Changes to the upcoming Medicare Assignment of Benefit rules

June 19, 2026

On 18 June, after sustained advocacy from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Federal Government softened the Medicare Assignment of Benefit changes due to start on 1 July.

What the announcement changes

Verbal consent available for a 12 month period from 1 July.
Enduring assignment brought forward for MyMedicare registered patients, aged care residents, and patients attending Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations (ACCHO)
Enduring assignment for ACCHO patients can be held across more than one site.
Activity begins only once the regulatory changes are complete, and starts with education rather than enforcement.
A 12 month transition period has been introduced with a commitment to reduce the administrative load on practices and patients.

The requirement underneath has not gone away

The concessions give practices room to move, yet they sit around the obligation rather than removing it. Consent still has to be captured at the point of claiming, recorded against the claim, and held for two years for whenever a patient or an auditor asks for it. That work happens every day. The only open question is whether the software does it or the front desk does.

This matters because the burden the College fought to reduce is, in practice, an administrative one. When software does not absorb a change, the practice absorbs the labour, and the RACGP 2025 Health of the Nation report found 70% of GPs are already concerned about their administrative workload. A change handled by hand lands straight on top of that.

Cloud-native software removes the burden, not just softens it

The deciding factor is how updates reach the system. Legacy software sits on a server in the practice, so each rule change arrives as a release to wait for, install, and test before it can be relied on. Cloud-native software is updated continuously, so the Medicare Assignment of Benefit changes can be built into the workflow ahead of the deadline and switched on for everyone at once, with no server visit and no version left languishing in a back room.

That is the difference between softening the burden and never carrying it. MediRecords is cloud-native, and the 1 July requirements are already built into the billing workflow, so digital consent is captured at the point of claiming and retained automatically for two years. When the rules shift, there is nothing for the practice to install and nothing to rework.

This is just one deadline, and there will be others. The figure worth weighing is not this month’s licence fee but what every future change will cost in hours, in risk, and in rejected claims. On a legacy system that bill keeps arriving, but on a platform built to update itself, it does not.

How we are supporting MediRecords customers

For practices already on MediRecords, the updated Assignment of Benefit tools will be available in the platform on 1 July, ready to use from day one. With the 12 month transition period in place, customers have time to get comfortable with the new workflow well before compliance begins.

As more detail of the Medicare Assignment of Benefit changes emerges, we will keep updating the platform to match, so the work of staying compliant stays with us rather than landing on your front desk.