Medicare and MRI

An MRI scanner is not automatically a Medicare-rebatable MRI scanner. Whether a rebate is possible depends on the practice, not on you — and the two are easy to confuse.

The Australian Government publishes a list of Medicare-eligible MRI locations (last updated 17 February 2026). If a practice is on that list, a Medicare rebate is possible for MRI scans done there. If it is not, the machine may still be fully accredited and perfectly good, but a scan there may attract no rebate at all — so ask what it will cost you before you book.

Of the 602 MRI-accredited practices in our corpus, 411 are on that list and 191 are not. Roughly one MRI practice in three is in the second group, and no clinic advertises which group it is in. Every clinic page on scanfinder says which.

What changed on 1 July 2025. Until then, eligibility attached to individual machines, and a practice could have one fully eligible scanner and another that was partial or ineligible. From 1 July 2025 the licences became practice-based, and all partial and ineligible MRI units at practices that already held a licence became fully Medicare-eligible. That is why we publish a single yes/no per practice: the old three-way split no longer exists.

What may change on 1 July 2027. Subject to legislation, the Commonwealth licensing requirement is due to be removed entirely, at which point existing and new MRI units would all become fully Medicare-eligible. If that happens, the distinction this page describes disappears — we will say so here on the day it does, rather than quietly leaving stale wording up.

Two things do not change: an MRI always needs a referral, and who wrote the referral matters. GPs can request a limited set of MRI items; specialists can request more. Your doctor decides which scan you need — we only tell you where the machines are.