What It Actually Costs to Start an Allied Health Private Practice

Ask five allied health professionals what it costs to start a private practice and you will get five completely different answers. Some will tell you they started for under $2,000. Others will say it cost $15,000 before they saw a single client. Both are telling the truth. The difference comes down to profession, setup choices, and whether you are factoring in the costs that don't show up on any invoice.

This guide lays out every cost you can expect, with real Australian dollar figures. We have split it into recurring costs (the things you pay monthly or annually), one-off startup costs, and the hidden costs that catch most new practitioners off guard. At the end, there is a summary table showing total first-year costs across three scenarios: lean, typical, and fully kitted out.

All figures are current as of early 2026 and are in AUD. Where costs vary by profession, we say so.

Recurring costs: what you will pay every month or year

These are the costs that keep ticking whether you see one client per week or thirty. Understanding them is important because they set your baseline. Before you earn a dollar, this is what private practice costs you just to exist.

Professional indemnity insurance: $300 to $800 per year

This is non-negotiable. You cannot practise without it, and most professional associations make it a membership condition. The cost depends on your profession, your scope of practice, and your turnover.

Physiotherapists and exercise physiologists tend to sit around $400 to $600 per year. Podiatrists pay slightly more because of the procedural risk profile. Dietitians are typically at the lower end, around $300 to $450. These figures are for solo practitioners with turnover under $150,000. Once you are earning more, premiums go up.

Most practitioners get their PI insurance through their professional association (APA, APodA, ESSA, DAA) as part of a membership bundle. If you are shopping independently, companies like Guild Insurance and BMS are common choices in the allied health space.

Practice management software: $0 to $55 per month

You need somewhere to manage bookings, client records, invoicing, and Medicare claims. The good news is that the range here is enormous, and there is a genuinely usable free option.

If you are starting solo and watching your costs, Halaxy on the free tier is hard to beat. You can always upgrade later when you know what features you actually need. Don't pay for software complexity you won't use in your first year.

Room rental: $50 to $150 per session, or $200 to $600 per week

Room costs vary wildly depending on your city, suburb, and setup. In metropolitan areas, you will typically pay $50 to $150 for a single-session room hire. This means you book (and pay for) only the hours you use. It is the lowest-risk option when you are building up a caseload.

A dedicated room (your own space, available whenever you want it) runs $200 to $600 per week in most metro areas. Regional and suburban rates can be 30 to 50 percent lower. Some practitioners start from home or offer mobile services to avoid room costs entirely, though check your profession's regulations and insurance requirements before going this route.

Telehealth changes the maths significantly. If a large portion of your caseload can be delivered via telehealth (common for dietitians, speech pathologists, and exercise physiologists), you may only need a room one or two days a week.

AHPRA registration: $290 to $380 per year

If your profession is regulated by AHPRA (physiotherapy, podiatry, osteopathy, chiropractic), you pay an annual registration fee. The exact amount varies by profession and by state or territory. Physiotherapists pay around $380. Podiatrists are around $290 to $340.

Note: exercise physiologists and dietitians are not AHPRA-regulated. They register with their professional associations (ESSA and DAA respectively) instead. Those fees are covered under professional association membership below.

Professional association membership: $300 to $800 per year

Technically optional for AHPRA-regulated professions, but realistically essential. Your association often bundles PI insurance, provides CPD opportunities, and gives you credibility with referrers. For non-AHPRA professions like exercise physiology and dietetics, your association membership is your professional registration.

APA (physio) membership runs around $650 to $800 depending on your level. APodA (podiatry) is around $500 to $700. ESSA (exercise physiology) charges around $350 to $500. DAA (dietetics) is around $300 to $500.

Accounting: $1,000 to $3,000 per year

You can do your own bookkeeping (and many practitioners do, at least initially). But you will almost certainly want an accountant for your tax return, and ideally one who understands sole traders or small health businesses. A basic tax return and BAS lodgement package runs $1,000 to $1,500. Add ongoing bookkeeping support and business structure advice and you are looking at $2,000 to $3,000.

This is one of those costs that pays for itself. A good accountant will save you more than their fee in deductions you would have missed and structuring decisions you would have got wrong.

Public liability insurance: $200 to $400 per year

Separate from professional indemnity insurance. Public liability covers you if a client trips in your waiting room or your equipment injures someone. If you are renting a room in a shared clinic, the clinic may have their own coverage, but check the fine print. Many room rental agreements require you to hold your own policy.

Recurring costs summary

That range is huge, and the room rental line is doing most of the work. A dietitian running telehealth three days a week and renting a session room one day sits at the low end. A podiatrist who needs a dedicated treatment room five days a week is at the high end. Both are legitimate setups. The point is to understand which costs apply to your situation before you commit.

One-off startup costs

These are the costs you pay once to get set up. Some are trivially cheap. Others depend heavily on your profession.

ABN registration: free

Registering for an Australian Business Number costs nothing and takes about 10 minutes through the Australian Business Register website. You will need your ABN before you can do almost anything else, so do this first.

Business name registration: $44 to $104

If you want to trade under a name other than your own (for example, "Bayside Physiotherapy" instead of "Jane Smith"), you register a business name through ASIC. It costs $44 for one year or $104 for three years. If you are just practising under your own name, you can skip this entirely.

Website: $500 to $3,000

You need a web presence. A basic professional website with your services, location, contact details, and online booking integration runs $500 to $1,500 if you use a platform like Squarespace or WordPress and do some of the work yourself. A custom-designed site from a web developer is $2,000 to $3,000 at the lower end.

Don't overthink this at the start. A clean, professional site that loads quickly and makes it easy to book an appointment is all you need. You can upgrade later. Your biggest source of referrals in the early days will be GPs and word of mouth, not your website.

Profession-specific equipment: $0 to $15,000+

This is where costs diverge dramatically depending on what you do.

If you are a podiatrist, equipment is a major line item and you need to budget for it carefully. If you are a dietitian, you could realistically start with a laptop you already own and a Halaxy account. The gap between these two scenarios is why generic "cost to start a practice" advice is so often useless.

The NDIS cost surprise

If you plan to see NDIS participants (and for many allied health professions, that is a significant chunk of the potential client base), you need to understand the registration costs. This is one of the most under-budgeted expenses in private practice.

NDIS provider registration involves several costs that stack up quickly:

• Initial registration audit: $3,000 to $8,000 depending on the scope of your registration groups and the auditor. This is the big one. You need to pay an approved quality auditor to assess your business against the NDIS Practice Standards.
• Worker screening checks: $100 to $150 per worker (NDIS Worker Screening Check, varies by state)
• Ongoing quality audits: Required periodically, $1,500 to $3,000 each time
• Administrative time: Preparing documentation for audits, maintaining compliance records, and navigating the NDIS portal. This is unpaid time that can easily eat 20 to 40 hours during your initial registration.

The alternative is to work as an unregistered provider, which limits you to plan-managed and self-managed NDIS participants. For some practitioners, especially those in metro areas where there are plenty of plan-managed clients, this can work fine. But if you are in a regional area or your client base is predominantly agency-managed, full registration is probably necessary.

Hidden costs nobody warns you about

The costs above are the ones you can put in a spreadsheet. The ones below are the ones that quietly erode your income and catch first-year practitioners off guard. They don't show up on any invoice, but they are real.

No-shows: 5 to 15 percent of your bookings

Across allied health, no-show rates typically sit between 5 and 15 percent. If you are charging $120 per session and seeing 20 clients a week, a 10 percent no-show rate means you are losing roughly $240 per week. That is over $12,000 a year in lost revenue.

You can mitigate this with cancellation policies, SMS reminders (most practice management software handles this), and requiring card details for bookings. But you cannot eliminate it completely. Budget for it.

Unpaid admin time: 30 to 50 percent of your working hours

This is the one that shocks most new practitioners. For every hour you spend with a client, expect to spend 20 to 40 minutes on notes, billing, phone calls, emails, report writing, and general administration. Some of this is clinical documentation (which is non-negotiable). Some of it is chasing payments, answering enquiries, and managing your diary.

When you were employed, someone else handled the admin or you were paid for it. In private practice, this is your unpaid time. If you are planning your income based on "I will see 25 clients a week at $120 each, that is $3,000," you are wrong. You are going to work 40+ hours to see those 25 clients, and you need to factor that into your hourly rate expectations.

No leave entitlements

No paid annual leave. No paid sick leave. No employer superannuation contributions. If you take two weeks off at Christmas and another week for illness during the year, that is three weeks of zero income. On a $100,000 gross revenue year, that is roughly $5,700 you need to self-fund. Plus 11.5% superannuation (currently rising to 12% by July 2027) that you should be putting aside yourself. On $100,000, that is another $11,500 per year.

When people compare their private practice income to their employed salary, they often forget to subtract these. Your gross revenue needs to be significantly higher than an equivalent salary to deliver the same take-home outcome.

Professional development: $500 to $2,000 per year

You are required to maintain CPD (Continuing Professional Development) to keep your registration. When you were employed, your employer may have covered course fees or given you paid study days. In private practice, you pay for courses, conferences, and workshops out of your own pocket, and every day spent on PD is a day you are not earning clinical income.

Budget $500 to $2,000 for course fees and factor in the lost income from the days you spend on PD rather than seeing clients.

Marketing and client acquisition

In the early months, you need to actively build your caseload. This might mean visiting GPs to introduce yourself, getting listed on directories (HealthEngine, HotDoc), running a small Google Ads campaign, or printing business cards and flyers.

Some of this costs money ($50 to $300 per month for directory listings or ads), but the bigger cost is your time. Expect to spend several hours a week on marketing activities in your first three to six months. That is time you are not billing clients.

The honest reality: most allied health practitioners get the bulk of their clients through GP referrals and word of mouth. Building those relationships takes time and effort, not big marketing budgets. But the time cost is real.

Profession-specific cost variations

To make the cost gap concrete, here is a side-by-side comparison of two professions at opposite ends of the spectrum.

The podiatrist is paying roughly three to four times what the dietitian pays. That does not mean podiatry is a bad business. Session fees for podiatrists are generally higher, and the demand is strong. But it means a podiatrist needs significantly more starting capital and needs to hit a higher caseload faster to cover their overheads.

If you are in a profession with high equipment costs, look into equipment finance. Spreading $10,000 over 24 months at a reasonable interest rate is often smarter than depleting your cash reserves before you have built a consistent caseload.

Total first-year cost estimates

Here is what it all adds up to. We have modelled three scenarios: lean (starting on a shoestring, minimal equipment, sessional room hire), typical (moderate setup, some dedicated room time, standard software), and fully kitted out (dedicated room, paid software, full equipment, NDIS registration).

The lean scenario is realistic for a dietitian or exercise physiologist doing mostly telehealth with one day of sessional room hire. The typical scenario fits most physiotherapists and speech pathologists starting a standard practice. The fully kitted scenario represents a podiatrist setting up a dedicated treatment space with full equipment and NDIS registration.

Making this work on a budget

The numbers can look intimidating, especially at the higher end. But most successful private practitioners did not start at the top scenario. They started lean and scaled up as their caseload grew. Here are the common patterns:

• Start with sessional room hire. Pay per session until you have enough consistent bookings to justify a dedicated space. This is the single biggest lever you have for controlling costs.
• Use Halaxy's free tier. It handles scheduling, billing, and Medicare claims. You don't need to pay for software on day one.
• Don't register as an NDIS provider immediately. Start with plan-managed and self-managed participants while you build your practice. Register once your caseload and cash flow support the audit costs.
• Buy second-hand equipment. Practice closures and upgrades mean there is a steady supply of used treatment tables, chairs, and equipment at 40 to 60 percent of new prices. Check Gumtree, Facebook Marketplace, and profession-specific buy/sell groups.
• Get an accountant from day one. This feels like a cost to cut, but getting your structure right from the start saves you money. Restructuring later is expensive.

The key takeaway: know your numbers before you start. Work out which scenario fits your profession, your location, and your planned service mix. Then add a buffer, because something unexpected always comes up. The practitioners who get into financial trouble are almost never the ones who planned carefully. They are the ones who didn't plan at all.

Next steps

Understanding your costs is the foundation, but it is just one piece of setting up a practice. If you are working through the setup process, these guides cover the other essentials:

• How Medicare CDM billing works for allied health covers the GPCCMP system, item numbers, and common billing mistakes.
• Getting your Medicare provider number walks through the PRODA account, HW093 form, and the location-specific trap.
• Business structure for allied health compares sole trader and Pty Ltd with allied-health-specific considerations.