Short answer: Often nothing. An ultrasound done at a public hospital usually has no charge, and one your GP orders under the national community criteria is free if the request is accepted. For an injury, ACC usually pays, but a part-charge is normal. A community pregnancy scan is capped at $30 with a Community Services Card and $90 without. Privately, the eight clinics in this guide publish their lists: in Hamilton alone an abdominal scan is $260 at The Ultrasound Clinic and $355.50 at River Radiology (16 September 2026). Every funded route starts with a referral.
On this page
Who pays for your ultrasound?
Ultrasound is the scan with the most funding doors, and two of them leave you a bill on the way out even when the scan is “funded”. That is almost never because the clinic is expensive. Work out which door your referral goes through and you have most of the answer.
Routes checked 16 September 2026. Prices are the clinics’ own listed figures on that date.
The door matters more than the postcode. At River Radiology, that $355.50 abdominal scan becomes a $40.00 part-charge on a weekday when ACC is paying; through the community route, if the request is accepted, the same scan costs nothing. If you are not sure which door you are standing at, our guide to who can request your scan sorts out the referral, and who qualifies for free imaging covers the public route in more detail. The rest of this page is about the two doors with a number on them.
Which ultrasounds are free through your GP?
There is a national list, and its current version dates from April 2026. A GP, urgent care doctor or nurse practitioner can send you straight for an x-ray, CT or diagnostic ultrasound without a hospital specialist seeing you first, and if the request meets the criteria the scan is free. The request goes to a radiology liaison, who checks it against the criteria and gives it a wait-time priority. Two things sit outside the list by design: scans ACC covers, and pregnancy scans funded under the maternity notice. Breast imaging is held over for a later part of the criteria, so a breast lump follows its own pathway.
For adults the ultrasound sections are abdomen, carotid, DVT, guided biopsy, musculoskeletal including shoulder, neck and thyroid, pelvis, renal, scrotum and soft-tissue mass. Each has its own conditions, and your GP works through them, not you. What the list is very clear about is the other side: the scans it does not routinely fund.
Examples from the adult ultrasound sections of the National Community Referral Criteria for Imaging, version 2.0, published 9 April 2026. They show the shape of the list, not whether you qualify; your GP writes the request and the liaison decides.
Read the right-hand column again, because it is the honest part. The scan you are most likely to pay for privately in New Zealand is not an exotic one. It is a sore shoulder, a heel, an elbow, a lump you are fairly sure is nothing. For a shoulder, the criteria say in plain words that ultrasound findings alone do not typically change the management approach: the scan would show you the tendon you already know is sore. If your GP suggests physiotherapy first, that is the system working, not the system saying no. If you still want the picture, the private price for exactly that scan is in the next table.
What does a private ultrasound cost?
The eight clinics below publish a full ultrasound price list on their own websites, and each has a listing in our directory. I have picked five common scans and copied each clinic’s figure for its own version of that scan, read on 16 September 2026. Where clinics describe a scan differently, the note under the table says so. DVT is a check for a clot in a leg vein; a transvaginal scan uses an internal probe for a clearer view of the uterus and ovaries.
Listed private prices in New Zealand dollars, read 16 September 2026 from each clinic’s own pricing page, in ascending order of the abdomen figure. The clinics label the scans slightly differently: the abdomen column is “Abdomen Upper (incl gallbladder)” at Auckland X-Ray, “Upper abdomen” at EchoNorth and UP, plain “Abdomen” at four clinics, and at Advance a whole-abdomen line that includes the kidneys; the pelvis column is the female or transvaginal-inclusive line where a clinic lists one; the thyroid column is the “Thyroid” line at EchoNorth, UP’s thyroid, soft-tissue lump, hernia or testis line, and the combined thyroid-and-neck line elsewhere; shoulder is the non-ACC musculoskeletal price at Advance, UP and EchoNorth; DVT is the one-limb or leg-only line at every clinic. Onsite’s page is headed “as at 1 July 2025”, and River says its prices are estimates and may change without notice; treat every list the same way.
A few things a radiologist notices in that table. The gap is widest where the scan is most variable: a thyroid or neck scan is $280 at The Ultrasound Clinic and $500 at Onsite (on a list dated July 2025), and a one-leg DVT is $260 in Hamilton and $470 in Whangārei. A shoulder barely moves: $260 at one end, $350 at the other. So for the musculoskeletal scan that is most likely to be your private one, ring the clinic you can actually get to rather than the cheapest one on the list; the saving is small and the sonographer who knows tendons is worth more than it.
Combined scans vary more than single ones. All eight clinics list an abdomen-and-pelvis price, from $400.00 at EchoNorth to $600 at Coastal, with $440 at The Ultrasound Clinic, $440.00 at Advance, $450.00 at UP, $467.00 at Auckland X-Ray, $520.00 at Onsite and $532.50 at River in between. If your referral names two regions, the combined line is the one that applies, not two single lines added together.
Then there are the extras that move a bill by a bank note or two. Advance adds $40.00 on a Saturday and $30.00 after 5 pm on a weekday, and takes $50.00 off a full private scan if you are seventy or over, or when several areas are scanned in one visit. UP adds $30.00 on a Saturday. River gives ten percent off to Gold Card and Community Services Card holders. If you hold private health insurance, some of the cost may be covered; policies differ, so read yours before you book, not after. What to eat or drink beforehand is in our ultrasound preparation guide.
Why an ACC ultrasound can still cost you something
This is the bill that surprises people. ACC will usually pay if your scan is needed because of an accidental injury, and you may have to pay for some of the procedure. For ultrasound, “some” has a name on every clinic’s list — a surcharge, a part-charge, a co-payment — and it runs from nothing to $80.00 depending on where you go.
As listed on each clinic’s pricing page on 16 September 2026. The ACC pages cited in this section were last read at source on 23 August and 9 September 2026.
Why does a scan ACC has agreed to fund still cost you $60.00 at one clinic and nothing at another, when an ACC CT or MRI billed under the high-tech contract carries no additional fee? My reading of the ACC paperwork, an inference rather than an ACC statement: standard x-rays and ultrasounds cannot be claimed under the high-tech imaging contract and go through the Cost of Treatment Regulations instead, where ACC pays part of the cost and the clinic may charge the rest. Duplex and Doppler ultrasound, the blood-flow scans, are included in the high-tech contract, and River’s list shows the split on one page: the ordinary ultrasound lines carry the $40.00 weekday surcharge, while the leg-vein Doppler lines read “ACC fully funded $0”. Same clinic, same machine, different contract.
Good to know: the part-charge is the clinic’s figure, not ACC’s, which is why it varies. Ask when you book whether the clinic will bill ACC for the scan and what you will pay on the day. Getting the injury covered in the first place is a separate step; our ACC imaging guide walks through it.
Pregnancy scans: the capped co-payment
If you were handed a bill for your twenty-week scan and wondered why, you were not imagining it. Health NZ pays community providers $92 per scan, a figure unchanged since 1997, and as costs rose clinics added their own fees; women have been paying between $30 and $155 per scan depending on where they live. Around 277,000 of these scans were done in community clinics in 2024.
From April 2026 there is a ceiling. A $12.9 million temporary top-up caps the co-payment at $30 if you hold a Community Services Card and $90 if you do not, lifts the total funding per scan to up to $225.50, and leaves public-hospital scans free. The clinics’ own lists now look like this for the anatomy scan at around twenty weeks:
Anatomy-scan co-payments as listed on 16 September 2026, for New Zealand residents with a referral. River Radiology’s page lists maternity charges but does not show whether it was updated for the April 2026 cap, and Onsite lists its maternity surcharge as a span rather than a figure, so neither appears here. Dating scans are often listed lower: $30 for a weekday dating scan at The Ultrasound Clinic, free with a card; $50.00 at EchoNorth.
Two moves are worth making. Say you hold a Community Services Card when you book, not at the desk; Advance, for one, wants to sight it before the appointment. And if $90 is a stretch, a nearby clinic may charge under the cap, and hospital scans stay fully funded. The cap is a temporary measure while the whole funding model is reviewed, so the figures above are this year’s, not forever’s. Which scans you will be offered and when is in our pregnancy ultrasound guide; clinics that do them are on the pregnancy ultrasound list.
Find a clinic and ask for the number
Our ultrasound clinic list groups New Zealand clinics whose own website names ultrasound, by brand, region and city, with a map and each clinic’s address and phone number. The eight clinics in this article are on it, and each publishes its list, so you can compare before you ring:
Auckland X-Ray Services, 290 Dominion Road, Mount Eden — price list.
Advance Ultrasound, Three Kings Plaza, 532 Mount Albert Road — price list, which also covers its Botany Junction clinic.
UP Ultrasound, 212 Dairy Flat Highway, Albany — price list.
The Ultrasound Clinic, 440 Anglesea Street, Hamilton — price list.
River Radiology, 30 Hood Street, Hamilton — price list; our record for River shows ultrasound as “likely also included” rather than confirmed, so it sits under that label on the ultrasound clinic list; its own ultrasound page is current.
EchoNorth Ultrasound Specialists, 50 Kioreroa Road, Whangārei — price list.
Eight examples from a longer list, chosen because they publish prices, in no particular order and with no endorsement implied. Listings and prices change after our check; the card below has the three things worth asking.
One more thing about referrals, since one of these clinics will take a booking without one. The Ultrasound Clinic says no referral is needed for most scans, though its subsidised pregnancy scans still need one. Health NZ’s position is simpler: you are referred by your healthcare provider and cannot self-refer. I would not argue with either. Every funded door on this page opens with a referral, and the referral is also what tells the sonographer what question to answer. A scan without a question is the one most likely to end with “normal” and no further forward.
Three questions for the clinic
✓ “For the scan written on this referral, what is my total — and is that one region or two?”
✓ “Will you bill this to ACC, the community radiology programme or maternity funding? Then what, if anything, do I pay?” — the three routes where someone else pays most or all of the bill.
✓ “And what is the first weekday slot?” — because at some clinics a Saturday costs more.
For a different scan, the MRI, CT and X-ray cost guides do the same job with the same rule: the door first, then the number.
Sources and review
Reviewed 16 September 2026 against Health NZ scans and x-rays, Health NZ ultrasound, Health NZ community referred radiology, the National Community Referral Criteria for Imaging, version 2.0, the 8 April 2026 maternity ultrasound funding update, Healthify, and the pricing pages of River Radiology, Auckland X-Ray Services, Advance Ultrasound, UP Ultrasound, The Ultrasound Clinic, EchoNorth, Onsite Ultrasound and Coastal Radiology. The ACC pages cited were last read at source on 23 August 2026 (what we cover and the high-tech imaging guidelines) and 9 September 2026 (treatment we pay for and the high-tech imaging service schedule). Prices are each clinic’s own listed figure on the review date and are not an average or a guarantee; the directory listings were checked live the same day.
This article is general information, not personal medical advice. Ask your referrer which service is available, and ask the clinic whether public funding or ACC cover applies and what you will need to pay.
Last updated September 2026
Author: Dr. Mark Bekhit
Dr Mark Bekhit (MBChB, FRANZCR) is a musculoskeletal radiologist practising in Brisbane and an AHPRA-registered specialist in diagnostic radiology (MED0002920947). He spends as much time building software as reading scans: he founded Imaging Finder (Australia) and Radiology Clinics NZ to make imaging easier to find, and builds radiology dictation and pain-tracking tools with one aim — better patient outcomes and a smoother reporting workflow. Outside the reading room he's usually training, bringing the same performance mindset to imaging.
Sources, method, and medical context
This article is published by Radiology Clinics NZ and reviewed for medical-adjacent accuracy by Dr. Mark Bekhit, radiologist. It is general information only and does not replace advice from your own doctor, referrer, clinic, insurer, or Health New Zealand service.
Official references
- Health New Zealand: scans and X-rays
- Health New Zealand: community-referred radiology service
- Radiology Clinics NZ: how the directory is built
Related directory pages
Radiology clinics directoryUltrasound clinicsBrowse by cityHow this directory is built
Last editorial review: 2026-06-30.
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