Pakistan Medical Association Calls Nationwide Hospital Strike for September 30 Over FBR Tax Rules

The Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) announced on September 26, 2026 that it will hold a nationwide strike on September 30, shutting private hospitals and clinics across the country in protest against Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) policies the association says are treating medical care as retail commerce.

What the FBR changed

At the center of the dispute is the FBR's move to reclassify healthcare services as retail sales and require private hospitals to install Point of Sale (POS) systems — the same electronic sales-tracking registers used in shops and restaurants. PMA Secretary General Dr Abdul Ghafoor Shoro said the medical community "strongly rejects the FBR's arbitrary reclassification of healthcare services as retail sales and the forced imposition of Point of Sale systems on private hospitals." The association argues that treating a hospital bill like a retail transaction misreads what private healthcare providers actually do, and has said enforcement has come with heavy fines and raids on hospital premises.

The scale of what's at stake

Private hospitals provide more than 70 percent of healthcare services in Pakistan, according to the PMA, and the association says those facilities already pay regular income tax on top of whatever additional burden the POS requirement adds. The strike call covers hospitals and clinics nationwide, with the PMA saying private healthcare providers across the country would join the closure on September 30. That would make it one of the broadest disruptions to private medical care the country has seen this year, arriving in the same week Punjab's MDCAT results exposed a separate strain on the health and education pipeline — 37,708 students qualified for MBBS seats that public colleges cannot come close to accommodating.

What the PMA is demanding

The association's list of demands is specific: withdraw the POS requirement, eliminate the fines already levied against hospitals, stop the raids on hospital premises, and recognize medical professionals as providing an essential public service rather than running retail outlets. PMA Punjab president Dr Kamran Saeed Sheikh went further, appealing directly to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to take personal notice of the dispute, warning that further pressure from the FBR would compound what he described as the country's already dire healthcare situation.

Where this sits in the broader tax push

The clash fits a pattern this year of the FBR extending its enforcement reach into sectors that have not traditionally been treated as points of sale, a push that has generated friction well beyond hospitals — the FBR's new registration and withholding rules for social media influencers, introduced in the same broader compliance drive, drew similar objections over how a professional activity gets classified for tax purposes. For a revenue authority under IMF-monitored pressure to widen the tax net, healthcare and other previously under-scrutinized sectors are an obvious target; for providers on the receiving end, the complaint is the same each time — that a blanket retail classification ignores how the underlying service actually works.

What happens next

Neither the FBR nor the federal government had publicly responded to the PMA's demands as of this writing, and it remains unclear whether the September 30 strike will proceed as planned or be resolved through talks beforehand. With a single-day national shutdown of private facilities affecting the majority of the country's hospital capacity, the practical question for patients is how emergency and ongoing care will be handled on the day itself — something neither the PMA's statement nor the FBR has yet addressed in detail.

Build Better Pakistan's Health Desk is tracking the dispute and will update this piece as September 30 approaches.