What scans cost in Australia

We do not publish prices, and we would rather say that plainly than guess. No Australian source publishes reliable per-scan prices per clinic, and on a health site a plausible-looking wrong number is worse than no number.

What we can tell you is the shape of the thing. A Medicare rebate for a scan exists only if the scan is a listed MBS item, the referral asks for it correctly, and — for MRI — the practice is on the Government's Medicare-eligible MRI list. If a practice bulk bills, it accepts the rebate as full payment and you pay nothing for that item. If it does not, you pay the difference between the fee it sets and the rebate.

That is why the same scan can cost quite different amounts at two clinics on the same street, and why a clinic bulk-billing your ultrasound tells you nothing about what its MRI will cost.

Where healthdirect records that a provider bulk-bills, we show it, attributed and hedged, because that is a provider self-report in a government directory rather than a promise. We do not show the other billing values — 'mixed billing' describes almost every private radiology practice in the country and answers nothing. And we never read absence as evidence: most practices have no billing record at all, which is not the same as charging a fee.

For actual dollar figures on a specific MBS item, the Australian Government's Medical Costs Finder publishes what people typically pay, and the practice itself will quote you when you book. Ask for the item number on your referral — it is the only way to get a quote that means anything.