This is educational context, not tax advice. Your chartered accountant decides your treatment.
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Ask us on WhatsAppA patient walks in for a consultation, the doctor prescribes a course of medicine, and reception dispenses it from the in-house pharmacy before the patient leaves. That is one visit, but it is not one GST treatment. The consultation is very likely exempt. The medicine is very likely taxable. Both lines belong on the same bill, and getting that split wrong in either direction is the kind of error a GST audit is specifically built to catch.
This article is not tax advice for your specific clinic. Confirm anything that affects your billing setup with your own chartered accountant before you rely on it.
The exemption attaches to the service, not to the fact that a doctor or a clinic is involved.
Consultations and diagnosis done as part of care sit inside the SAC 9993 exemption.
The exemption is deliberately narrow to "health care services". Day-to-day billing crosses it in three published ways.
For an OPD clinic, a walk-in pharmacy sale from your in-house pharmacy is ordinarily a taxable line, even on the same bill as an exempt consultation. On cosmetic work, whether a specific procedure is restorative or appearance-driven is a call for your CA. The room boundary is an inpatient, admitted-bed matter and will not apply to most OPD clinics.
For orientation only: see the shape of the boundary, not a final answer for a specific bill.
| Line item | Generally | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Doctor consultation fee | Exempt | Health care service, SAC 9993, Notification No. 12/2017-CT(Rate) |
| Diagnostic test ordered as part of treatment | Exempt | Part of the same health care service as the consultation |
| Medicine dispensed to an admitted inpatient | Generally exempt | Treated as part of one composite health care supply |
| Medicine dispensed to an outpatient / walk-in pharmacy sale | Taxable | Treated as a separate supply of goods, not a health care service |
| Reconstructive surgery (congenital defect, injury, trauma) | Exempt | Circular No. 32/06/2018-GST carve-back for therapeutic intent |
| Cosmetic/aesthetic procedure (appearance-driven) | Taxable | Expressly excluded by Notification No. 12/2017-CT(Rate) |
| Hair transplant | Taxable | Expressly excluded by Notification No. 12/2017-CT(Rate) |
| Non-ICU hospital room, ₹5,000/day or below | Exempt | Threshold not crossed |
| Non-ICU hospital room, above ₹5,000/day | Taxable at 5%, no ITC | Entry 31A, Notification No. 03/2022-CT(Rate), effective 18 Jul 2022 |
| ICU / CCU / ICCU / NICU room, any daily rate | Exempt | Explicitly carved out of Entry 31A |
The billing system has to put an exempt line and a taxable line on one bill, correctly, every time.
Five checks that hold regardless of which software your clinic runs.
No, not as a rule. Notification No. 12/2017-Central Tax (Rate), dated 28 June 2017, exempts health care services provided by a clinical establishment, an authorised medical practitioner, or para-medics (SAC 9993) from GST, and a doctor's consultation fee for diagnosis, treatment, or care falls squarely inside that definition. This is the general rule, not a determination for your specific practice structure, so confirm with your chartered accountant if your consultation is billed through an arrangement that might sit outside it, for example a corporate or franchise billing structure.
For outpatients, generally yes. Guidance and rulings interpreting the health care services exemption draw a line between medicines given as part of inpatient treatment, which are typically treated as part of one exempt composite supply, and medicines sold to an outpatient, which are typically treated as a separate, taxable supply of goods because the patient could in principle buy them from any pharmacy. Since CuraVerto is built for OPD-first clinics, this second case is the common one: an in-house pharmacy sale to a walk-in or outpatient is ordinarily taxable at whatever GST rate applies to that medicine's HSN code. Confirm the treatment for your specific dispensing model with your CA.
Usually, yes. The same Notification No. 12/2017-Central Tax (Rate) that exempts health care services expressly carves out hair transplant and cosmetic or plastic surgery, and CBIC Circular No. 32/06/2018-GST (12 February 2018) clarifies that this carve-out does not apply when the procedure is undertaken to restore or reconstruct anatomy or bodily function affected by a congenital defect, developmental abnormality, injury, or trauma. In practice: reconstructive work generally stays exempt, and appearance-driven aesthetic work generally does not. Where a procedure could plausibly be argued either way, that determination belongs to your CA, not to this article.
Since 18 July 2022, a hospital room (other than ICU, CCU, ICCU, or NICU) billed at more than ₹5,000 per day attracts 5% GST without input tax credit, under Entry 31A inserted by Notification No. 03/2022-Central Tax (Rate). This is an inpatient, hospital-bed boundary. It will not come up for most OPD clinics, which is the majority of CuraVerto's customer base, but it matters if your practice also runs admitted beds.
Yes. Nothing in GST law requires a clinic to split an exempt consultation and a taxable pharmacy item onto separate bills; the requirement is that each line is treated, and taxed, correctly for what it actually is. CuraVerto's billing engine supports this at the line-item level: every service and catalog item carries its own GST-applicable flag and rate, so a single invoice can total an exempt consultation line at 0% GST and a taxable medicine line at its own configured rate, with CGST/SGST computed only on the taxable lines, while the document still gets one fiscal-year-correct number. CuraVerto applies whatever treatment your catalog is configured with; it does not decide for you which of your services should be exempt or taxable, that determination is still yours and your CA's to make.
Set the GST treatment once per service or catalog item, and every invoice, exempt and taxable lines together, gets billed and numbered correctly from Essential onward. Flat annual pricing, exclusive of GST, no per-doctor fee.
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