Property billing FAQ

Your Annual Budget Schedule provides a detailed breakdown of your estimated charges for the full financial year. Your bill contains only the total amount due for a specific billing period (month or quarter).

Your Annual Budget Schedule will normally be sent in advance of your first bill of a new financial year. You should keep your Annual Budget Schedule handy throughout the year as a helpful reference when you receive your bills.

This may be as a result of a change to your occupancy or amendments that have been made to the budget figures since you received your Annual Budget Schedule.

So that we can consider your specific circumstances, please get in touch with our Customer Service Centre.

Our financial year runs from April to March so you’ll receive your first bill of the financial year for Q1 in April.

If you need a purchase order to be shown on your bill to enable payment, please share the details of the purchase order with us before the financial year starts.

For the rest of the year, bills will be sent in the first month of each quarter. This means that Q2 bills will be sent in July, Q3 bills will be sent in October and Q4 bills will be sent in January, unless otherwise stated in your occupancy documents.

If you haven't received your bill, it's likely that we need purchase order details for 2023/24​ charges. Please get in touch with our Customer Service Centre and they'll be happy to help.

Help us keep your property data correct by letting us know of any changes. Occupiers with a formal occupancy agreement must refer to the terms of their agreement when considering any occupancy changes.

Occupiers without a formal occupancy agreement must inform us of any planned changes to occupancy, at least three months in advance, by completing an Occupancy Change Notice and ensuring that you also inform your Clinical Commissioning Group.

Once the form has been completed and submitted, a member of NHS Property Services will contact you to discuss your occupancy requirements.

If you do not have an occupancy agreement and would like more information about the types of occupancy agreement available, please contact customer.service@property.nhs.uk

Subject to meeting defined criteria, clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) may be eligible to surrender surplus space to NHS Property Services through the Vacant Space Handback policy.

There are a number of reasons why this could happen. Common reasons include changes to your occupancy of a property, budget changes or changes to the types of service provided to the property. You can find information about the estimated charges for 2022/23 and 2023/24 here.

If you still have questions about your specific bill, please contact our Customer Service Centre.

Help us keep your property data correct by letting us know of any changes. Occupiers with a formal occupancy agreement must refer to the terms of their agreement when considering any occupancy changes.

Occupiers without a formal occupancy agreement must inform us of any planned changes to occupancy, at least three months in advance, by completing an Occupancy Change Notice and ensuring that you also inform your Clinical Commissioning Group.

Once the form has been completed and submitted, a member of NHS Property Services will contact you to discuss your occupancy requirements.

If you do not have an occupancy agreement and would like more information about the types of occupancy agreement available, please contact customer.service@property.nhs.uk

You can pay your bill by BACS or cheque made payable to NHS Property Services Ltd. All the payment details can be found on your bill.

If you receive a communication (either by email or phone) that asks you to send payment to details that differ from the payment details on your bill, please contact your property manager immediately. You should call our Customer Service team directly on a phone number you know to be genuine before sending any money.

When you send a payment to us, you must provide a remittance to let us know which invoice the payment has been made against. This means that we can allocate the payments against the correct invoice.

If you do not send us a remittance, then the payment will be treated as a payment on account.

You should send all remittances to remittances@property.nhs.uk 

We request that remittances must be sent over in the below formats:

• PDF
• Excel

It is important to send remittances in a copyable format so that we can allocate remittances in an accurate and timely manner.

In addition, please ensure you include your customer reference (C0000000) in your remittance. 

If you have unapplied payments on your account, please forward a remittance to remittances@property.nhs.uk as a matter of urgency so that we can reflect the true position on your account and ensure accurate statements can be issued.

Payment is due 30 days from when you received the invoice, unless you have an agreed lease that states otherwise.

If you need to update your billing contact details, please get in touch with our Customer Service Centre.

You might be able to find the answer to your query on our website, where we have useful information about Annual Budget Schedules, property bills and rent, and other charges.

If you still need to get in touch with us, please contact our Customer Service Centre.

If you'd like to make a complaint, please contact our Customer Service Centre.

Your complaint will be handled by a case manager who will always look to address your concern quickly and keep you updated about progress.

You may occupy a property that is not owned by NHSPS, instead NHSPS may hold a lease for the property. In addition to NHSPS paying a rent for the property to the superior landlord, there may also be other costs incurred such as service charge and insurance. In such circumstances NHSPS will pass these costs down to you as occupier of the property. NHSPS will apportion the costs based on the space you occupy. This charge only includes the cost of the services provided directly by the superior landlord, other services provided by NHSPS will be charged separately.

Additional sums refer to the insurance and utilities costs related to the exclusive space that you occupy. These are recovered via the service charge but would not normally be included as individual service charge categories on your bill for service charges and facilities management charges.

The estimated costs relating to the management and delivery of services to a customer within their exclusive space, distinct from shared areas.

The estimated costs relating to the common areas and shared areas of a single property/site.

Planned preventative maintenance is work we do to prevent your building falling into disrepair, helping to avoid the need for urgent, and usually more expensive reactive works to get things back up and running.

An example of this could be servicing the lift in the building or refurbishing the toilets.

Operating in this way helps to protect you against sudden and unexpected costs throughout the year and helps with cashflow planning.

If at the end of the year the upkeep of your building hasn’t cost as much as we had budgeted for, we will refund any underspend to you. On the other hand, if it costs more than expected, we’ll charge you the increase.

We always try and set our reactive and planned budgets as accurately as possible, taking into account the work we have planned, and costs from previous years.

Rent, business rates, water and clinical waste collection.

As a GP, you can be reimbursed for rent, business rates, water and clinical waste collection charges.

The reimbursables section in your Annual Budget Schedule (ABS) provides an overview of the total amount your practice may be eligible to claim from your commissioner under each reimbursable charge type (rent, business rates, water and clinical waste services).

Please fill in your reimbursable claim form using the figures included in the reimbursables section of your ABS and return it to your commissioner for processing, depending on your funding route, along with your ABS from NHS Property Services.

If sending the claim by email, the email subject line should be formatted as follows: Practice - Practice Code - Commissioner Name - Type of Claim (i.e. Premises Reimbursement).

Filling out your reimbursable claim form should take less than ten minutes.

Yes, if you are a dispensing practice you can claim reimbursement from your local Commissioner.

Business rates are set by the Valuation Office Agency and collected by your local authority. It is a local property tax on the occupation of commercial property, payable by private and public sector businesses alike.

Market rent is the level of rent for a property, determined by an independent professional valuer or the Valuation Office Agency, applying market recognised valuation standards and approach. It is based on a comparison with similar properties in the same area, market conditions, and takes into account the condition of the specific property. Service charges for shared areas, and facilities management  charges for areas exclusively used by the occupier are calculated and charged separately.

We moved to charge market rent in April 2016 to provide our occupiers with a clear picture of the true cost of occupation. This in turn leads to better decisions about cost efficiency and strategic planning.

The costs outlined in the Annual Budget Schedule are forecasts for the year ahead. At the end of the year, NHSPS will reconcile the costs billed to a customer throughout the year with the actual cost of facilities or services provided to a property and either bill the customer for the difference or add a credit note to the customer’s account. This process is known as annual reconciliation, an industry standard practice that enables the calculation of any balancing charges required and provides cost transparency.