This time last year, the health minister was dragging Cleanbill’s methodology. Now, he says its findings stack up.
Health Minister Mark Butler has all but confirmed the broad findings of GP fee aggregator Cleanbill’s latest report, which indicates that the number of bulk billing clinics nationwide has doubled over the past 12 months.
While the official Medicare statistics showing the immediate impact of the November bulk billing investments likely won’t be available for another few months, Mr Butler confirmed on Tuesday that new practices were signing up to be universal bulk billers “pretty much every single day”.
“I frankly am very pleased that since our record investment took effect on 1 November, more than 1200 GP practices across the country who were charging gap fees before 1 November are now bulk billing all of their patients all of the time,” he told media.
“Already we’ve delivered millions of additional free GP visits.”
The 1200 practices figure gels with answers given in senate estimates prior to the launch of the new bulk billing PIP; as of early October, roughly 900 practices had expressed interest, with that number increasing to over 1000 later in the month.
Cleanbill’s 2026 Blue Report, released on Monday, also tracks with Mr Butler’s statement.
It estimated that the proportion of universally bulk billing GP clinics increased from one in five in 2025 to two in five in 2026, marking the largest proportion of universal bulk billers since Cleanbill began its surveillance in 2023.
While Cleanbill recorded increases in the proportion of universal bulk billers across all states and territories, the jurisdiction with the largest jump was the Northern Territory, where universal bulk billing clinics went from making up 9% of clinics in 2025 to 57% in 2026.
“On the bulk billing side, we’re now seeing a complete reversal of the trends we’ve observed over the last 3 years,” the report reads.
“The percentage of fully bulk billing clinics has almost doubled to over 40% nationally, with this rate surpassing 50% in New South Wales and the Northern Territory.
“Tasmania, which had no available bulk billing GP clinics in January 2025, now has 37. And 1,007 clinics nationwide have switched from private/mixed billing to fully bulk billing since the start of last year.”
It is worth taking Cleanbill’s data with a grain of salt.
Related
In terms of methodology, Cleanbill sources its data by manually ringing GP clinics and asking a receptionist whether a new patient who is not eligible for any concessions could book a standard, bulk billed consult during regular business hours.
It calculates the proportion of bulk billing clinics based on the number of clinics which are accepting new patients.
As Mr Butler put it in 2025, “this ring around effectively asks general practices, whoever happens to pick up the phone, whether they have a policy of bulk billing every single person, every single time that person walks in the front door, whether it’s an age pensioner or whether it’s Gina Rinehart or James Packer”; it misses swathes of clinics that are either not taking on new patients or are mixed billing.
This makes it near impossible to estimate Australia’s true bulk billing rate from Cleanbill data alone; it will nearly always be an underestimate.
Cleanbill also calculates the average out-of-pocket cost of a standard GP appointment using similar methodology.
Between 2025 and 2026, it estimates that the average out-of-pocket cost has risen from $43.38 to $49.23, or 13.5%.
The information that this figure alone can tell us is limited. One possible scenario is that clinics are, generally, putting their fees up.
Another scenario is that a large proportion of the mixed billing clinics which were charging smaller out-of-pocket fees made the switch to universal bulk billing, skewing the mean upward.
The wait for further clarity will take some months.
Official Medicare data is released in quarterly batches by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.
The next batch to be released will cover 1 October 2025 to 31 December 2025. Because the new bulk billing incentives began in the middle of that quarter, it is likely to give an incomplete picture of the investment’s impact.
