Podiatrists Have Five HCPC Annotations. Most Hold Two.

Chiropodists and podiatrists have more HCPC annotations available to them than any other regulated profession. Five of them. One is unique to the profession, one is shared with only one other, and together they mean a podiatrist can inject local anaesthetic, supply named prescription-only medicines, perform foot surgery and — with further training — prescribe independently.

That breadth is the most commercially useful thing about the profession's development pathway, and it is poorly explained almost everywhere.

Both titles are protected

The HCPC lists the profession as "chiropodists / podiatrists" with both words protected, covering one profession and one part of the register. There is no regulatory distinction between the two titles.

As at 1 October 2026 there were 11,524 chiropodists and podiatrists on the register. Updated standards of proficiency took effect on 1 September 2023, with fifteen standards; one of them requires registrants to be able to administer relevant prescription-only medicines and to interpret a pharmacological history, and pharmacology sits explicitly in the knowledge base.

In Ireland, CORU's Podiatrists Registration Board opened its register on 31 March 2021, and the titles podiatrist and chiropodist became protected on 31 March 2023. Our guide to CORU CPD for podiatrists and chiropodists covers the Irish requirements, which run on a different basis entirely.

The five annotations

An annotation is a marker on the register recording that you have completed approved training for a specific additional entitlement. The HCPC lists five available to this profession:

• Independent prescribing — prescribing on your own judgement, within your scope of practice and applicable law. Shared with physiotherapists, paramedics and therapeutic radiographers.
• Supplementary prescribing — prescribing under a clinical management plan agreed with a doctor and the patient, limited to the medicines in that plan. Shared with several professions.
• Podiatric surgery — surgical management of the bones, joints and soft tissues of the foot and related structures. Unique to this profession.
• Prescription only medicines, administration — qualified to administer certain prescription-only medicines by injection, including a range of local anaesthetics, without a prescription. Unique to this profession.
• Prescription only medicines, sale and supply — qualified to sell or supply certain prescription-only medicines as part of practice. Shared only with orthoptists.

Where the administration and supply entitlements come from

Both sit in Schedule 17 of the Human Medicines Regulations 2012.

The administration entitlement exempts annotated registrants from the restriction on administering prescription-only medicines, for parenteral administration of a named list of local anaesthetics and related products. Two conditions apply: administration must be in the course of professional practice, and the practitioner must not have combined the substances themselves.

The sale and supply entitlement works in two tiers. All registered chiropodists and podiatrists may sell or supply general sales list medicines for external use plus a set of named pharmacy medicines for external use. Annotated registrants may additionally sell or supply a longer named list including several oral antibiotics, analgesics and antifungals. Conditions: the sale or supply must be in the course of professional practice, and the product must have been made up for sale or supply in a container elsewhere than the place of sale or supply.

We are deliberately not reproducing the full medicines lists here. The administration list we were able to verify was a point-in-time version of the regulation rather than the current consolidated text, and a named medicines list is exactly the sort of thing that must be read at source on the day you rely on it. Read Schedule 17 Parts 3 and 4 directly.

Independent prescribing, and one figure we are not going to give you

Independent prescribing for podiatrists was created by an amendment to the Human Medicines Regulations in 2013, which made a podiatrist independent prescriber an appropriate practitioner for prescription-only medicines, excluding controlled drugs other than a short named list.

How short that list is, we are not going to state. The 2013 instrument as made names two controlled drugs. The Royal College of Podiatry says four. A later amending instrument surfaced in our research that may have changed the position, and we did not read it. Two sources disagreeing by a factor of two is a reason to tell you to check the current consolidated regulation, not to pick one.

What is solid: a prescribing annotation requires training the HCPC has approved, and you may not practise as a prescriber until the completed training appears as an annotation on the register. The HCPC's standards for prescribing cover this profession for supplementary prescribing, or supplementary and independent prescribing together. Since September 2019 the HCPC has used the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's Competency Framework for All Prescribers as its prescribing standards, with the updated 2022 framework expected to be built into programmes.

One thing not to believe: there is no regulatory minimum number of years of post-registration experience to enter a prescribing course. The HCPC's standards for prescribing set only "appropriate academic and professional entry standards." Individual universities set their own entry requirements, and everything we found stating a years-of-experience rule was training-provider material rather than regulation.

How many actually hold these annotations

This is where the commercial opportunity shows up.

An HCPC freedom of information response in January 2018 gave the then position: 10,227 holders of the administration annotation, 5,623 of sale and supply, 339 of supplementary prescribing and 273 of independent prescribing.

More recently, the Nuffield Trust reported that as at November 2025, 7 per cent of chiropodists and podiatrists held the independent prescribing annotation — against 4 per cent of physiotherapists, 5 per cent of therapeutic radiographers, 7 per cent of paramedics and around a third of pharmacists. Nurses account for 69 per cent of all independent prescribers, and there are nearly 100,000 independent prescribers UK-wide, almost a quarter of the prescribing workforce.

So the administration and sale-and-supply annotations are close to standard — all new graduates from approved programmes receive both, because the training sits in pre-registration education and the required skills are in the standards of proficiency. Independent prescribing is held by roughly one podiatrist in fourteen. That gap is the development opportunity, and education providers can also run standalone programmes to upskill already-registered practitioners who do not hold the medicines annotations.

CPD: the HCPC asks for no hours at all

The most likely error anyone can make on this topic is conflating the HCPC's requirements with the Royal College of Podiatry's. They are different in kind.

The HCPC operates five CPD standards and an audit. No hours, no points, no cycle total. At each renewal it randomly selects 2.5 per cent of each profession to submit a CPD profile; in the 2022 audit, 287 chiropodists and podiatrists were asked. Only those registered two years or more are selected. The profile comprises a summary of practice of up to 500 words, a dated list of activities with gaps of three or more months explained, a personal statement of at most 1,500 words, and supporting evidence for the activities discussed. Our guide to preparing for an HCPC CPD audit covers the profile in detail.

The Royal College of Podiatry, separately and as a condition of its own membership, sets a minimum of 30 hours of CPD a year including a mix of clinical and self-directed learning, and specifies mandatory refreshers: basic life support annually, local anaesthetic and medicines every two years if annotated, independent prescribing every two years if annotated, and ultrasound every two years. Those are membership requirements. They are not HCPC requirements, and the HCPC will not ask you for an hours total.

Both matter if you are a member. Only one of them can remove you from the register.

Renewal and fees

Chiropodists and podiatrists share a renewal window with hearing aid dispensers: it opens 1 May 2028 with a deadline of 31 July 2028. The current fee is 123.34 pounds a year, or 246.68 pounds for the two-year cycle, with new UK graduates of approved courses paying half for their first two professional years. A consultation that closed in July 2026 proposed a rise to 128.40 pounds phased from April 2027, with no outcome published at the time of writing.

Qualification route

Registration requires an HCPC-approved podiatry degree. Full-time programmes typically run three years and include clinical placements.

The degree apprenticeship route is ST0493, podiatrist (degree). Version 1.3 — Level 6, 48 months excluding end-point assessment, maximum funding 24,000 pounds, with a BSc (Honours) in Podiatry as the integrated mandatory qualification or a pre-registration MSc where the apprentice already holds a Level 6 degree — is retired, with a latest start date of 24 March 2026. Version 2.0 is the live version, with an earliest start of 25 March 2026. Its published parameters did not render when we checked, so confirm the current level, duration and funding band with your provider rather than citing the retired page. A live HCPC-approved integrated degree apprenticeship exists, with a first intake in September 2025.

Pay and the workforce picture

NHS Agenda for Change rates for England, effective 1 April 2026, run Band 5 from 32,073 pounds to 39,043 pounds, Band 6 from 39,959 pounds to 48,117 pounds, and Band 7 from 49,387 pounds to 56,515 pounds.

We are not going to tell you which band a podiatrist sits in, because no official source maps the profession to a band. What is published is that NHS Employers, in its guide to the profession in May 2023, cited HCPC figures of 11,977 registered podiatrists in 2023 — 800 fewer than in 2019 — with less than half working in the NHS. It reported declining new entrants, rising attrition, an ageing workforce and recruitment difficulty particularly at band 5, alongside expanding scope into first contact practitioner and advanced practitioner roles and specialisms in diabetes, wound care, rheumatology, musculoskeletal practice and podiatric surgery.

A shrinking register, a large private sector and five available annotations is an unusual combination. It means the scarcity is in the advanced end of the profession rather than the entry point — which is exactly where the annotations sit.

What to do with this

If you hold the medicines annotations and nothing else, the independent prescribing route is the single biggest expansion of your scope available, and 93 per cent of the profession has not taken it. The constraint is approved training and an employer willing to support it, not a regulatory waiting period.

If you are registered but do not hold the administration and sale-and-supply annotations — which applies to anyone who qualified before they became standard in pre-registration education — standalone approved programmes exist specifically to close that gap.

And whatever you hold, keep the HCPC's five standards and your College's 30 hours in separate files. They are evidence for different audiences, and the audit does not want a tally.