What the 8CPA Means for Your Pharmacy

Most coverage of the Community Pharmacy Agreement is written as a political story: who negotiated, who complained, who claimed the win. That framing is not much use if you own the pharmacy. For you it is an operating document. It sets a large share of the revenue line for five years, and it has been in force since the middle of 2024.

Key facts: the 8CPA runs from 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2029 and carries $26.5 billion. Most of it, $22.5 billion, is dispensing. The parts that change how you actually operate are much smaller line items, particularly the expanded funding for Dose Administration Aids and the new supply support payment. Knowing which is which tells you where to put your effort.

What the 8CPA actually is

The Eighth Community Pharmacy Agreement is the deal between the Australian Government and the community pharmacy sector. It covers how pharmacies are paid to dispense PBS medicines and to deliver funded professional programs.

It commenced on 1 July 2024 and will remain in effect until 30 June 2029. That matters more than it sounds. Very few small businesses know their principal revenue framework four years out. You do.

The headline is $26.5 billion in funding over five years, described as a funding boost of $3 billion on the previous agreement.

Where the money actually goes

The total is the number that gets reported. The breakdown is the number that tells you something useful.

Component	Amount	What it covers
Dispensing PBS prescriptions	$22.5 billion	Core dispensing remuneration, the bulk of the agreement
Additional Community Supply Support Payment	$2.1 billion	New payment from 1 July 2024, replacing the Regional Pharmacy Transition Allowance
Other services and programs	$1.05 billion	Includes Dose Administration Aids, MedsChecks, Staged Supply, and an increased Regional Pharmacy Maintenance Allowance
PBS co-payment freeze	$484.4 million	A one-year freeze on the maximum co-payment, and up to five years for concession cardholders
Expanded DAA services	$196.7 million	To increase the number of patients who can receive funded Dose Administration Aid services
New and improved programs	$103.3 million	Program development across the life of the agreement

Read that table as a set of instructions about where growth is available. Dispensing volume is largely set by your catchment and your prescribers. The service lines are the ones you can actually decide to grow.

The three changes worth understanding

The supply support payment. From 1 July 2024 the Government established the Additional Community Supply Support Payment, which replaces the Regional Pharmacy Transition Allowance. It is framed as giving pharmacists more confidence to keep supplying cheaper medicines under 60-day prescribing, without increasing patient fees.

The co-payment freeze. $484.4 million covers a one-year freeze on the maximum PBS co-payment for everyone with a Medicare card. Pensioners and other Commonwealth concession cardholders get up to a five-year freeze. That is patient-facing relief with the cost carried centrally, not a margin change you have to absorb.

The DAA expansion. $196.7 million goes to increasing the number of patients who can receive funded DAA services. If you pack blisters, this is the line item that touches your week. We looked hard at whether that funding covers the work in are dose administration aids worth it. The honest answer was that the program fee alone rarely does.

What the agreement does not do

It is worth being clear about the limits, because the headline number invites the wrong conclusion.

The 8CPA sets what you are paid. It does nothing about what it costs you to earn it. Wages, rent, energy and the labour hours behind every funded service sit entirely on your side of the ledger. A funded service that takes more staff time than the fee covers is still a loss.

It also does not create demand. Funded programs pay for services delivered, so the binding constraint is usually capacity rather than eligibility. Most owners are not short of patients who qualify. They are short of the hours to enrol and service them.

Three things worth doing with this

Audit which funded programs you are actually claiming. Plenty of pharmacies deliver services they never claim for, or sit well under the cap without realising it. Check your own claim history against the current caps.

Cost each service properly before growing it. Take the fee, subtract the real staff minutes at your actual wage rate, and look at what is left. Grow the ones that clear, and be deliberate about the ones you keep for relationship reasons.

Protect the capacity you already have. Every funded service competes for the same staff hours as dispensing and the counter. Recovering interrupted time is usually cheaper than adding headcount, which is the argument we set out in reducing phone interruptions.

Where Krepko fits

We build Emily, an AI voice agent for Australian pharmacies. She answers routine calls using your pharmacy’s own data and hands anything clinical or complex to a pharmacist.

The link to a funding agreement is not obvious, so here it is plainly. The 8CPA pays for services your staff have to find time to deliver. In our 30 day audit of one Australian pharmacy, 74.9 percent of inbound calls went unanswered, and 99.1 percent of those calls arrived during opening hours. Time spent chasing the phone is time not spent on the services this agreement funds.

We are also building an inventory platform for pharmacies that will track stock by batch, expiry and shelf. It is in development rather than released, and the aim is the same: take administrative load off the people who should be doing the funded work. You can see how Emily works today at krepko.com.au.