How much does a private GP cost in the UK?
Most price comparisons of private GPs are useless because they put two different products in the same table. One sells you an appointment. The other sells you a year of managed health. Once you separate them, the numbers stop looking random.
The transactional market
This is what most people picture. You have a problem, you book, you pay, you leave. A phone or video consultation usually costs £80 to £120. An in-person clinic appointment runs closer to £100 to £150. A home visit costs more, usually £150 to £250, because it takes a doctor out of a clinic for an hour.
Some practices wrap this in a low monthly membership, often £50 to £80, which covers a set number of appointments and faster access. What you are buying, in every case, is availability. A doctor, sooner than the NHS can offer one. It solves a real problem, and for a one-off illness it is decent value.
What it does not do is watch you. The doctor you see may not be the one you saw last time, and nobody is holding the thread of your health between visits, because nobody is being paid to.
The managed market
The second market prices by the year, because it sells continuity rather than access. You start with a full assessment. Everything gets measured, examined, and written up into a strategy. Then the practice books your reviews, reads your results against your last set rather than against a reference range, and contacts you when something moves.
In my own practice, the comprehensive assessment is £950 for an individual and £1,450 for a family, and it is credited in full against membership if you join within 90 days. Proactive membership is £245 a month for an individual and £395 for a family. Managed membership, which adds quarterly reviews, continuous monitoring, and interval bloods, is £595 and £795. Paid annually, those work out at £2,450 and £3,950, or £5,950 and £7,950.
Those are not appointment prices with a zero added. They buy a different thing.
Why the annual number looks high and often isn't
Set the two side by side. Eight private appointments a year at £120 comes to £960, and at the end of it nobody has examined you properly, nobody has a baseline, and nobody knows whether your blood pressure has been climbing for three years. You have bought eight solutions to eight separate problems.
The annual fee buys the assessment, the reviews, the interpretation, and the person who notices. The value sits in what gets caught early, which is exactly the thing you cannot see on an invoice. That is uncomfortable, because it means you are paying for something that has not gone wrong yet. It is also the entire point.
What sits on top of the headline price
Laboratory fees, imaging, consultant fees, vaccine stock, and drug costs are all charged separately. Ask any practice whether they pass those through at cost or add a margin. In my practice they pass through at cost, evidenced on request, because I am paid for clinical judgment rather than for marking up other people's invoices. In a typical assessment, laboratory fees come to £120 to £280 depending on the panel.
Private prescriptions are charged at the full price of the medicine, rather than the NHS flat charge. For a short course of antibiotics the gap is small. For something you will take for twenty years, work it out before you start.
What to ask before you pay anyone
Ask whether you see the same doctor every time. Ask who books your reviews, you or them, because a practice that waits for you to call has sold you access rather than management. Ask what happens to a result that is normal today but heading the wrong way. Ask what is excluded, in writing, and be suspicious of any practice that cannot answer that in one page.
Then ask yourself which problem you are actually solving. If you want a doctor when you are ill, the transactional market is the right market and the cheaper one. If you want somebody to hold your health across a decade, an appointment price will never buy that, at any number of appointments.