Today the Human Tissue Authority (HTA) published license fee levels for the 2025/26 business year. The new fees can be found here
The fees for 2025/26 reflect the increased pressures faced by HTA of continuing higher levels of inflation, as well as the second year of impact following a change in funding policy with our sponsor department.
The Department now requires the HTA to raise a higher proportion of income from fees (our funding from DHSC is due to reduce by around a half in 2025/26 from the 2024/25 level). In order to recover the forecast cost of regulation in 2025/26, we will need to increase fees on average between 6 and 15%.
In recent years we have adapted the way we regulate and the tools we use in order to keep any fee rises to a minimum. This focus on efficiency and effectiveness has meant that our fee increases in the three years prior to 2024/25 have been significantly below inflation, but we are no longer able to absorb cost increases without it impacting on the quality of the work that we do.
The fees are set to recover the actual cost of regulation within each sector. This is reflected in the different fee levels and structures for each sector we license and ensures there is no cross-subsidisation between sectors.
A light-touch review of fees took place in the Autumn of 2024 and that has resulted in some changes (detailed below).
Changes to this year’s fees
For 2025/26 financial year:
- Licence fees are set to recover the cost of regulation and whilst every effort has been made to streamline where possible, our costs have risen due to ongoing inflation as well as an increase in employer’s National Insurance Contributions. This, plus the reduction in Grant-In-Aid, has resulted in a need to increase the total fees recovered by the HTA from regulated sectors by 13.2%.
- Within the Human Application sector, we have introduced a reduced main licence and satellite fee for those establishments within the EU and Northern Ireland who import human tissue. This reduced fee reflects the regulatory effort in licensing these establishments.
If you have any questions regarding HTA fees, please email finance@hta.gov.uk