2126957 | 2439835.41 |
| 2021-01 | 8 | 0906040G0 | Colecalciferol | 2050357 | 7771094.35 |
| 2021-01 | 9 | 0601022B0 | Metformin hydrochloride | 1891128 | 9675032.89 |
| 2021-01 | 10 | 0209000A0 | Aspirin | 1735984 | 2042153.04 |
| 2021-01 | 11 | 0301011R0 | Salbutamol | 1728377 | 4465812.61 |
| 2021-01 | 12 | 0403030Q0 | Sertraline hydrochloride | 1620265 | 12639289.4 |
| 2021-01 | 13 | 0212000Y0 | Simvastatin | 1533473 | 2203269.19 |
| 2021-01 | 14 | 0407010H0 | Paracetamol | 1369977 | 6607897.65 |
| 2021-01 | 15 | 0407010F0 | Co-codamol (Codeine phosphate/paracetamol) | 1231418 | 7517287.75 |
| 2021-01 | 16 | 0403010B0 | Amitriptyline hydrochloride | 1219610 | 2601843.31 |
| 2021-01 | 17 | 0403030D0 | Citalopram hydrobromide | 1177855 | 1680282.86 |
| 2021-01 | 18 | 0302000C0 | Beclometasone dipropionate | 1039204 | 24125075.7 |
| 2021-01 | 19 | 0403040X0 | Mirtazapine | 910085 | 2380030.9 |
| 2021-01 | 20 | 0202020L0 | Furosemide | 905912 | 1061047.94 |
Licence and attribution
The underlying figures are NHS open data published by the NHS Business Services Authority under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
The derived dataset on this page — the aggregation, the columns and the rates — is free to reuse, including commercially. We ask that you credit PharmaInsight with a link when you do, which is what lets other people find their way back to the method and the caveats.
How to cite
Citing a figure in something durable? Use the pinned 2026-06 snapshot rather than the latest file — it will not change when next month's data lands.
Download
-
most-prescribed-medicines-england-latest.csv
33,000 rows · 1.8 MB · always current
-
most-prescribed-medicines-england-2026-06.csv
Pinned snapshot of the June 2026 release — use this in citations
At a glance
- Source NHSBSA Prescription Cost Analysis
- Coverage January 2021 to June 2026
- Latest data June 2026
- Updates Monthly
- Format CSV, UTF-8
- Licence OGL v3.0
- Geography England
Columns
- month
- rank
- bnf_chemical_substance_code
- bnf_chemical_substance
- items
- net_ingredient_cost_gbp
Where we use this data
Refresh
Monthly, within a few days of the NHSBSA publication. Last published 25 August 2026.
More open data
Browse the full dataset catalogue, the sources we import from, and our methodology.