Almost every community pharmacy delivers, and almost none of them know what it costs. Delivery is not funded by the NHS in England, so every drop comes out of the margin on the items delivered — and the true cost is spread across wages, fuel, vehicle, failed drops and the owner's time, none of which appears on one line. This guide puts the pieces together so you can see the number, and then decide what to do about it.
The components
Driver time
Hours per round multiplied by the hourly cost (wage plus employer's National Insurance and pension for an employee; the invoiced rate for a self-employed driver). Include the time in the pharmacy loading, sorting and returning bags, not just the driving.
Vehicle
Fuel per mile, plus a share of insurance, maintenance, tax and depreciation if it is a pharmacy vehicle, or a mileage allowance if it is the driver's own. HMRC's approved mileage rate (45p a mile for the first 10,000 miles at the time of writing) is a reasonable all-in proxy for a private car.
Failed deliveries
A failed drop costs a second visit and usually a phone call. If one drop in fifteen fails, you are running a round and a half for every round's worth of deliveries.
Pharmacy time
Someone preparing the delivery list, answering "where is my prescription", handling returns of failed drops, and managing the driver. This is the cost nobody counts, and for a busy round it is often an hour a day of a dispenser's time.
Packaging and consumables
Bags, insulated carriers, delivery sheets, ice packs.
Working it out
Take a typical week:
- Drops per day and days per week
- Round duration in hours, including loading and return
- Miles per round
- Driver hourly cost
- Failed-drop rate
- Pharmacy admin hours per week
Multiply up, add a small consumables figure, and divide by drops to get a cost per drop; multiply by 52 for the annual figure. The delivery cost calculator does this with your numbers and shows what a 10% improvement in routing efficiency is worth. For many pharmacies the annual figure is a surprise: a single-driver round of 20–30 drops a day commonly costs well into five figures a year once everything is counted.
Cost per drop vs margin per drop
Set the cost per drop against what the items in the bag earn. For a patient on several regular medicines, the dispensing income on a monthly delivery comfortably exceeds a few pounds of delivery cost, and keeping that patient's nomination is worth far more than the round (the nomination calculator puts a number on it). For a single low-value item delivered to a patient who could collect, the drop loses money. That is the argument for a delivery policy — who, where, when — rather than delivering everything to everyone.
Where the cost can be cut
- Batch by area and day. Fewer, denser rounds. The single biggest saving for most pharmacies.
- Optimise the sequence. Route planning typically takes 10–25% off miles and time on a scattered round.
- Reduce failed drops. Delivery instructions saved once, an "on its way" message, and a photo of where it was left.
- Stop the phone calls. "Delivered" messages remove most of the pharmacy admin time.
- Charge outside the radius, or don't go. A stated policy is easier to hold than an unstated one.
When software pays back
Delivery software costs £30–£60 a month for a branch. At ten drops a day, a 15% saving in miles and time plus a couple of avoided failed drops a week covers it comfortably; at thirty drops a day it is not close. What the software should do, and how to choose it, is in what to look for in pharmacy delivery software; the setup of the service itself is in setting up a pharmacy delivery service. Routly is PharmGrowth's product for this, at £49.95 a month flat.