The Medicare Assignment of Benefit rules from 1 July 2026

The short version

• From 1 July 2026, bulk-billing a Medicare service means capturing the patient's agreement to assign their benefit as a record you can keep.
• There is no approved or prescribed form. Any clear, accurate record of the assignment is enough.
• Only the patient, the assignor, agrees and signs. The practitioner does not sign the assignment.
• You can capture the agreement before the service (pre-service) or after it (post-service).
• Verbal assignment is accepted during a transition period that ends on 30 June 2027.
• Keep the record. Medicare records are generally retained for two years.

What is an Assignment of Benefit?

When you bulk-bill, your patient assigns their Medicare benefit to you, so Medicare pays you directly and the patient has nothing to pay for that service. That transfer of the benefit is the Assignment of Benefit (AOB). It has always needed the patient's agreement. What changes from 1 July 2026 is how that agreement has to be captured and kept.

What changes on 1 July 2026

From 1 July 2026, when you bulk-bill a service you need a record of the patient's agreement to assign their Medicare benefit to you. In practice that means a clear, contemporaneous record showing the patient agreed to assign the benefit for the service or services in question. The change is about having and keeping that record, not about adopting a specific document.

There is no approved form

The rules do not prescribe an approved AOB form. You are not required to use a particular template, wording or layout. Any clear record that captures the patient's agreement to assign the benefit, tied to the service, is acceptable. Consistency still helps: using the same clear record every time keeps your archive easy to maintain and to produce if it is ever requested.

Only the patient signs

An Assignment of Benefit is the patient assigning their benefit to you, so it is the patient, the assignor, who agrees and signs. The practitioner does not need to sign the assignment. What matters is a reliable record that the patient agreed, together with the date the agreement was given.

Pre-service and post-service agreements

An episodic agreement covers a specific service or visit. You can capture it two ways:

• Before the service (pre-service). The patient agrees ahead of the appointment. Because the exact item may not be known yet, a pre-service agreement describes the service in general terms, and can be made up to six months before the service.
• After the service (post-service). The patient agrees once the service has been provided and the item is known, so the record can reference the specific MBS item.

Either way, the record should match the service actually provided when you claim. If the practitioner, the date of service or the kind of service does not match, capture a fresh agreement before claiming.

Verbal assignment: the transition to 30 June 2027

To give practices time to adjust, verbal assignment is accepted during a transition period that ends on 30 June 2027. A verbal agreement still needs to be genuine and recorded. Moving to a signed, written record now is the safer habit: it removes any doubt about what was agreed and when, and it is what will be expected once the transition ends.

Keeping records

Keep your assignment records. Medicare records are generally retained for two years from the date of the service. Storing each agreement in a consistent, retrievable form, with the date and the service it relates to, means you can produce it if it is ever requested.

A simpler way to capture it

AOB Assist is built for these rules. It captures the patient's signature on-screen, records the date and time, handles both pre-service and post-service agreements, and files a consistent, audited PDF, all on your device with nothing sent anywhere. It is coming soon to the App Store.