AHPRA Advertising Guidelines: The 2026 Rules for Healthcare Marketing

The AHPRA advertising guidelines are the national rules that govern how regulated health services can be advertised in Australia. They sit under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and apply to every registered health practitioner and business that advertises a regulated health service, from a solo GP clinic to a multi-location cosmetic clinic group. In plain terms, health advertising must not be false, misleading or deceptive, must not offer gifts or discounts without stating the terms, must not use testimonials about clinical care, must not create unreasonable expectations of treatment, and must not encourage unnecessary use of health services. A separate set of guidelines for higher risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures, in effect from 2 September 2025, tightened the rules further for injectables, laser and similar treatments. Last reviewed: 14 September 2026, against the guidelines published on the AHPRA website.

This guide breaks the rules down in the language a practice owner or clinic manager actually needs: what each rule means, where practices commonly get caught, and how to check your own marketing against the rules before a complaint does it for you. We build AHPRA-compliant marketing campaigns for Australian practices every day, so every rule below is explained the way we explain it to clients when we audit their advertising.

AHPRA is the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. It works with the fifteen National Boards to register and regulate health practitioners across medicine, nursing, dentistry, physiotherapy, psychology, pharmacy and the other registered professions. The advertising guidelines apply to anyone advertising a regulated health service: the practitioners themselves, the clinics and businesses that employ them, and third parties who advertise on their behalf, which includes marketing agencies and influencers. If a business employs registered health practitioners delivering health services, its advertising is caught by the National Law regardless of who wrote the ad.

One boundary worth knowing: the rules apply to advertising a regulated health service. Non-clinical businesses like gyms, beauty salons offering purely cosmetic treatments without registered practitioners, and wellness brands sit outside AHPRA's remit, although other consumer law still applies to them. If you are unsure which side of that line your business sits on, that is the first question to resolve, because everything else follows from it.

Section 133 of the National Law sets out five things advertising for a regulated health service must not do. Every AHPRA advertising case, from the mildest warning letter to tribunal proceedings, traces back to one or more of these five.

1. Advertising must not be false, misleading or deceptive

Every claim in your advertising must be supported by acceptable evidence. This is the rule that catches the most practices, because it reaches further than most owners expect. It covers claims about treatment outcomes, success rates, qualifications and titles, pricing that hides conditions, and comparisons with other practitioners or professions. Listing a condition your treatment helps, without being able to show acceptable evidence for how it helps that specific condition, is misleading advertising. So is calling yourself a specialist or surgeon without holding the specialist registration that title requires, a distinction the National Law tightened in 2023 when it restricted the title surgeon to surgeons, obstetricians, gynaecologists and ophthalmologists.

2. No gifts, discounts or inducements without stating the terms

You can offer a discount, a gift or a prize, but the terms and conditions must be stated in the advertising. A voucher that hides its expiry, a competition that hides how winners are chosen, or a discount that hides what the normal price is can all breach this rule. The deeper concern AHPRA points to is that inducements can encourage people to use a health service they do not clinically need, which collides with the fifth rule below. Prize promotions where the prize outweighs the clinical value of the treatment attract particular scrutiny.

3. No testimonials about clinical care

Advertising must not use testimonials or purported testimonials about a regulated health service. The detail matters and is covered in full in the next section, because the rule is narrower than many practices fear: it targets positive statements about the clinical aspects of care, not every kind word a patient ever posted.

4. No unreasonable expectations of beneficial treatment

Advertising must not create an unreasonable expectation that treatment will be beneficial. Patient stories, transformation journeys and one person's outcome presented as if it predicts everyone's outcome all risk this breach, because one person's result never guarantees another's. Visual content gets special mention: images and representations that overstate what treatment achieves, or that fail to reflect the realistic range of outcomes, create exactly the expectation the rule prohibits. Before and after imagery must be handled with care for this reason, and the 2025 cosmetic guidelines added an explicit requirement that image-based advertising of higher risk procedures carry a warning that results may vary.

5. No encouraging the indiscriminate or unnecessary use of health services

Advertising must not directly or indirectly encourage people to use a regulated health service they do not need. This is the rule behind AHPRA's concerns with aggressive discounting of clinical procedures, demand-creation language around cosmetic treatments, and marketing that targets the insecurities of vulnerable people. The 2025 cosmetic guidelines name this directly: advertising higher risk cosmetic procedures must not exploit vulnerabilities or insecurities to increase demand, and practitioners must recognise the potential harm to people experiencing conditions like body dysmorphic disorder.

Penalties for breaching the National Law's advertising provisions can reach court-imposed fines, and AHPRA's compliance strategy also uses requests to withdraw advertising, undertakings and, for practitioners, referral to the relevant National Board. The bigger commercial risk for most practices is simpler: advertising that has to be pulled mid-campaign, and the complaint trail that follows it.

The testimonial rule causes more confusion than any other part of the guidelines, so it is worth slowing down. The advertising guidelines define a testimonial as a recommendation or positive statement about the clinical aspects of a regulated health service. Patient stories, patient experiences and success stories about clinical care are testimonials and cannot be used in your advertising. Fake testimonials, which AHPRA calls purported testimonials, are treated the same way.

But not every review or positive comment is a testimonial. Comments about customer service or communication style that do not reference clinical aspects are not caught by the rule. A review saying the reception team was lovely and booking was easy is a service comment. A review saying the treatment fixed a problem, or praising a clinical outcome, is a clinical testimonial. The line is whether the statement is about the clinical care itself.

Two practical obligations follow. First, advertisers are responsible for the advertising they control, which includes their own social media pages. A clinic Facebook page is advertising space under the guidelines, so clinical testimonials posted there by others fall within the clinic's responsibility to manage. Second, the 2025 cosmetic guidelines strengthened the ban specifically around social media influencers, whose clinical endorsements of cosmetic procedures are squarely testimonial advertising under the National Law. The safest pattern we implement for clients: actively curate the review platforms rather than republish reviews on your own channels, keep your website and social pages clear of clinical outcome statements from patients, and let your own evidence-based content carry the proof instead.

From 2 September 2025, the Guidelines for advertising higher risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures took effect with no transition period. They apply to advertising higher risk procedures performed by registered health practitioners, and the definition reaches further than many clinics expect: cosmetic injectables such as anti-wrinkle and dermal fillers, thread lifts, injection lipolysis, sclerotherapy, platelet rich plasma procedures, treatments using products derived from the patient's blood, hair transplants and dental veneers are all named as examples.

The changes that matter most for clinic marketing:

If your clinic advertises injectables, laser, PRP or similar treatments and your marketing was built before September 2025, the honest advice is to re-audit it now. The guidelines arrived with no transition period, and AHPRA signalled a crackdown posture on exploitative advertising as they took effect. Campaigns built on transformation imagery without variation warnings, influencer partnerships or price-led injectables promotions carry more risk today than the same assets carried a year ago.

The guidelines define advertising broadly: any public statement that promotes a regulated health service, or a practitioner who provides it, is advertising. In practice that covers your website and its service pages, Google and Meta ads, your Google Business Profile, your social media posts, signage, printed materials, and statements in directories or media appearances. Information in a consultation is not advertising. Educational content that stops short of promoting your specific service is generally not advertising, which is one reason an evidence-based content strategy is the safest growth channel available to a practice: it informs without triggering the advertising rules, as long as it stays genuinely informational.

AHPRA publishes a self-assessment tool for advertisers, and working through it is the exact audit we run on client marketing. The checklist version:

The official sources sit on the AHPRA advertising hub: the advertising guidelines themselves, the summary of advertising requirements, the acceptable evidence guidance, the testimonial tool and the self-assessment tool. The National Law and AHPRA guidance are the authority on every point above, and where any summary, including this one, differs from the official guidelines, the official guidelines win.

Do the AHPRA advertising guidelines apply to Google reviews?

Reviews left on platforms you do not control, like Google or Facebook, are generally not your advertising. The obligation attaches to advertising you control, including your own social media pages. The line to respect: do not republish clinical testimonials into your own channels, do not curate reviews to promote clinical outcomes, and manage the pages you control so clinical testimonials do not accumulate on them.

Can I use before and after photos in my clinic marketing?

Yes, within rules. Images must be real and unedited, used with appropriate patient consent, and must not create an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment. For higher risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures, the September 2025 guidelines add a mandatory warning that results may vary for other patients on any image-based advertising. Transformation galleries without consent, filters or variation warnings are the pattern that attracts complaints.

Are discounts and special offers allowed under AHPRA rules?

Yes, when the full terms and conditions are stated in the advertising. Offers that hide conditions breach rule two, and inducements that encourage unnecessary use of a health service breach rule five. Price-led promotion of clinical procedures, particularly higher risk cosmetic procedures, attracts the most scrutiny of any offer type.

What is the difference between AHPRA and the TGA for advertising?

AHPRA regulates the advertising of regulated health services delivered by registered practitioners. The TGA regulates the advertising of therapeutic goods, including prescription-only medicines and many cosmetic injectables. The two regimes overlap in cosmetic medicine: advertising a clinic's injectable treatments must satisfy both AHPRA's service advertising rules and the TGA's requirements for advertising therapeutic goods, which is why the 2025 cosmetic guidelines explicitly cross-reference TGA requirements for price lists involving prescription products.

What happens if my advertising breaches the guidelines?

AHPRA's approach escalates from education and requests to withdraw or correct advertising, through undertakings, to court action with penalties for breaches of the National Law's advertising provisions. Practitioners can also face referral to their National Board. Most matters are resolved at the correction stage, which is still costly in pulled campaigns and lost momentum, and the complaint record itself is the thing most practices would rather never create.

If you want your practice or clinic marketing built inside these rules from day one, Business Warriors is a medical marketing agency that builds every campaign against the AHPRA advertising guidelines. Book a free strategy session and we will audit your current marketing against the rules above, and rebuild anything that puts your registration at risk.