What's actually changing
Wales has had Minimum Unit Pricing (MUP) for alcohol since March 2020, under the Public Health (Minimum Price for Alcohol) (Wales) Act 2018. The rate has sat at 50p per unit since it was introduced — until now. The original legislation carried a sunset clause, due to lapse after six years unless Welsh Ministers acted. In February 2026 the Senedd voted not just to continue the policy, but to raise it: from 1 October 2026, the minimum price for a unit of alcohol in Wales rises to 65p.
MUP doesn't set the price of a drink directly. It sets a floor — the lowest price a unit of alcohol in that product is legally allowed to be sold for, calculated from the drink's strength and size. A can, bottle or double can still be priced however a venue likes above that floor. What it can't do, whatever the offer, is drop below it.
The maths, worked through
The formula is simple: volume in litres × ABV percentage = units. Multiply that by the current MUP rate and you have the legal floor price for that specific product. Here's what the change from 50p to 65p actually looks like on real drinks:
| Drink | Units | Floor at 50p | Floor at 65p |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500ml can, 5% ABV lager | 2.5 | £1.25 | £1.63 |
| 750ml bottle, 13% ABV wine | 9.75 | £4.88 | £6.34 |
| 700ml bottle, 40% ABV spirit | 28 | £14.00 | £18.20 |
That bottle of spirits carries a legal floor price that's £4.20 higher than it was the day before — not because anyone chose to raise it, but because the law now requires it. Every one of those figures should be rounded up to the nearest penny where the calculation lands on a fraction, since rounding down would put the price below the legal minimum.
Scotland was the first part of the UK to introduce MUP, back in 2018. Its rate has already gone through exactly this jump — from 50p to 65p per unit — after a Scottish Parliament vote in April 2024, with the higher rate taking effect that September. Wales isn't in unfamiliar territory here; it's following a path Scottish venues have already been operating under for two years. If you want the fuller regulatory picture for either country, see our pages on EPOS for Wales and EPOS for Scotland.
The part that actually trips venues up
Getting a single product's floor price right is straightforward enough with a calculator. Where MUP compliance actually goes wrong is everywhere the arithmetic isn't a single, obvious sum.
Multi-buy deals are the classic trap. A "2-for-1" or "3 for £10" offer can look perfectly reasonable at a glance while quietly averaging out below the legal floor per unit once you do the maths — and it's the averaged price that matters, not the headline offer. The same risk applies to happy hour pricing, loyalty discounts, and any promotion that's built around a round number rather than a per-unit calculation.
Rate-change day is the other obvious pinch point. On 1 October, every alcoholic product on a Welsh menu needs its floor price recalculated simultaneously. A venue repricing manually — updating a spreadsheet, then the till, then the printed menus, then the digital ones — is running a real risk that something gets missed in the gap, even briefly. And for multi-site operators trading in Wales and also in England, where there's no MUP at all, a single blanket price change across every site isn't even the right answer — it needs to apply per location, not per business.
What a compliant till actually needs to do
None of this is complicated in principle. It's tedious and error-prone if it's being done by hand, which is exactly the kind of problem EPOS software should be quietly solving in the background rather than leaving to a manager with a calculator on launch morning. In practice, that means:
- Calculating the floor price automatically from each product's ABV and volume, not from a value someone typed in once and forgot about
- Checking promotions and multi-buys against the effective per-unit price before they're allowed to run, not after a complaint
- Updating every product's floor the moment the legal rate changes, with no manual repricing exercise required on the day
- Keeping a timestamped record on receipts and Z-reports that the correct price was actually applied at the point of sale
- Applying the rule only where it's legally required, so a multi-site operator trading across Wales, Scotland and England isn't stuck choosing between one rigid rule everywhere or none at all
This is exactly what HDS Cloud Apps builds into the platform rather than treating as an afterthought — every alcoholic product's legal floor is calculated automatically, promotions are checked before they go live, and the rate updates itself the instant the law changes. We've written up the full mechanics, including how it handles multi-site operators and what the audit trail actually looks like, on our dedicated EPOS for Wales and EPOS for Scotland pages.
What to check before 1 October
Whatever system you're running, the run-up to the rate change is worth a genuine audit rather than an assumption that it'll be fine. Pull a list of every alcoholic product you sell and confirm its ABV and volume are recorded accurately — a wrong ABV on file produces a wrong floor price no matter how good the rest of the system is. Check every multi-buy, bundle and happy-hour rule against the new 65p rate specifically, not just the headline price. And confirm, in writing if you can, whether your current EPOS provider is actually going to make this change for you automatically at midnight on 30 September, or whether "the system will handle it" turns out to mean someone on your team needs to log in and do it manually.
The venues that sail through this rate change won't be the ones who worked hardest on the day — they'll be the ones whose till already had this covered weeks before anyone else started thinking about it.