GST answers
GST on WorkCover treatment
For treatment, yes. A session treating an injured worker is GST free where the same session would be GST free supplied to the patient, because an operator of a statutory compensation scheme is one of the four payers the ATO names. No Medicare benefit is needed. A report the insurer commissions is a separate supply, and taxable.
Key facts
- The rule the treatment runs on
- s38-60, third party procured GST-free health supplies, in Subdivision 38-B of the GST Act, in the compilation current from 1 January 20266
- What that rule does
- A service that is GST free supplied to the patient stays GST free when the practice is contracting with one of four kinds of payer2
- Where a workers compensation insurer sits in that list
- An operator of a statutory compensation scheme, the second of the four the ATO names, alongside an insurer, a compulsory third party scheme operator and an Australian Government agency2
- The ATO's own workers compensation example
- Dr Green supplies GST free medical services to Annabelle, and those services are paid by workers compensation3
- Whether a Medicare benefit has to be payable
- In that example it is not. The ATO states no Medicare benefit is payable because workers compensation covers the service, and calls the treatment GST free anyway3
- The test for a health service that is not a medical service
- Three conditions together: it is a listed health service, a recognised health professional in that listed service performs it or, in certain circumstances, their assistant does, and the profession generally accepts it as necessary for the appropriate treatment of the recipient4
- How strict the listed service test is
- The service has to be one of the listed services and cannot just be similar to one of them4
- Who the recipient of the supply is
- Whoever engages the health practitioner to provide the service5
- Where the allied health template posts a WorkCover session
- Account 407, Clinical services, WorkCover and workers compensation, at the GST Free Income tax rate7
- Where the psychology template posts it
- Account 405, the same account name on a different code, at the same tax rate7
- The report row the allied health template carries for this funder
- Workers compensation paired with a report category posts to account 420, Reports, assessments and medico-legal, at the taxable rate, which is a row no template gives motor accident or veterans affairs work7
- The confirmation the template prints beside account 407
- s38-60 lets a scheme agree not to treat its supplies as GST free, so confirm none of the practice's compensation schemes have opted out7
The rule a practice actually needs
The scheme paying changes who owes the money. It does not change what the practice supplied. The ATO's page on services organised and paid for by a third party sets out where that holds, and it names its payers as a closed set. The page states the rule without naming a section; the section is s38-60, and the canonical templates cite it by number beside the accounts they send this work to.
If the service is GST-free when provided to the patient, it is also GST-free when you are contracting with: an insurer; an operator of a statutory compensation scheme; a compulsory third party scheme (scheme operator); an Australian Government agency.2
A workers compensation insurer is a statutory compensation scheme operator, and in some states it is a licensed insurer as well. Either way it is inside the set. The same page shuts the door on everyone outside it: medical and other health services supplied to any other third party are not GST free. An employer buying the same assessment directly, or a law firm asking for the same appointment, is a taxable supply whatever the clinical content is.
The ATO's own workers compensation example
There is a published example about a workers compensation claim, and it is usually quoted for its second half, the report. Its first half is the answer to this page's question, stated plainly.
Dr Green provides GST-free medical services to Annabelle. The services provided to Annabelle are paid by worker's compensation. As the service is covered by worker's compensation, a Medicare benefit is not payable for the services.3
The insurer paying does not disturb the status of the treatment. The example goes on to make the insurer's progress report taxable, which is the split reports to insurers works through in full, and this page leaves there.
GST free is not the same as Medicare funded
Read that quote again for the sentence in the middle. No Medicare benefit is payable, precisely because workers compensation is covering the service, and the treatment is still called GST free. The two ideas travel together so often in practice that they get welded, and a compensation claim is where the weld shows.
The answer is borrowed, so a taxable service stays taxable
This is the part the general results skip entirely. Because s38-60 borrows the answer from the supply to the patient, a service that would have been taxable privately is taxable when a scheme funds it. A single soft tissue injury claim can carry both kinds of line in the same week.
| What the practice delivers | Clears the ATO's three conditions | What the scheme paying changes |
|---|---|---|
| Physiotherapy by a physiotherapist as appropriate treatment | Yes, on all three | Nothing. It is GST free privately and stays GST free on the claim |
| Remedial massage supplied on its own | No. Remedial massage is not one of the listed services | Nothing. It is taxable privately and stays taxable on the claim |
| Exercise physiology supplied on its own | No. Exercise physiology is not on the ATO's list either | Nothing. The funder cannot lend a rate the service did not already have |
| Assistant time billed outside the conditions the ATO sets for an assistant | No. The listed service may be fine; the condition it fails is who performed it | Nothing. That condition asks who performed the service, not who paid for it |
The ATO is strict about the list: a service has to be one of the listed services, not merely similar to one. Massage therapy and exercise physiology take those two cases in full. The error shape is the same either way, and it is coding a whole claim to one rate because the payer is one payer.
Where a WorkCover session lands in the templates
The canonical templates carry the conclusion as a posting rather than as prose, and they do not put it in the same place. Two of the three name a workers compensation revenue account of their own, on different codes under the same account name. The third holds no such row and reaches its practice default, at the same tax rate.
The account note in the allied health template gives the reason in a line: treatment funded by a statutory compensation scheme is GST free under s38-60 when the same service would be GST free billed to the patient. Which code a practice ends up on depends on the template it started from, which is why the card prints all three rather than merging them.
The report row this funder carries and the others do not
Three funding sources carry a GST free treatment rate with a scheme or an agency paying: workers compensation, motor accident schemes and veterans affairs. The allied health template puts the first two on the s38-60 reasoning and gives the veterans affairs account a different reason, the listed service test. Of those three, only workers compensation has a report row in any canonical template. Pair it with a report category in the allied health template and the row posts to Reports, assessments and medico-legal at the taxable rate rather than to the treatment account.
The confirmation the template prints
Beside the workers compensation account the template carries an instruction, and the product prints it rather than resolving it. s38-60 lets a supplier and a scheme agree not to treat the supplies as GST free, which the ATO notes may suit parties holding a mix of taxable and GST free supplies. A practice billing a scheme for treatment and for reports is exactly that mix.
Nothing read for this page shows a workers compensation scheme making that agreement, and the search for one was not exhaustive, so it stays in the open questions below. What follows for a practice is small: read the provider terms once, and if the scheme treats the supplies as taxable, say so in the map with the reason beside the row.
Which leg the rate sits on
Everything above concerns one leg of the deposit, the revenue line, which is where the GST Free Income rate lives and where the activity statement reads it. The settlement leg is a separate posting. Every clearing component in every canonical template is posted outside the activity statement, because the money it holds was earned and reported when the invoice was raised.
Keeping the two apart is what stops an insurer payment carrying a revenue rate and double counting sales. The authorisation queue, the nightly disbursement and the remittance belong to WorkCover Queensland payments in Xero, the question of which scheme is settled through which channel belongs to workers compensation schemes, and the motor accident version of this treatment question is CTP and TAC treatment.
What Ledger Map does with a WorkCover deposit
Ledger Map holds one standing map for the practice, approved by the practice before anything syncs. A workers compensation line resolves to its account and its tax rate through that map, so a treatment item and a report item on the same claim can carry different rates without anyone remembering to change one by hand.
The insurer's payment is then posted as one balanced document set, which leaves one exact match in the bank feed for a person to accept. A line the map cannot place becomes a question with the options laid out, and the practice answers it once. How it works shows the map and the approval step, and the other GST answers carry the same treatment record for every funder in the mix.
Questions
Do WorkCover payments have GST?
It depends which payment. An employer's premium is an insurance transaction, and the Queensland insurer's own premium page states GST and stamp duty are payable on it. A payment to a practice for treating an injured worker is consideration for a GST free supply where the same session would be GST free supplied to the patient, so that line carries no GST.
Is there GST on WorkCover QLD?
For a provider's treatment invoice the test comes from the GST law rather than from a scheme's own rules, so it does not change at a state border. Treating the worker is GST free and a report the insurer asks for is taxable, in Queensland the same as under the other compensation schemes. What can differ by scheme is the published fee and whether the provider and the scheme have agreed to treat the supplies as taxable.
What services are GST free?
There are two routes. A medical service is GST free on its own terms. A health service that is not a medical service is GST free where three things hold together: it is on the ATO's list of health services, a recognised professional in that service performs it, and the profession generally accepts it as necessary for the appropriate treatment of the recipient. Being similar to a listed service is not enough.
Is GST included in insurance?
That is the employer's question, and it runs on the insurance rules rather than on the health rules this page uses. The Queensland insurer's premium page states that GST and stamp duty are payable on a premium. What an employer then recovers is a question for its own accountant, and none of it reaches the tax rate on a treatment line billed to the scheme, which is what this page settles.
Does a session need a Medicare benefit to be GST free?
No. The ATO's workers compensation example makes the point directly: the services are paid by workers compensation, so no Medicare benefit is payable for them, and the ATO still calls them GST free medical services. For a health service that is not a medical service the Medicare question does not arise, because the three listed service conditions carry the answer.
Sources
Open questions
- The operative text of s38-60 was not read. The Federal Register returned the subdivision table of contents on 3 Sep 2026 and confirmed the compilation current from 1 January 2026, so the section is cited for its title, location and currency while the test itself is carried by the ATO page, which states the rule without naming a section.
- Whether any workers compensation scheme has agreed with providers that its treatment supplies are not GST free. The ATO says a supplier and a scheme can make that agreement, nothing read for this page shows one doing it, and the search for one was not exhaustive, so the practice's provider terms decide it.
- The ATO's workers compensation example is written about a medical practitioner, so the Medicare sentence inside it belongs to a medical service. An allied health practice reaches the same rate through the listed service conditions, which is the reading set out above rather than a sentence the ATO wrote for allied health.
- GSTR 2006/10 sits third on the search results for this question and was not opened, because the legal database refused the fetch. Its note about supplies made GST free by section 38-60 is taken from the recorded result, and the ruling addresses insurance settlements rather than a provider's invoice, so nothing above rests on it and it is not listed as a source.
- Whether a scheme's published maximum fee is stated before GST was not established on this pass. The Queensland table of costs is held unverified in the corpus, so no fee arithmetic appears here and a practice reads the current schedule for itself.
- The premium sentence is quoted from the Queensland insurer alone. Whether every scheme states the employer side the same way was not checked, and it is the employer's question rather than the provider's, so it is here for orientation and no key fact rests on it.
- No thread by a practitioner coding a workers compensation treatment invoice appeared on the search results for this question. The three that did appear are about premiums and about compensation as income, so this page carries no quote in a practitioner's own words.
- GST and health, supply of services through a third party
Australian Taxation Office. Retrieved 3 Sep 2026. Source updated 12 Jun 2024.
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- GST and health, medical services
Australian Taxation Office. Retrieved 3 Sep 2026. Source updated 12 Jun 2024.
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- GST and health, other health services
Australian Taxation Office. Retrieved 3 Sep 2026. Source updated 12 Jun 2024.
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- GST and health, recipient of the supply
Australian Taxation Office. Retrieved 3 Sep 2026. Source updated 12 Jun 2024.
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- A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act 1999, section 38-60, third party procured GST-free health supplies
Federal Register of Legislation. Retrieved 3 Sep 2026. Source updated 1 Jan 2026.
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- Allied health, psychology and NDIS plan managed canonical templates
Ledger Map. Retrieved 3 Sep 2026.
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Review
Last reviewed 3 Sep 2026 by Shane
General information for Australian allied health practices, not tax advice. Confirm a treatment with your BAS agent or accountant before you post it.
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