GP bulk-billing rates have rebounded following incentives introduced by the federal government in November, analysis by the online health directory Cleanbill shows.

The national analysis, published on Monday, found the proportion of fully bulk-billing clinics almost doubled to 40.2% by the end of 2025, from 20.7% the year before.

The Albanese government implemented an additional 12.5% payment on Medicare benefits for practices that bulk bill all eligible patients for all eligible services. Previously, only children under 16 and commonwealth concession card holders were eligible for most incentives.

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Between 1 November and mid-December 2025 Cleanbill called 6,877 clinics and found 1,007 had switched from private or mixed billing to full bulk billing since the start of 2025.

However, there were disparities depending on location.

In the ACT, 96% of GP clinics said they were taking new patients, which was a criterion for including them in the survey, but only about 12 of the 101 that responded reported they were fully bulk billing. In Western Australia, 95% of clinics reported to Cleanbill they were taking new patients but about 130 (19.8%) of the 657 clinics contacted said they fully bulk billed.

According to the report, 51.9% of the 2,342 clinics contacted in NSW fully bulk billed, and 43.6% of the 1,793 clinics contacted in Victoria.

The data shows a rise of 13.5% over the year in out-of-pocket costs for patients who are not bulk billed.

The average total cost of a standard GP consultation now exceeds $100 in the ACT and Tasmania, leaving patients out of pocket an average of $58 and $61 respectively.

The federal health minister, Mark Butler, said “specific data contained in the Cleanbill analysis cannot be relied upon and should not be reported as accurate”.

“On clinic numbers, they failed, for example, to include clinics that did not answer their questions,” he said.

The Cleanbill report says clinics that could not be reached or declined to provide information are identified in its database but were excluded from pricing and availability calculations if costs could not be independently verified.

Butler said the government’s own data showed that since November more than 3,200 practices were now fully bulk billing.

“Almost 1,200 of these were previously mixed billing practices,” he said.

Butler also noted other measures to expanding access to care through additional Medicare urgent care clinics and the establishment of 1800Medicare, a free, nationwide 24/7 health advice line.

The health program director at the Grattan Institute, Peter Breadon, said the bulk-billing rebound was not surprising given the new incentives, but said the changes had failed to address deeper structural problems in general practice.

It meant access to care still differed by location, and the most vulnerable patients were often missing out, he said.

“This doesn’t really deal with the supply and distribution of care,” Breadon said. “We need a different way of funding general practice that targets GP deserts and better supports clinics dealing with more disadvantaged and low-income patients.”

He said a key concern was that the expanded incentive applied to all patients, rather than prioritising those with the greatest need.

“It used to be that the bulk-billing incentive was tied to looking after concession card holders or children. That was one of the only mainstream parts of the GP funding system that explicitly prioritised disadvantaged patients,” Breadon said.

“We’ve taken that away, while countries like New Zealand are moving in the opposite direction, tying funding to disadvantage, complexity and rurality.”

Greater bulk-billing incentives are offered to rural areas in Australia, but Breadon said the changes marked a step backwards in aligning funding with need.

Breadon said Cleanbill’s data was based on what clinics said when called at a specific point, and that more comprehensive Medicare data from the health department over time would provide a more accurate picture.

But he said successive independent reviews had consistently recommended a more fundamental shift in GP funding, including voluntary models that provided clinics with flexible patient budgets that increased for seeing sicker and poorer patients.

“Funding should follow need,” he said. “If anything, the recent changes move us away from that.”