There is no single product called a medical practice loan. What you can borrow, and who will lend it, is decided by three things: how your practice is owned, what the money is for, and who pays your invoices. We lend to UK limited companies, so this page is written for an incorporated practice or clinic.

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An incorporated practice can hold an NHS contract

If your practice is a limited company, NHS work is not off the table. The contract rules allow for it, and that shapes everything a lender sees.

Under the NHS (General Medical Services Contracts) Regulations 2015, NHS England can hold a GMS contract with a company limited by shares, as long as at least one share is both legally and beneficially owned by a general practitioner.

That matters more for funding than it sounds. It means one incorporated practice can carry NHS contract income, reimbursed premises costs, insurer billings, and private self-pay work on the same set of books, and a lender will read each of those income streams very differently when it works out what you can afford to repay.

The pressure that sends practices looking for funding shows up plainly in the numbers. BMA analysis of NHS England data counted 63.1 million patients registered with GP practices in England in August 2026, up about 12% – some 6.2 million people – since 2015. Over the same period 1,480 practices closed or merged, leaving 6,143. More patients across fewer practices means more rooms, more staff, more equipment, and more working capital to carry it all.

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What practices actually borrow for

Four things, most of the time, and they need different money.

Premises is the biggest one: buying the freehold, taking a lease, or fitting out a space you already have. Buying a practice or buying into one is the next, and it behaves unlike any other purchase in business lending. Equipment is its own market – if what you need is a scanner, a dental chair, or an imaging suite, funding the equipment itself is almost always cheaper than borrowing cash for it, because the lender can take security over the machine. And working capital covers the rest: payroll between claim cycles, a locum you didn't budget for, a tax bill that lands before the insurer pays.

You'll see longer lists than that, usually padded with marketing, utilities, and insurance. Those are real costs, but they come out of trading rather than out of a loan, and no lender sizes a facility around them.

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Buying a practice, or buying into one

This is where sector knowledge earns its money, because the thing you are buying may not legally exist.

In most industries, buying a business means buying its goodwill – the value of its customers, reputation, and future earnings – and lenders will advance against it. A private clinic, a dental practice, or an aesthetics business can sell goodwill freely, and acquisition lending in those deals looks much like buying a business in any other sector.

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Selling the goodwill of an NHS practice is unlawful

Under section 259 of the National Health Service Act 2006 it is unlawful to sell the goodwill of the medical practice of someone who provides NHS primary medical services. The section catches any part of that goodwill, and any part of the practice.

So buying into an NHS practice isn't funded the way a dental or aesthetics acquisition is. There's no patient list to lend against, and a lender has to size the facility on tangible things instead: the share of the premises you're buying, the equipment, and the share capital behind them. That's why the same broker can quote a dentist and a GP wildly different structures for deals that look identical from outside, and why 'goodwill loans' advertised without that caveat are worth a question.

There's a timing point to build into any practice purchase, too. CQC registration cannot be transferred from one legal entity to another: the incoming entity has to register in its own right, the outgoing registration is cancelled, and the CQC assesses both applications together. That sits in the middle of the deal, so plan the funding around it rather than finding out late.

Either way, the structure question comes before the lender question. Acquisition finance for a deal of that size usually means a term loan over several years, secured on what's actually being transferred. That isn't what we do, and a practice purchase is not a job for a working capital facility.

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Premises and fit-out: check the grant before the loan

If you hold an NHS contract, do this before you talk to any lender. It may save you the loan entirely.

NHS England's 2024 Premises Costs Directions changed the numbers substantially. Premises improvement grants used to cover between 33% and 66% of a project; commissioners can now fund up to 100% of project value, subject to a business case and local prioritisation. Grants can also now pay for land needed for an extension, and for tenant fit-out works in a new build. That last one matters, because fit-out is exactly the spend practices tend to borrow for.

The trade is a guaranteed period of use, which rises with the size of the grant:

If you do borrow for premises, there's a second NHS route people miss. Under the same Directions, NHS England can reimburse your borrowing costs as an alternative to notional rent. Two conditions are worth knowing before you shake hands with a lender: you have to tender for the loan from at least three regulated lenders to show value for money, and the interest reimbursed is the lower of a prescribed percentage NHS England publishes and the interest you actually pay. NHS England sets that percentage itself now, rather than tracking a gilt rate or Bank Rate as the earlier Directions did – so check the published figure rather than assuming it follows the market.

For a freehold purchase outside that scheme, you're looking at a commercial mortgage, secured on the building and running far longer than anything else on this page. We don't lend against property, so that one isn't us either.

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Who pays you decides what you can afford to repay

A practice's income can arrive from three directions at three different speeds, and lenders read them differently. NHS contract payments and reimbursed premises costs are contractual and predictable. Private medical insurer billings are reliable but slow, and they arrive on the insurer's cycle, not yours. Self-pay income is immediate and the least predictable of the three.

The gap between treating a patient and being paid for it is the cash flow problem this sector actually has. If you're waiting on an invoice, a Flexi-Loan can cover the gap, and you can clear it with no early repayment fee once your customer pays.

On a practice, that gap is unusually easy to see coming. You know when you billed, you know roughly when the insurer or the commissioner settles, and you know when payroll runs. It bites hardest in two places: a practice whose billings concentrate on one insurer, where a single change to a fee schedule or a claims backlog moves all the money at once, and a practice carrying salaried clinical staff between claim cycles, where the payroll is large, fixed, and monthly.

If your receivables are mostly insurer invoices, it's worth comparing a loan with a facility that advances against those invoices instead, which is priced against the debt rather than against your trading.

Flexi-Loan in action: VCare24

When local authorities took 30 to 60 days to pay and around 200 staff needed paying every month, founder Victoria Simpson drew about £200,000 against the gap and repaid it within a week as the payments came in.

Read Victoria's story

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What a lender will ask your practice for

The standard pack, plus three things only this sector gets asked.

Expect to hand over your filed company accounts, recent management accounts, and six months of business bank statements. Beyond that, a lender assessing a clinic will want your clinical registrations and the registered manager in place, your CQC registration and where you stand with it, and a split of your income between contract, insurer, and self-pay – which is the number that drives the affordability decision, not your headline turnover. If you're applying for NHS borrowing-cost reimbursement, you'll also need those three lender quotes.

Two things are worth doing before you apply rather than after. Check what a lender will see when they look you up: Credit Compass is free and shows your Equifax business credit score plus four more, the factors behind them, and areas to work on. And get your income split on one page, because if you can't produce it quickly, the lender will build it themselves from your bank statements, slowly.

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Where an iwoca Flexi-Loan fits

We fund the working capital end of a practice: payroll between claim cycles, a fit-out, a tax bill, a locum, a piece of equipment you need next week rather than next quarter.

Three things about how it works change what you can do with it. You have 30 days to draw down after approval, so the money can be agreed before a fit-out starts and taken the week you need it. You don't have to take the full amount approved, and you're charged interest on what you draw rather than on the limit. And because repaying early is free, it can be open for the three weeks between paying your staff and being paid by an insurer, rather than for a year.

It isn't the answer to everything on this page, and the honest version of that is short. Premises purchase is a commercial mortgage. A scanner is cheaper on asset finance, secured against the scanner. A practice acquisition needs a term structure and security we don't offer. We're the right call when the problem is timing rather than the size of the asset.

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What it costs and what you're signing up to

Our Flexi-Loan is a business loan with flexible repayment options of £1,000 to £1m. You choose a fixed term of between 12 months and five years, so you know the repayment schedule from the outset. Because there's no fee for repaying early, you can clear it as soon as the cash arrives – many of our customers only take out our finance for a few weeks, or even days.

Your rate depends on your practice's circumstances, and the business loan calculator shows what you'd repay. Every new Flexi-Loan needs a personal guarantee from at least one director, though not every director has to sign, and we lend to UK limited companies.

A decision is made within 24 hours, but it might be longer depending on the complexity of the request. A quick decision isn't a light one: we look at your revenue and what your business can afford to repay before we make an offer, and our credit team reviews larger or more complex applications.

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