GP Wait Times and Bulk Billing in Australia: What the Numbers Show

The national bulk billing rate has climbed sharply since the incentive was tripled — 77.6% in the September 2025 quarter, 81.9% by March 2026, per government Medicare statistics reported by Medical Republic. At the same time, 26% of people still say they waited longer than they felt was acceptable for a GP appointment, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Billing is being subsidised faster than capacity is being added, and a practice can’t fix that gap — but it can stop losing patients to whichever clinic picks up the phone first.

The wait for a GP hasn’t shortened much

The ABS Patient Experiences survey, covering the 2024-25 financial year and released in November 2025, found that 26.0% of Australians aged 15 and over reported waiting longer than they felt was acceptable to get a GP appointment — down only marginally from 28.0% the year before. Two out of three people (67.2%) could always see their preferred GP when they wanted to, which means one in three couldn’t. For care that felt urgent, only 41.6% were seen within four hours; nearly half, 47.0%, waited 24 hours or more.

Those averages hide real variation. People in outer regional or remote areas reported the longest waits, at 33.6%, well above the national figure. Women reported longer waits than men (29.4% versus a lower male rate), and people aged 35–44 were the age group most likely to say the wait felt too long, at 30.6%. None of this is a one-off blip tied to a bad flu season — it is the same pattern the RACGP’s own Health of the Nation 2025 report describes from the practice side of the desk, where the average standard consultation now costs $82, up from $78 the year before, and 8.8% of people say they delayed or avoided GP care because of cost — up from 7% in 2022–23, and highest among adults aged 15–34 (10.5% to 15.4%, depending on the age band).

A one-in-three chance of not getting your usual GP, and roughly the same odds of a wait that feels too long, adds up to a system where a patient’s first call rarely resolves cleanly into “see you Thursday.” More often it becomes a second call, a different day suggested, or a message left that has to be chased. For a practice managing that volume with a front desk built for a smaller, calmer caseload, the daily arithmetic gets harder even when nothing about the clinical work has changed.

Bulk billing is rising on the government’s ledger, faster than patients are feeling it

Here is where two real, official numbers describe two different things, and reading only one of them gives a misleadingly rosy picture. Since the bulk billing incentive was expanded, the national GP bulk billing rate — the share of GP consultation items billed with no out-of-pocket cost, drawn from Medicare claims data — has risen quickly: 77.6% in the September 2025 quarter, 81.4% for November 2025 to January 2026 (a 3.8 percentage point jump the Health Minister called the largest quarterly increase in two decades outside the pandemic), and 81.9% by the March 2026 quarter, per the same government statistics covered by Medical Republic.

That is a real, welcome shift — in the November 2025–January 2026 quarter, regional (MM3) areas moved further than metro, reaching 83.9% against 79.0% for MM1 metro areas. But it is a rate of billing items, not a rate of patients. The RACGP’s own patient-facing figure, from the same 2025 report, is that 56% of patients say they are bulk billed for all of their care — a number that has stayed flat while the claims-based rate climbed. Only 12% of GPs bulk bill every patient they see. And it says nothing at all about the 26% of people from the ABS survey who are still waiting longer than they think is reasonable to get in the door in the first place. A practice can be bulk billing more of its consultations than it did a year ago and still be turning new patients away, or leaving them on hold, because billing policy and appointment capacity are two different constraints.

A shrinking GP workforce means less slack to absorb demand

The reason bulk billing and wait times can move in opposite directions is workforce, not policy. Australia had 40,375 GPs in the primary care workforce in 2024, equivalent to 29,976 full-time-equivalent GPs, according to the RACGP. A third of GPs — 33% — say they plan to stop practising within five years, and 63% are considering cutting their hours even sooner. That is not evenly distributed across the country either: in the most remote classification (MM6), there are only 68 FTE GPs per 100,000 people, against 130 per 100,000 in inner regional areas (MM3) — nearly double the density.

None of that capacity gap closes because a bulk billing incentive made a consultation cheaper for the patient. If anything, a cheaper consultation on paper can pull more demand toward a workforce that is not growing to match it, which is exactly the tension the numbers above show: billing access up, GPs per person flat or falling, wait times barely moved. A practice in a low-density area — the 68-per-100,000 end of that range — is already running near capacity most weeks; a modest bump in demand from lower out-of-pocket costs shows up immediately as a fuller book and a busier phone line, not as a queue that quietly absorbs it.

When appointments are scarce, the phone becomes the rationing mechanism

This is the part none of the official statistics measure directly, but it follows from everything above. When a third of the population can’t always see their preferred GP, and a third of people say a recent wait felt too long, the deciding factor for a meaningful number of patients stops being who is the better clinician and starts being who answers first. A patient who calls their usual practice, gets no answer, and calls a competing clinic down the road because that one picks up — that patient is now a lost booking, a lost recall, and quite possibly a lost patient relationship for good.

No single practice can fix the national GP shortage or rewrite the Medicare Benefits Schedule. What a practice can control is whether every incoming call and message actually gets answered — at 8am when the phones open and everyone rings at once, at lunchtime when reception is down to one person, and after hours when the practice is closed but the patient’s question isn’t waiting for business hours. In a market where 26% of people already feel they’re waiting too long, a call that rings out is not a neutral event. It’s a patient deciding, in that moment, whether to try again later or try somewhere else.

That decision doesn’t only cost a single booking. A patient who switches practices because nobody picked up also takes their repeat scripts, their chronic-disease reviews and their family’s bookings with them — the recurring, lower-effort revenue a practice actually depends on, not just the one visit that triggered the call. And it compounds the exact numbers cited above: fewer patients able to always see their preferred GP, more of the population effectively shopping around for whoever answers, and less continuity of care for the people who most need it.

What your practice can actually control this week

This is the gap Arbol is built to close. Arbol answers every call, WhatsApp message and SMS to your practice, 24 hours a day, in a natural conversation — not a phone tree. It books, reschedules and confirms appointments directly on the systems your practice already uses, so nothing changes on the clinical or admin side except that the phone stops ringing out. Because it runs on your existing scheduling setup rather than requiring a new one, a practice can typically be live within seven days of starting.

1. 1
   Pull last week's call log

   Count how many calls came in before opening, after closing, at lunchtime, or during the 8am rush — and how many of those went unanswered or to voicemail.

2. 2
   Work out what that volume is actually costing you

   Every unanswered call in a market this tight is a real chance the patient calls a different practice next, not just a callback you'll get to later.

3. 3
   Put a 24/7 answering layer on the phone line and WhatsApp

   Every call and message gets a response immediately, at any hour, without adding a shift to the reception roster.

4. 4
   Let it book, confirm and reschedule against your real calendar

   Routine requests get handled the moment they arrive instead of queuing for the morning; anything genuinely urgent is flagged for a person straight away.

5. 5
   Go live without replacing what you already run

   Arbol connects to your existing booking system, so the change is on the front line — how fast a patient gets an answer — not a rebuild of your back office.

The bulk billing incentive is doing real work on cost, and the numbers above show it. What it isn’t doing, and isn’t designed to do, is add capacity or guarantee that a patient trying to reach your practice actually gets through. That part is still decided call by call, message by message — and it’s the one lever a practice controls entirely on its own. If you run a practice in Australia and want to see how this works against your own systems, Arbol’s Australia page has the detail.