Independent off-licences and wine merchants are bracing for another rise in alcohol duty, with the Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA) warning the Chancellor ahead of the 26 November Budget that a further increase would do more harm than good. It is the second such warning in a year: duty on wine and spirits already rose by 3.66% in February 2026, in line with the Retail Prices Index, and early indications are that the Treasury is weighing a similar RPI-linked rise of around 2.9% for next year.
Why duty keeps climbing
Since the 2023 reform that moved alcohol taxation onto a strength-based system, duty on wine and spirits has been uprated almost every year in line with inflation. The logic from the Treasury’s side is straightforward: RPI has stayed high, and alcohol duty is treated as one of the levers that moves automatically with it unless a Chancellor chooses to freeze it. For a wine merchant or off-licence, though, each uprating lands as a real cost on every case of wine or crate of spirits bought in, on top of whatever suppliers are already charging for shipping, glass and energy.
Receipts are falling anyway
What makes this round of lobbying different is the WSTA’s own figures on where the last few years of increases have actually got the Treasury. Alcohol duty receipts for the financial year ending April 2026 fell 1.4% to £12.4 billion, with wine and spirits duty down £94 million and beer duty down £68 million, even after rates went up. Spirits volumes have fallen 15.3% over the three financial years since 2022/23, wine volumes are down 8%, and fortified wine is down more than 22%. The WSTA’s argument to the Chancellor is that each increase has pushed shoppers to buy less rather than raised the money the Treasury expected, so a further rise in November would likely repeat the pattern rather than reverse it.
What it could add to a bottle
The WSTA has put real numbers on what a 2.9% RPI-linked rise would mean at the till: roughly 10p more on a bottle of Prosecco, 11p on a bottle of still red wine, and 31p on a bottle of gin. None of those figures sound dramatic in isolation, but they stack on top of February’s 3.66% increase and several years of rises before it — and for a specialist shop competing on range and service rather than volume discounting, every extra penny of duty is a penny that either comes off the margin or goes on the shelf price.
The squeeze on independent shops
Around 900 independent wine merchants trade across the UK, alongside thousands of local off-licences, and they are the businesses least able to absorb repeated duty rises quietly. A supermarket can smooth a few pence of extra duty across a huge range; a single-shop wine merchant in somewhere like Westminster or an independent off-licence in Chapel Allerton is pricing case by case, often holding stock that took months to import. These are also exactly the kind of shops that tend to know their customers, hold tastings, and recommend something a supermarket shelf never would — reasons enough to back the local merchant over the big multiple when duty is pushing prices up everywhere regardless.
What happens next
Nothing is confirmed until the Chancellor stands up on 26 November. Trade bodies lobbying against a rise is a near-annual ritual, and RPI-linked increases have gone ahead in most recent years regardless. For now, the honest position for anyone running or using an off-licence or wine merchant is to expect another small rise rather than a freeze, and to watch the Budget itself for the confirmed figure rather than the pre-Budget estimate.
