Clinic Pricing Page: 1 of 25 Answers All Six Questions

A clinic pricing page has one job. It tells a new patient what the first visit costs and how long it runs. It says what Medicare or their fund pays back, when they pay, what a late cancellation costs, and whether the fees are current. I checked 58 Australian clinic websites in September 2026. 25 had a fees page. Only 1 of those 25 answered all six questions.

What does a patient need from a clinic fees page?

A fees page is where a patient checks they can afford you. Most people land on it with the same six questions.

1. What will my first appointment cost? Not a range for every service. The one they are about to book.
2. How long is it? A price means little without the time it buys.
3. What will I pay after Medicare or my fund? The number they care about is the gap, not the fee.
4. When do I pay? On the day, upfront, or after the session.
5. What does cancelling late cost? People want to know the penalty before they commit.
6. Are these fees current? A date tells them the page is still true.

None of this is exotic. A good receptionist answers all six in one phone call. The fees page is that phone call, written down for the person who would rather not ring.

So I went looking for it on real clinic websites.

How many clinic websites have a fees page at all?

Fewer than half of them do.

I used the same 58 Australian clinic websites from my earlier measurements. They cover physio, dental, GP, psychology and cosmetic clinics, found through neutral city searches. On each one I looked for a page whose menu label or web address says fees, pricing, prices, costs, billing or rates.

25 of the 58 sites had a working fees page. 22 of those were linked from the homepage. The other 3 only turned up in the site's own sitemap.

Some of the misses were worse than an absence.

• 2 sites listed a fees page in their sitemap that no longer works. One returned a "page not found" error. The other sent me back to the homepage.
• 1 fees page had no fees on it. It carried a date, "Effective 1 April 2026", then one line: "Our fee schedule is being updated."
• 1 dental site had a run of cost articles for single treatments, but no page for the practice's own fees.

That does not mean the other 33 clinics hide their prices. My earlier read of this same group found a fee in dollars on 45 of them. The prices were in FAQs, service pages and homepages. There was just no single page a patient could go to and find them.

What did the 25 fees pages actually answer?

Here is how the 25 fees pages did on the six questions. I read every page by hand, and each "yes" is backed by a line I saved from that page.

The first question is the one clinics get right. 22 of 25 pages gave a price for the first appointment. That is the good news.

After that, the answers fall away fast. The typical page answered 3 of the 6. Only 1 page answered all six, a GP clinic. It showed the upfront fee, the Medicare rebate and the gap, by appointment length. It said when you pay, what a no-show costs, and the date the fees took effect.

Even that page hedged. At the bottom it said: "All fees are subject to change without notice and are not guaranteed." More on that below.

Why do so many pages leave out the gap?

Because the gap is the one number the clinic has to work out.

19 of the 25 pages mentioned Medicare or a health fund rebate. Only 9 of those 19 put a dollar figure on what the patient is left paying. The rest listed the fee, and sometimes the rebate, and left the sum to the reader.

The pages that did it well were all GP and psychology clinics. The clearest ones used three columns: the fee, the Medicare rebate, and the out-of-pocket cost. One psychology page wrote it as a plain sentence: "Typical out-of-pocket costs after rebates are: $90 to $120 per session".

Physio and dental are harder, and it is fair to say so. Private health funds pay different amounts on different policies. A clinic cannot print one gap that is true for everyone.

But it can still answer the question. One physio page told patients to "swipe your health fund card at reception and pay only the gap on the day." That tells a patient how the money moves, even without a number. Another told patients to ask their fund what they would get back. Most of the other physio and dental pages left the patient to work out the gap alone.

This matters more for some clinics than others. My dental marketing post covers why cost stops more dental patients than GP patients. If price is your patients' main worry, the gap is the line to get right.

Is the Medicare rebate on your fees page out of date?

On 3 of the pages I checked, yes.

Medicare rebates change every year, usually on 1 July. A fees page that quotes a rebate is making a promise that goes stale unless someone updates it.

So I checked every rebate I could against the source. MBS Online lists each item with its fee and its benefit, "Schedule Fee Updated: 01-Jul-2026". I checked seven items. Those were the four common GP consultation levels, the two psychology session items and the physio item used under a GP chronic condition management plan.

11 of the 25 pages quoted a rebate for one of those items. 3 of the 11 quoted a figure that no longer matches MBS Online.

The gaps are small, a few dollars. But a patient who is told $96.65 and gets $101.55 back will wonder what else on the page is out of date.

One page showed the opposite problem. Its rebates were current. But the heading above them said "Applicable From 1st July 2024". The numbers had been updated and the date had not.

Only 6 of the 25 pages dated their fees at all. A date is cheap. It tells a patient the page is maintained, and it reminds you when to check it.

Does "fees are a guide only" protect you?

Not much, and it can cost you trust.

7 of the 25 pages said their fees were a guide, might vary, or could change. Some examples:

• "The fees below are a general guide."
• "Fees vary depending on your oral health, the complexity of treatment required and the options discussed during your consultation."
• "All fees are subject to change without notice and are not guaranteed."

Some variation is real. A dental treatment plan depends on what the dentist finds. A GP's long consult depends on how long it runs. Saying so is honest.

The problem is a hedge that stands in for an answer. Ahpra's advertising guidelines never ban publishing a price. But they list advertising that "contains price information that is unclear, inexact or vague" as advertising that may breach the National Law.

So the useful version and the safer version are the same thing. Say what the fee depends on, then give the numbers for the common cases. "Fees vary" on its own tells a patient nothing. "A 30-minute review is $X and a 60-minute appointment is $Y" tells them almost everything.

Two more lines from the same guidelines apply to fees pages. If you offer a payment plan, do not state "an instalment amount without stating the total cost". And if you offer a free first visit, remember that the guidelines say an offer is not actually free when its cost is recouped "through a price rise elsewhere".

Which kinds of clinic answer best?

Psychology and GP clinics, by a clear margin. They are the ones Medicare forces to explain rebates.

Read the order as a signal, not a league table. Some groups are small. Only 2 dental sites had a fees page to score.

Two patterns stand out. Physio pages were good at price and length, since 6 of the 7 gave both. They were weak on everything else. Cosmetic pages listed treatment prices, often as "from" figures. 2 of the 3 never said what the first consultation costs, and the third offered it free.

One more thing surprised me. One physio page listed its fees as bare numbers, with no dollar sign. Another page loaded its prices by script, so they were not in the page a search engine first receives. A person sees a price on both. Software reading the page may not. My post on what patients ask AI explains why that matters when a chatbot answers the cost question for you.

What should the page say instead?

Here are the patterns from the measurement, each with a line you could publish instead. The words in square brackets are yours to fill in. Every rebate figure is from MBS Online, as at 1 July 2026.

Notice what the rewrites do not do. They do not promise a patient will pay nothing. They do not claim everyone gets the rebate. Each one names the condition that decides the price.

If your fees page sits on an NDIS site, the rules are different again. The NDIS pricing pages guide covers them.

How did I measure this, and what can it not tell you?

The method is short enough to repeat.

The frame is the group of clinic websites I first read on 21 September 2026, from neutral searches such as "physio Sydney" and "dentist Perth". No cost words went into any search. On 24 September I fetched each homepage again. I also read each site's sitemap.

While doing this I found that one site in the original group was a clinic in the United Kingdom. Its prices were in pounds. I removed it, which is why this post says 58 and not 59. One more homepage would not load on the day. I checked its sitemap instead, and it listed no fees page.

For each site I took the fees page a patient would reach first. That is the one linked from the homepage, or failing that the one in the sitemap. A cost article about a single treatment did not count. I then read the page and answered the six questions by hand. Each "yes" is backed by a quoted line from the saved page, and a script checks every quote is really there.

Method. 58 Australian clinic websites (11 physio, 10 dental, 16 GP, 11 psychology, 10 cosmetic), fetched 24 September 2026. 25 working fees pages, each read by hand. Medicare rebates checked against seven MBS Online item pages, schedule fees updated 1 July 2026. Ahpra's advertising guidelines were read in full through the Internet Archive, because ahpra.gov.au blocks automated reading. No clinic is named.

Now the limits.

• A "no" means I did not find the answer on the fees page. The clinic may answer it on another page.
• I read the page as it was sent by the server. Prices loaded later by script, or shown in images, are not counted.
• Out-of-pocket was only asked of the 19 pages that mention a rebate. A page with no rebate to explain was not marked down for it.
• The group sizes by clinic type are small. Treat the type table as a signal.
• I only checked rebates for seven common items. Other figures on these pages were not checked.
• This is general information about how clinics present fees. It is not legal advice about your practice.

What should you check on your own fees page this week?

Open your fees page on your phone and answer the six questions as a new patient would.

1. Find the first appointment. Is its price on the page, with the minutes beside it?
2. Find the gap. If you mention Medicare or a fund, is there a dollar figure for what the patient pays?
3. Check every rebate against MBS Online. Search the item number. The page shows the date the fee was last updated.
4. Add when payment is taken, and the late cancellation fee as an amount.
5. Put a date at the top. Then set a reminder for the first week of July.

That is about an hour of work. It turns a page most clinics leave half done into the most useful page on the site.

If you want every page on your site read the same way, that is what the All Clear Audit does. It quotes every flagged line, names the rule, and writes the replacement. If you would rather talk it through first, book a call. For the full rulebook, start with the AHPRA advertising guidelines explained. The page patients read right after your fees page is usually your About page.

Prefer the short version? The findings are in an eight-slide web story.

Related reading:

• The questions patients ask AI before they ask a clinic
• Dental practice marketing: the barrier is price
• NDIS pricing pages: what to say and what gets flagged
• What a clinic About page needs
• What patients Google before they book
• AHPRA advertising guidelines, explained for clinics
• View all services →