10 October 2026 - PRESS RELEASE
Australia's health practitioner regulator has more than doubled its annual expenditure in nine years, prompting the Australian Medical Professionals' Society (AMPS) to question whether the extraordinary growth in regulatory spending is delivering proportionate benefits to patients and practitioners.
In 2015-16, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra) recorded total expenditure of $169.1 million. By 2024-25, annual expenditure had reached $362.4 million, an increase of 114 per cent.
The most recent increase is particularly striking. Expenditure jumped from $312.8 million in 2023-24 to $362.4 million in 2024-25, an increase of 15.9 per cent in a single year. Over the same period, Australian inflation was 2.1 per cent and the number of registered practitioners grew by 4.3 per cent.
Put another way, Ahpra's spending grew more than seven times faster than inflation. Even after allowing for both inflation and workforce growth, the cost of regulating each practitioner rose by about 9 per cent in real terms in one year.
This was no isolated year. Our analysis shows Ahpra's expenditure growth exceeded inflation in every year examined since 2016-17.
For a regulator overwhelmingly funded by the health professionals it regulates, those figures demand an explanation.
Ahpra's audited accounts show employee costs alone reached $218.6 million in 2024-25, up from $193.3 million the previous year. Other operating expenses rose from $83.7 million to $107.6 million in just twelve months, an increase of 28.5 per cent.
Despite this, Ahpra recorded an operating deficit of $3.6 million in 2024-25 and has budgeted for a further deficit in 2025-26, drawing on reserves. Some registration fees were indexed by up to 5 per cent, more than double the rate of inflation.
Ahpra attributes rising expenditure to wage inflation, organisational growth, cybersecurity and technology investment. Those are legitimate costs. The number of registered practitioners has also grown substantially, from 657,621 in 2015-16 to 959,838 in 2024-25.
But workforce growth and inflation do not explain it all. Over the decade, Ahpra's spending per registered practitioner rose from about $257 to about $378, well ahead of inflation.
Ahpra's legal and notification costs reached $15.974 million in 2024-25, but Ahpra does not disclose how much is spent pursuing practitioners where no patient has alleged harm. Since 2021, a number of doctors who departed from official positions on COVID-19 or gender medicine have been suspended for years before any final hearing. In one case, the Queensland Supreme Court set aside a GP's suspension and investigation, finding he had been denied procedural fairness. AMPS asks Ahpra to disclose how many such matters it has pursued, how long they took, and what they cost. When the process lasts years, the process itself becomes the punishment.
The fundamental purpose of the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme remains recognisable: register practitioners, set professional standards, accredit training, investigate notifications and take regulatory action where necessary to protect the public.
The question AMPS believes must now be asked is simple:
Has the cost of regulation grown in proportion to the regulatory task, and has the additional expenditure produced demonstrably better regulation?
Ahpra is not an ordinary government department competing annually for taxpayer funding. As Ahpra itself states, the National Scheme is funded largely by practitioner fees and receives no ongoing government subsidy. The National Law requires fees to be reasonable, having regard to the efficient and effective operation of the scheme.
That funding model creates an important accountability issue. A regulator that can recover its costs from a captive professional population needs especially strong safeguards against bureaucratic expansion. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other registered practitioners cannot simply decline the regulator's services if they become too expensive or inefficient. There is no conventional market discipline on the regulator.
More money can improve regulation: better technology, faster investigations, stronger cybersecurity and more sophisticated risk assessment. But it can also generate more bureaucracy, more processes, more investigations and more compliance requirements, without a corresponding improvement in patient safety.
The objective of health regulation should never be to maximise regulatory activity. It should be to achieve the minimum intervention necessary to protect patients effectively, while preserving procedural fairness, professional judgement and a functioning health workforce.
These concerns are not confined to AMPS. The National Health Practitioner Ombudsman is conducting an own-motion investigation into delay and procedural safeguards for practitioners subject to immediate action. The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and the RACGP have raised concerns about delays and the harm prolonged proceedings cause practitioners.
AMPS has separately called for greater procedural fairness, earlier screening of weak notifications, clearer disclosure of allegations and enforceable investigation timeframes.
Ahpra spent $362 million last year, almost $7 million every week.
The question is not whether Australia needs a properly funded health regulator. Clearly it does. The question is whether practitioners, and ultimately patients, are receiving $193 million a year more in effective regulation than they were a decade ago.
AMPS calls on Australia's Health Ministers to commission an independent examination of Ahpra's decade-long expenditure growth, including staffing, administrative overheads, investigation and legal costs, technology spending and measurable regulatory outcomes.
Every regulator needs sufficient resources to do its job. No regulator should assume that more resources automatically mean better regulation.
When the cost of regulating Australia's health professions has more than doubled in nine years, asking where the money went, and what Australians received in return, is not an attack on patient safety. It is precisely the kind of accountability a powerful regulator should welcome.
Media contact:
Kara Thomas, AMPS Secretary
Dr Duncan Syme, AMPS President
via hotline@amps.asn.au
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