You're thinking about GP locum work, or you're already doing it and wondering if you've got the structure right. Maybe you're trying to piece together a portfolio career, or you need income while you figure out what kind of practice you want to commit to long term. Either way, the mechanics matter. Credentialling, indemnity, contracts, clinical governance, and how you're actually paid all need sorting before you take your first shift.
What Makes a GP Locum Different from Other Locum Roles
A GP locum operates in a fundamentally different environment from a hospital registrar or emergency medicine locum. You're not covering a rostered shift within a larger team. You're often the sole doctor in a practice for that session, managing a full appointment book of undifferentiated presentations, chronic disease reviews, mental health assessments, and procedural work if you're credentialed for it.
The clinical autonomy is higher. The medico-legal exposure is higher. The continuity of care is lower. You're stepping into someone else's patient list, often with incomplete handover, and making decisions that will be documented in a permanent medical record you won't see again.
That creates specific risks. Research comparing clinical practice between locum and permanent GPs has highlighted differences in prescribing patterns and documentation quality, particularly when locums are unfamiliar with practice systems or patient cohorts. This doesn't mean locum work is inherently unsafe, but it does mean you need to manage those risks deliberately.
Your indemnity policy needs to reflect the fact that you're working across multiple sites. Your documentation habits need to be tighter than if you were seeing your own patient panel. Your threshold for seeking senior advice or referring should probably be lower, especially in the first few sessions at a new practice.
Credentialling and Registration Requirements
Before you take a single session, you need current AHPRA registration as a medical practitioner with general registration. If you're an international medical graduate, you'll need to meet the relevant AHPRA pathway requirements, which usually means passing AMC exams and completing a period of supervised practice.
Fellowship of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) or the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM) is expected for most GP locum roles, though some practices will consider registrars in their final year of training or doctors with substantial general practice experience but no formal fellowship.
Medical indemnity insurance is non-negotiable. You cannot work as a GP locum without it. Your policy must cover you for general practice work, and if you're doing procedural work such as skin excisions, joint injections, or IUD insertions, those procedures need to be explicitly covered. Many junior doctors assume their hospital employer's indemnity extends to their after-hours or weekend GP locum shifts. It does not.
You also need a provider number for Medicare billing, which is tied to a specific practice location. If you're working across multiple practices, you'll need a provider number for each one. The application process takes several weeks, so this needs to be organised well before your first shift.
Before any doctor is placed, verification of these credentials is handled in-house by agencies that understand the compliance landscape. Doctor Credentialling and Compliance Verification processes managed by clinicians who understand what AHPRA registration, medical indemnity insurance, and facility-specific requirements actually mean in practice make the difference between a placement that proceeds smoothly and one that stalls two days before the shift.
How GP Locum Payments Work
You'll be paid either as an employee of the practice or as a contractor invoicing for your services. The distinction matters for tax, superannuation, and professional indemnity purposes.
Employed Locums
If you're employed, you'll be on the practice's payroll. You'll receive a payslip, the practice will withhold PAYG tax, and they'll pay superannuation at the legislated rate. You'll typically be paid an hourly rate, which in 2026 ranges from $100 to $180 per hour depending on location, experience, and whether you're covering a standard session or an after-hours clinic.
Some practices offer a higher rate for Saturday morning or evening sessions. Others offer a flat rate regardless of when you work. The rate should be clear in writing before you accept the shift.
Contractor Locums
If you're contracting, you'll operate as a sole trader or through a company structure, invoice the practice for your services, and manage your own tax and superannuation obligations. The rate is usually higher than the employed equivalent, often $120 to $200 per hour, but you're responsible for your own indemnity insurance, PAYG instalments, and superannuation contributions.
You'll also need to arrange and submit your own invoices. Some agencies handle this administrative side on the doctor's behalf, arranging and submitting invoices to the healthcare facility and following up on any outstanding amounts. This removes the burden of chasing your own billing, which can be significant if you're working across multiple sites.
The BMA's guidance on sessional and locum GP contracts provides a useful framework for understanding pay structures, even though it's UK-focused. The principles around hourly rates, session definitions, and contract terms translate directly to the Australian context.
Clinical Governance and Practice Policies
When you walk into a practice as a GP locum, you're subject to that practice's clinical governance framework. That includes their pathology and radiology referral processes, their prescribing policies, their clinical software system, and their approach to after-hours handover.
You should be briefed on all of this before you start. In reality, you often won't be. You'll arrive, someone will show you to a consulting room, log you into the system, and the first patient will knock on the door three minutes later.
This is where things go wrong. You don't know where the practice keeps its emergency equipment. You don't know whether they have an on-site nurse who can do dressings or ECGs. You don't know whether they use Medical Director, Best Practice, or Genie, and you don't know where the pathology request templates are saved.
You need to ask these questions before the first patient arrives. If the practice can't give you a 15-minute orientation, that's a red flag about their clinical governance standards.
Some specific things you need to know on day one:
Software and templates: How to open a new patient file, how to generate a prescription, where the referral templates are, how to order pathology, and how to access previous consultation notes.
Emergency protocols: Where the anaphylaxis kit is, where the defibrillator is, what the emergency call number is (it's not always 000 in a practice setting if they have a medical emergency protocol that routes through reception first).
After-hours care: What happens if a patient needs urgent review outside your session. Is there an after-hours number? Do patients go to the local emergency department? Is there a locum service that covers evenings and weekends?
Referral pathways: Which specialists the practice usually refers to, whether there are any bulk-billing pathways available, and whether the practice has any shared-care arrangements with local hospitals or allied health providers.
Billing and Medicare: Whether the practice bulk bills, charges a gap, or operates entirely as a private billing practice. Whether you're expected to explain gap fees to patients or whether reception handles that.
You're still legally responsible for your own clinical decisions, even if the practice's systems are inadequate. The Medical Protection Society's guide for locum GPs covers medico-legal risk management in detail, including documentation standards, handover responsibilities, and managing clinical risk when you're unfamiliar with the patient cohort.
Locum Pools Versus Agency Placement
In the UK, NHS England has been promoting primary care flexible staff pools as an alternative to traditional agency-based locum work. The model involves creating a managed pool of pre-credentialed GPs who can be deployed across multiple practices within a geographic area, with standardised pay rates and governance oversight.
Australia doesn't have a direct equivalent at scale, though some Primary Health Networks and hospital groups have experimented with similar models. Most GP locum work in Australia still operates through direct practice-to-doctor arrangements or via recruitment agencies.
The agency model works because it manages the credentialling, contracting, and placement logistics that individual practices often don't have the capacity to handle. A practice needs a locum for three weeks while their regular doctor is on parental leave. They don't want to spend two weeks advertising, interviewing, checking credentials, and organising provider numbers. They want someone who can start next Monday and already has their indemnity sorted.
That's where agencies fill a gap. But not all agencies operate the same way. Some are transaction-focused, matching availability to demand without much clinical oversight. Others have clinicians managing the placement process, ensuring the match is appropriate and the credentialling is genuinely verified.
If you're choosing between a locum pool arrangement and an agency placement, the key questions are:
Who is managing your credentials? Is someone verifying your AHPRA registration, indemnity, and provider numbers before you're placed, or are you expected to self-declare and hope the practice checks?
Who is managing the contract? Are the terms clear in writing, or are you relying on a verbal agreement that could be disputed later?
Who is supporting you if something goes wrong? If there's a clinical incident, a billing dispute, or a rostering error, who do you call?
Building a Sustainable Locum Career
You can treat GP locum work as a short-term income source between jobs, or you can structure it as a deliberate career model. The difference is planning.
If you're going to work as a GP locum for more than a few months, you need to think about professional development, appraisal, and how you're going to maintain your fellowship requirements. The RACGP requires ongoing CPD participation and a triennial practice visit. If you're working across six different practices, none of which considers you a permanent staff member, organising that becomes complicated.
The RCGP's jobs advice toolkit includes portfolio career guidance that's useful here, even though it's UK-focused. The principle is the same: you need a structured approach to tracking your CPD, collecting evidence for appraisal, and ensuring you're meeting your college's revalidation requirements.
You also need to think about clinical variety. If you're only taking sessions at bulk-billing practices in high-turnover areas, you'll see a lot of acute presentations but very little chronic disease management or preventive care. That's fine if it matches your interests, but if you're aiming for fellowship or trying to maintain broad general practice skills, you need to be more deliberate about where you work.
Some doctors build a locum career by working regular sessions at two or three practices, becoming a semi-permanent fixture rather than a truly itinerant locum. This gives you better continuity, stronger relationships with patients and staff, and more influence over how the practice operates. It also makes it easier to maintain your professional development and meet fellowship requirements.
Other doctors prefer maximum flexibility, taking short-term assignments across different regions and practice types. This works well if you're combining locum work with other professional activities such as research, teaching, or specialist training. Regional locum placements can be particularly attractive because the pay is often higher, accommodation is sometimes provided, and the clinical variety is broader.
The article on building a sustainable locum career rather than just taking shifts as they come covers this in more detail, including how to structure your work to maintain professional development, manage tax obligations, and avoid burnout.
Contract Terms You Need to Get Right
Whether you're employed or contracting, the terms of your engagement need to be documented in writing before you start. Verbal agreements are not sufficient, and they create risk for both you and the practice.
A proper GP locum contract should specify:
Rate of pay: Hourly rate, daily rate, or session rate, and whether that's inclusive or exclusive of superannuation and leave entitlements.
Hours of work: Start time, finish time, and whether you're expected to stay late if appointments run over.
Notice period: How much notice either party needs to give to terminate the arrangement, and whether there's a probationary period.
Clinical governance: Who is responsible for clinical supervision, who you escalate clinical concerns to, and what the practice's policy is on prescribing high-risk medications.
Indemnity and insurance: Confirmation that you hold appropriate medical indemnity insurance and that the practice holds public liability and professional indemnity cover.
Provider number and Medicare billing: Whether the practice will arrange your provider number or whether you're responsible for organising it yourself.
Leave and cancellations: What happens if you need to cancel a session due to illness or personal circumstances, and what notice you're required to give.
The terms around cancellations are particularly important. Some practices will accept 48 hours' notice. Others require a week. If you cancel a session without adequate notice, you may be liable for the practice's lost revenue, which can be substantial if they've already booked a full day of patient appointments.
Conversely, practices sometimes cancel locum sessions at short notice, leaving you without income for that day. The contract should specify whether the practice is required to pay a cancellation fee or a minimum payment if they cancel within a certain timeframe.
The NHS Employers resources on recruitment and contractual arrangements provide a useful reference point for understanding what should be included in a locum contract, even though the NHS context is different from private general practice in Australia.
Regional Versus Metropolitan GP Locum Work
The clinical work is different. The pay is different. The support structures are different.
In a metropolitan practice, you're usually covering a standard consulting load of 15-minute appointments, mostly chronic disease and minor acute presentations. There's usually a hospital within 10 kilometres, pathology collection is available on-site or next door, and if you need to refer a patient urgently, there are specialists available.
In a regional or rural practice, you might be the only doctor in town. Your consulting load might include procedural work, antenatal care, aged care visits, and emergency presentations that would go straight to a hospital emergency department in a metro area. Your nearest hospital might be an hour away. Your nearest specialist might be three hours away. Pathology collection might only be available twice a week.
This isn't necessarily harder work, but it requires a different skill set and a different level of comfort with clinical uncertainty. You need to be confident managing a broader scope of practice, and you need to be comfortable with the fact that you can't immediately escalate or refer every complex case.
Regional locum work also tends to pay better, sometimes significantly better. Rates of $150 to $200 per hour are common in rural and remote areas, and some placements include accommodation and travel costs. The trade-off is that you're often expected to work longer hours, cover after-hours on-call, and manage a higher acuity caseload.
The decision about whether to take regional work often comes down to professional development goals and lifestyle preferences. If you're early in your career and trying to build broad general practice skills, regional locum work can be excellent experience. If you've got family commitments or other professional activities in the city, it might not be practical.
How GP Locum Work Fits into Workforce Planning
From a health system perspective, GP locum work is both a symptom and a stopgap. It's a symptom of chronic understaffing in general practice, particularly in rural and outer metropolitan areas where it's difficult to recruit permanent doctors. It's a stopgap because it allows practices to maintain service continuity when they can't fill permanent positions.
Large-scale research quantifying GP locum consultations in UK primary care has shown that locum consultations now account for a substantial proportion of all general practice activity, and the trend is increasing. Australia doesn't have comparable national data, but anecdotal evidence from practice managers and Primary Health Networks suggests the pattern is similar.
This creates tension. Patients prefer continuity of care, and the evidence suggests better health outcomes when patients see the same doctor over time. But if the alternative to a GP locum is no doctor at all, or a practice closing its doors because it can't recruit, then locum work becomes essential.
For individual doctors, GP locum work offers flexibility, autonomy, and often higher pay than salaried employment. For practices, it offers a way to manage leave, cover short-term gaps, and test out potential permanent recruits without committing to a long-term employment contract.
The challenge is ensuring that locum work is structured safely, with proper clinical governance, adequate handover, and appropriate credentialling. That's where recruitment agencies with clinical oversight make a difference, particularly when they're managing placements across multiple sites and ensuring consistency of standards.
Understanding how locum agency staff can assist both doctors and practices helps clarify the value proposition beyond just matching availability to demand.
Tax and Superannuation Considerations
If you're working as a contractor, you're operating a business for tax purposes. That means you need an Australian Business Number (ABN), you need to register for GST if your annual turnover exceeds $75,000, and you need to lodge a Business Activity Statement (BAS) quarterly or annually.
You're also responsible for paying your own tax via PAYG instalments, which the ATO will calculate based on your previous year's income. If you don't make these instalments, you'll face a large tax bill at the end of the financial year and potentially interest charges.
Superannuation is not automatically paid if you're contracting. You need to make your own contributions, either as concessional contributions (which are tax-deductible up to the annual cap) or non-concessional contributions (which are made from after-tax income). If you don't do this, you'll reach retirement age with a much smaller superannuation balance than a salaried employee who has had employer contributions made throughout their career.
You can also claim work-related expenses as tax deductions, including medical indemnity insurance, professional development, medical equipment, and a portion of your home office costs if you're doing administrative work from home. Keep records of everything.
If you're working across multiple states or territories, you may need to manage different payroll tax thresholds, workers' compensation arrangements, and registration requirements. This is where having an accountant who understands medical contractor arrangements is worth the cost.
When GP Locum Work Doesn't Make Sense
Locum work isn't the right fit for every doctor or every stage of career. If you're in the early stages of fellowship training and need close clinical supervision, taking locum shifts at practices where you're the only doctor on site isn't going to give you the support you need.
If you're trying to build a patient panel and establish long-term therapeutic relationships, moving between practices every few weeks will make that difficult. If you're managing complex mental health patients or chronic disease cases that require close follow-up, the lack of continuity inherent in locum work creates clinical risk.
If you value predictable income, set working hours, and employer-provided benefits like sick leave and annual leave, contracting as a GP locum will feel precarious. The flexibility comes at the cost of income stability and employment protections.
And if you're not comfortable with high levels of clinical autonomy, unfamiliar practice systems, and incomplete patient handover, GP locum work will be stressful rather than professionally satisfying.
The question isn't whether GP locum work is good or bad in the abstract. It's whether it fits your clinical skills, your professional development goals, and your personal circumstances at this point in your career.
GP locum work in Australia requires deliberate planning around credentialling, contracts, clinical governance, and professional development. It's not just about filling gaps in your schedule. If you're looking for properly structured locum placements where credentialling is verified, contracts are clear, and clinical oversight is managed by people who understand the work, Best Practice Medical connects doctors with locum opportunities backed by ISO 9001:2015 certified processes and in-house clinical oversight. Worth a conversation if you're building a locum career rather than just taking shifts as they come.