WorkSafe Victoria occupational therapy fee schedule 2026-27

What changed on 1 July 2026

WorkSafe Victoria's Occupational Therapy Services fee schedule took effect 1 July 2026, with every consultation and assessment item up about 2.35 per cent on the schedule it replaced. The initial standard consultation under 1 hour (OT600) is now $116.56, and the equipment prescription hourly rate (OT610) is $174.82. Because occupational therapy's previous schedule was dated 8 December 2025 rather than 1 July 2025, the profession had already had one rate change mid financial year before this one landed.

The bigger change is not a fee, it is a rename. The ADL Assessment items that existed under the 8 December 2025 schedule (ADL001 for a GP referral, OT310 for an agent referral, and the flat rate versions ADL002 and OT320) do not appear in the 1 July 2026 schedule. In their place sit HHSNA01 and HHSNA02, the Household Help Services Needs Assessment, which must be submitted on WorkSafe's own template form. The fee moved from $970.00 to $992.80, in line with the standard indexation, but any Cliniko billable item still carrying the old ADL code needs to be retired.

Rooms rate versus home, hospital or work rate

Unlike several other WorkSafe allied health schedules, occupational therapy keeps two separate fees for most consultation lengths: an R suffix for a rooms consultation and an H suffix for the same length delivered at home, in hospital, or at the worker's workplace. A standard consultation under 30 minutes is $87.42 in rooms (OT602R) but $131.12 away from rooms (OT602H), and a prolonged consultation over 45 minutes is $174.82 in rooms (OT606R) against $218.53 away from rooms (OT606H). Getting the R and H codes right in Cliniko matters more here than in disciplines that bill one consultation fee plus a separate per kilometre travel item.

Two travel items do still exist, OT510 (Melbourne metropolitan, $2.50 per km) and OT520 (regional or rural, $1.56 per km), but WorkSafe restricts them to three specific item codes: HHSNA02, OT610 (equipment prescription) and OT611 (ride on mower prescription). They cannot be billed against an ordinary home or hospital consultation, since the higher H rate already covers that travel.

Who can bill this schedule

Occupational therapists must be approved and registered with WorkSafe to deliver these services, and must hold the required insurance. Two items carry an extra qualification requirement on top of that: driver assessment (OT608) can only be billed by a VicRoads accredited assessor or equivalent, and equipment prescription (OT610) requires the therapist to manage any conflict of interest when prescribing equipment to the worker they are assessing.

Loading the schedule into Cliniko

Build the Cliniko import CSV (Item code, Name, Price (ex. tax), Taxable, Item type) with clear rooms versus home, hospital or work naming, for example WorkSafe VIC OT602R Standard consultation rooms and WorkSafe VIC OT602H Standard consultation home/hospital/work, so front desk staff pick the right fee for where the visit happened. Retire any ADL-coded item left over from the 8 December 2025 schedule rather than renaming it to HHSNA, so historical invoices under the old code stay intact.

The per hour items (OT400, OT608, OT610, OT611) do not have hourly maths built into Cliniko's billable items, so load them as a single unit price and multiply for the hours delivered when you raise the invoice. Roll the rest of the list forward each July with Cliniko's export, edit, re-import cycle on the Item ID and price columns, keeping the original export since there is no undo.