Pulse ·
Australia's women's health PBS package: one year on, what changed
Australia's $573 million women's health PBS package — including the first new menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) listings in over 20 years and the first new oral contraceptive listings in over 30 years — has now reached more than 600,000 Australian women.
The package covers MHT (Estrogel, Estrogel Pro, Prometrium), newer oral contraceptives (Yaz, Yasmin, Slinda), and the endometriosis treatment Ryeqo. Since January 2026, the PBS co-payment for general patients dropped to $25. Thirty-three endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics are now expanding to deliver menopause and perimenopause care.
What just happened
Something shifted — not in the science, but in the system.
The Australian Government has released the first-year results of its women’s health PBS package — a $573 million commitment that has been quietly rewriting what it costs, and what it takes, for Australian women to access medicines they have needed for years. The numbers are significant enough to sit with: in the first year of the new PBS listings, 363,000 women saved $45.4 million on 1.5 million menopausal hormone therapy scripts. Three hundred and three thousand women saved $23 million on 573,000 oral contraceptive scripts. Six thousand seven hundred women with endometriosis accessed treatment at PBS prices, saving $4.9 million collectively.
These are not abstract statistics. Each one represents a prescription that previously cost $50 or $90 out-of-pocket — now accessible at $25 general rate, or $7.70 for concession holders.
The MHT listings — Estrogel, Estrogel Pro, and Prometrium — were the first new menopausal hormone therapy additions to the PBS in over two decades. That sentence requires a moment to register. Australian women have been navigating the perimenopause transition for more than twenty years without any new PBS-listed treatment options being added. The transdermal and micronised progesterone formulations that many women and their GPs now prefer — based on a significantly improved evidence and safety profile compared with older oral progestogens — were simply unsubsidised. That changed from March 2026.
Similarly, the first new oral contraceptive listings in over thirty years — Yaz and Yasmin, alongside the progestin-only pill Slinda — address a gap in clinical choice that has been visible for a generation. For women who require a specific progestin profile, access depended entirely on whether they could afford the private price.
The endometriosis treatment Ryeqo is now also on the PBS for eligible women — and beyond the individual medicines, 33 endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics have been established nationally, all now expanding to include menopause and perimenopause services. Pelvic pain and perimenopause are not separate clinical worlds. For many women they overlap in timing, in symptom burden, and in the accumulated experience of being told the tests are normal.
The both-and
The package has materially improved access. Access improvement is not the same as clinical care improvement. Both are true — and the distinction matters.
Reducing cost is a genuine lever. When a woman cannot afford the PBS price of her MHT, she either goes without or she rations. Both carry consequences: unmanaged vasomotor symptoms affect sleep, mood, cognitive function, and cardiovascular risk over time. RANZCOG has welcomed the package and noted that the new listings bring Australia closer to international standards for accessible women’s healthcare.
The harder question is whether improved access has been accompanied by improved knowledge — at the GP level, at the system level, and in the consulting room. Prescribing MHT well requires understanding it: its indications, its contraindications, the individual risk profile that determines whether a given woman is a candidate. The evidence base for MHT in perimenopause has evolved considerably since the reassessment of the WHI trial, particularly in relation to the cardiovascular risk signal that was overstated in the original analysis. But that evolution has not uniformly reached every GP, particularly in rural and regional areas.
There is also the equity layer. The 363,000 who have accessed MHT at PBS prices were, by definition, already in a consultation. The women who are not reaching those consultations — those in communities without a bulk-billing GP, without reliable transport, without confidence that the system will take their symptoms seriously — those women are not counted in the access numbers. Structural access barriers sit upstream of price.
2 cents
For women reading this: the PBS changes are real and they apply now. If you have been putting off a conversation with your GP about perimenopause or menopausal symptoms because the medicines were unaffordable — that barrier has been substantially lowered.
If you have endometriosis and have not revisited your management plan recently — the PBS listing of Ryeqo for eligible women means the pharmacological options have expanded. The 33 pelvic pain clinics now extending to perimenopause care are a referral pathway worth knowing about.
For the GP reading this: the backlog of women who previously went without — or who learned, across years of consultations, that their symptoms would not be taken seriously — may show up now with questions they have been sitting with for a long time. Being ready for that conversation is not a small clinical ask. It is the whole one.
This is general information. Whether any specific medicine is clinically appropriate depends on your individual history and risk profile — that conversation belongs in the consulting room.
Verdict
Verdict: yes — worth knowing about.
The first-year results of Australia’s women’s health PBS package represent a concrete, measurable improvement in access: 600,000+ women reached, medicines that were unaffordable now subsidised, and a national network of clinics expanding to cover perimenopause. The limitations are real — structural access barriers remain for the most marginalised women, and price is one lever among many. The direction is right, and the numbers confirm the policy has delivered.