Billings-per-FTE Benchmark Calculator

What the number is

Billings per FTE is total billings divided by total full-time-equivalent practitioners. The calculator also shows it per operating day, which is often the more useful figure because it removes the effect of how many days a year the practice opens.

It is a single number standing in for a lot of different work. A practice doing long cognitive consultations and a practice doing short procedural work can produce very different billings per FTE without either being badly run, which is the main reason the benchmark is a prompt rather than a verdict.

FTE is not headcount

A part-time GP working three days a week is 0.6 FTE, not 1.0. Mixing headcount and FTE makes billings per FTE look artificially low and leads to conclusions about productivity that the underlying data does not support.

Allied health and nursing staff count towards FTE because they contribute to billings, even where the contribution is indirect. A practice nurse who frees the GP to see two extra patients a day is generating revenue, and excluding her understates the practice's capacity.

The three things that drive it

Billings per FTE is a function of consultation rate, average fee per consultation, and utilisation. A practice can improve any of the three, and they trade against each other.

Shorter consultations raise throughput but may reduce quality and patient satisfaction. Higher fees raise revenue per consultation but may reduce volume. Better utilisation, meaning fewer gaps and less downtime, raises both at once and is usually the cheapest of the three to improve.

Why a median is weak evidence for one practice

A median says nothing about case mix. A practice whose GPs spend their day on chronic disease management and mental health care plans will bill far less per hour than one doing skin checks and minor procedures, and neither is under-performing. The mix, not the effort, drives the difference.

Location matters as much as specialty. Rural and remote practices often bill less per FTE and carry higher costs at the same time, so a national median read as a target would mislead them in the wrong direction.

The bulk-billing proportion matters too, and it is the one a practice can most easily change. A practice that shifts its mix will move its billings per FTE without any change in how hard anyone is working.

Better comparators than a median

Your own history is the strongest comparison available. A practice that knows its billings per FTE for the last three years can see a trend, and a trend is evidence in a way that a single reading against an industry figure is not.

The second best is your own practitioners against each other, adjusted for their sessions and their case mix. That comparison holds the practice's systems, location and patient base constant, which is most of what makes an external median unreliable.

What these ranges are, and are not

The ranges this calculator uses are indicative, and they are the site's own working figures rather than a published dataset. They are not adjusted for case mix, location or billing mix, and they carry no check date because there is no authoritative source to check them against.

That is why the calculator is labelled as using indicative benchmarks rather than verified rates, and why the result is presented as a percentile band rather than a precise position. Treat it as a reason to look closer, not as a finding.

Worked example: a dental practice adding a part-time associate

Take a single-dentist practice billing $500,000 a year against 1.0 FTE. That is $500,000 per FTE, above the $450,000 median for dentists and comfortably inside the $320,000 to $650,000 range this calculator treats as typical.

Add a part-time associate at 0.4 FTE without an equivalent lift in total billings, and the same $500,000 now spreads across 1.4 FTE. Billings per FTE falls to roughly $357,000, near the bottom of the dentist range, even though total billings has not fallen by a single dollar.

That drop is not a productivity problem. A new associate typically spends months building a book of regular patients, and the benchmark reflects an established caseload, not a ramp-up period. Read the number again a year later, once the associate's list has matured, before drawing any conclusion from it.

Worked example: why mixing professions on one FTE line can mislead

This calculator collects one billings figure and splits it across practitioner types in proportion to their FTE count, because it does not ask you to bill each profession separately. For a single-profession practice that is harmless. For a mixed practice it can produce a comparison that looks precise but is not.

Take a practice with 2 GPs and 1 practice nurse, 3.0 FTE in total, billing $1,200,000. Billings per FTE is $400,000 overall, and because the calculator spreads that evenly across types, it checks the GPs against their $280,000 to $500,000 range at $400,000, a reasonable-looking result, and checks the nurse against her $50,000 to $120,000 range using that same $400,000, which is more than three times the top of her usual range.

The nurse has not out-billed every GP benchmark in the country. The number is the practice's blended average attributed to her line as if she generated it alone. Where a practice genuinely mixes professions, treat the per-type benchmark rows as a rough steer at best, and rely on the overall billings-per-FTE trend, or an actual breakdown of billings by practitioner, before concluding anything about one role.

What to do with the answer

If the number sits below the range, find out why before deciding what to change. The cause is usually one of four things: not enough patient demand, too much unfilled time in the diary, a fee schedule that has not been reviewed, or a case mix that explains the difference entirely.

If it sits above the range, the useful question is whether it is sustainable. High billings per FTE can come from very short consultations or from practitioners working unsustainable hours, and both have a cost that does not appear in the number.