New TGA Guidance on Advertising Prescription Medicines: What Clinics Must Change Now

Published 19 June 2026

The marketing keeping your clinic full may be the same marketing that brings a regulator to your door. On 18 June 2026 the TGA published new guidance that sets out, in detail, the conduct it treats as unlawful advertising of prescription medicines. If you prescribe cosmetic injectables, weight loss medicines, peptides, medicinal cannabis, IV therapies or erectile dysfunction treatments, the pages already live on your website, your booking system and your social accounts are now measured against a published list. Some of what is on them was probably built by an agency that did not read that list.

The two documents do not change the law. They state the existing prohibition with far more specificity than before and give worked examples of breaches, which leaves you much less room to claim you read the rules a different way. The TGA also restated the penalties: civil penalties of up to $1.65 million per breach for individuals and up to $16.5 million per breach for corporations, plus infringement notices, directions, prevention notices, and civil or criminal proceedings. The individual figure is the one to sit with, since it attaches to a person, not only a company.

Summary

• The TGA published two documents on 18 June 2026: a new guidance on complying with the restrictions on advertising prescription medicines to the public, and a revised guidance on advertising health services that involve therapeutic goods.
• The Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 prohibits advertising prescription medicines to the public, with narrow exceptions for advertising directed exclusively to health professionals, information a practitioner gives a patient during treatment, and advertising a government authorises or requires.
• The prohibition covers indirect references, not only brand names: terms such as “weight loss injections”, “wrinkle reduction injections”, “plant-based medicine” and “peptides”, acronyms such as “GLP-1” and “CBD”, nicknames, hashtags, and images of syringes, pens or vials all count as references to prescription medicines.
• Framing the offer as a service does not exempt it: promoting a clinic or telehealth service as a way to obtain a particular prescription medicine, or implying a consultation will produce a prescription, advertises that medicine.
• The TGA names specific mechanics as capable of breaching the Act: business names, logos, booking systems, product catalogues, price lists, symptom checkers and condition dropdowns.
• Before and after photos are not prohibited, but they breach the Act when they attribute the result to a prescription medicine, directly or by implication.
• Influencer and content creator posts carry the same rules, and liability can sit with both the clinic and the creator.
• Penalties reach up to $1.65 million per breach for individuals and up to $16.5 million per breach for corporations. The per-breach structure means a single non-compliant page can give rise to multiple contraventions, though a court sets the final figure with reference to the totality principle.

Why the TGA Acted

The TGA’s position is that a patient should decide whether a prescription medicine is appropriate in consultation with a qualified health practitioner, and that advertising should not drive that decision. Prescription medicines carry higher risks than medicines sold over the counter. Advertising them to the public creates demand that the consultation is meant to assess, and it undermines the relationship between patients and their treating practitioners.

What Changed on 18 June 2026

The new guidance lists the specific terms, images and mechanics the TGA will treat as a breach, which closes down the “reasonable interpretation” argument. You could once argue you read “indirect reference” in good faith. That argument is far weaker against a published list. The TGA also moved the operational detail into a dedicated document, “Complying with the restrictions on advertising prescription medicines to the public”, and renamed the health services guidance from “Advertising a health service” to “Advertising health services that involve therapeutic goods”, which signals where its attention now sits.

Enforcement Supports the Guidance

In September 2025, the TGA issued ten infringement notices totalling $198,000 to telehealth business Midnight Health Pty Ltd for the alleged unlawful advertising of prescription-only weight loss medicines, which Midnight Health paid that month.

In 2019, the Federal Court ordered a $10 million penalty against peptides retailer Peptide Clinics Australia, a benchmark the TGA still cites in its enforcement record. The new guidance removes any argument that a business did not understand the rules.

Indirect References Breach the Prohibition

Most clinics respond to the prohibition by deleting brand names. Botox goes. Ozempic goes. That step is necessary, and it is not sufficient.

The TGA treats a wide range of substitute terms as references to prescription medicines when read in context. The guidance lists them: trade names, direct substance names such as semaglutide and sildenafil, abbreviations and acronyms such as GLP-1, CBD and BPC 157, class references such as “weight loss injections”, “wrinkle reduction injections”, “medicinal cannabis”, “plant-based medicine” and “peptides”, colloquial names and nicknames, and images that imply a prescription medicine, including syringes, applicator pens, vials, capsules and a cannabis leaf.

A consumer who reads “weight loss injections” understands what the clinic is promoting, even with no product named. The substitute term carries the promotion. A clinic that replaces “Ozempic” with “weight loss injections” has not removed the breach. It has reworded it. The test the TGA applies is contextual, which means the same word can be compliant on one page and a breach on another depending on what surrounds it. The companion guidance, “Determining if your content is advertising”, sets that test, and it is the document that decides the borderline cases.

Service Framing Does Not Exempt the Content

The guidance is direct about framing the offer as a service. Promoting a clinic or telehealth service as a way to obtain specific prescription medicines is unlawful advertising of those medicines. This covers content that indicates a service can supply or help supply particular goods, can prescribe a class of medicines, or offers consultations where the advertising implies a prescription will follow.

If your funnel is built around “select your condition, see what we can prescribe, book now”, it performs the conduct the guidance prohibits. A wording pass over that funnel leaves the breach in place, since the architecture is what promotes the medicine. You cannot rewrite your way out of this one. The structure of the user flow has to change, not just the copy on it.

The Mechanics the TGA Names

The guidance identifies where breaches occur. The TGA treats each of the following as capable of constituting prohibited advertising:

• Business names and logos: a name such as “Medicinal Cannabis Clinic”, or a logo using a stylised cannabis leaf or a blue pill, can promote a prescription medicine.
• Booking systems and product catalogues: a publicly searchable list of available medicines, or a booking page that names prescription treatments, promotes those medicines.
• Price information: listing a per-unit or total price for treatments that involve prescription medicines is itself advertising those medicines in most cases, and the Code permits price lists only in narrow circumstances.
• Symptom checkers and eligibility tools: a survey, questionnaire, checklist, chatbot or condition selector that directs a consumer to a prescription medicine advertises it.
• Direct marketing: a mass email or text to past patients about available injectable products is unlikely to be exempt, since it is not information shared during treatment.
• Third party links and re-shares: linking to or re-sharing content that promotes a specific prescription medicine can make the clinic’s own material an advertisement.

Cosmetic and Aesthetic Clinics

Most cosmetic injectables contain prescription-only substances, so they fall inside the prohibition. When you advertise a cosmetic service, you must not refer to those substances directly or indirectly. That rules out brand names, acronyms, colloquialisms, and hashtags that point to a specific product. The guidance gives a non-compliant example: a clinic promoting “dermal filler treatments” to reduce wrinkles and add volume. The reference to the product is the breach. This is the part clinics find hardest commercially, since the terms that breach the Act are often the exact terms patients search for, and removing them from a page can cost the rankings that page was built to win. That is a real problem, and it is solved by content built to rank on the consultation and the condition rather than the product, not by leaving the breach in place and hoping.

Before and after photos sit in a narrower position than many clinics assume. The Act does not ban them. It prohibits the implication that a prescription medicine produced the result. When a before and after sequence ties the outcome to an injectable, in words or in context, it advertises that injectable.

Testimonials Breach More Than One Regime

A testimonial about a prescription medicine advertises that medicine, which makes it unlawful under the Act. The Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code separately prohibits testimonials and endorsements from certain people, including health practitioners.

The Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (National Law) also prohibits the use of testimonials in advertising a regulated health service, which Ahpra sets out in its own advertising guidelines. A patient review describing a clinical outcome can breach the Act, the Code and the National Law at once.

The TGA, the Code, the National Law and Australian Consumer Law operate concurrently, and compliance with one does not create a defence under another.

A clinic can remove every TGA reference and still hold an Ahpra-reportable testimonial, or a pricing claim that breaches Australian Consumer Law. A review limited to the TGA guidance produces false confidence. The only safe posture is to check the content against all the regimes that apply to it.

Regulatory Analysis

The forward-looking views are inference from that record, not TGA statements, and are marked as such.

1. The enumeration is the real change, and it raises the standard of care: Once the regulator names the term, the image and the mechanic, a business that uses them is not making a defensible reading. It is acting against a published instruction. For any board or principal, “we took advice and formed a view” is a weaker position than it was a week ago.
2. Expect an enforcement sweep, and expect it soon (inference): The TGA published this specific guidance after the 2025 telehealth infringements and the 2019 peptides penalty, and its record is to act against the conduct its guidance names.
   • Our assessment is that an enforcement round against non-compliant clinic and telehealth content is likely within the next two to three quarters. This is inference from the enforcement record, not a TGA statement. The window between publication and action is the time to remediate, and it is open now.
3. The penalty exposure is a multiple, not a single ceiling: The headline figures are per breach. A single clinic website can hold many breaches at once: each named condition in a dropdown, each price line, each indirect term, each before and after that implies a medicine. Courts apply a totality principle when setting the final figure, so the theoretical maximum is rarely imposed. In the Peptide Clinics matter the Court calculated a theoretical maximum near $20 million across nine courses of conduct and imposed $10 million, which it described as mid-range. The practical lesson holds: exposure scales with the number of distinct non-compliant elements on a page, not with the existence of one.
4. Individual liability is built into the Act: The Act sets a separate, lower penalty tier for individuals, which means directors, marketing leads and prescribers can be pursued personally, not only the company. If you sign off the content, you sit in that tier. The current Federal Court proceedings against medicinal cannabis group Montu Group and its subsidiary Alternaleaf, and their common director Christopher Strauch, test director personal liability directly. The TGA alleges Mr Strauch is personally liable for the companies’ alleged contraventions. These allegations are unproven and the matter remains before the court. The point for any principal reading this is simple: the company is not the only thing that can be named.
5. Remediation will fail if it is treated as a copy task: The telehealth funnel finding makes this concrete. The conduct the TGA describes is structural, the path from condition to medicine to booking. A language pass does not remove a structural breach. Any remediation that stops at rewording, without changing the architecture of the booking flow and the design of any symptom checker or catalogue, leaves the exposure in place.
6. Watch three things next (inference): First, the companion guidance “Determining if your content is advertising” sets the contextual test that decides every borderline case, so it should sit alongside this guidance in any review. Second, the TGA’s social media and influencer guidance signals the next enforcement frontier, and clinics that rely on creators carry shared liability for that content. Third, the price-information rules under the Code are narrower than most clinics assume, and they warrant a dedicated review rather than a glance.

What to Do Now

Review your website, social accounts, booking platform and email templates against the guidance, and act on what you find:

1. Remove direct and indirect references to prescription medicines, including substitute terms, acronyms and imagery.
2. Reframe service copy around the consultation and the conditions you treat, not the medicines a patient might receive.
3. Remove prescription medicines from booking menus, catalogues and price lists.
4. Rebuild any symptom checker or condition dropdown that routes a visitor to a prescription outcome, treating it as a design change rather than a wording change.
5. Check the content against the TGA, the Code, the National Law and Australian Consumer Law together, not the TGA guidance alone.
6. Audit your influencer briefs, since liability can reach both the clinic and the creator.

A compliant position is narrower than the way much of the market currently operates, and the TGA has now documented what it will look for. The clinics that act first reduce their exposure before the enforcement activity that typically follows new guidance, and they get to stop wondering whether the next regulator contact has their name on it.

If your content refers to prescription medicines in any form, the question is no longer whether to review it. It is whether the people reviewing it understand all four regimes that apply, not the TGA guidance alone. Commission that review before your next campaign goes live.

References

Sources are primary TGA materials, Commonwealth legislation and public court records. Citations follow the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (4th ed).

A — Legislation

• 1. Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 (Cth) ss 42DL (criminal offences), 42DLB (civil penalties), 42DM and 42DMA (non-compliance with the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code).
• 2. Therapeutic Goods (Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code) Instrument 2021 (Cth).

B — Cases

• 3. Secretary, Department of Health v Peptide Clinics Australia Pty Ltd [2019] FCA 1107.

C — Other

• 4. Therapeutic Goods Administration, ‘TGA Releases New Guidance on Advertising Restrictions for Prescription Medicines’ (Media Release, 18 June 2026) <https://www.tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/tga-releases-new-guidance-advertising-restrictions-prescription-medicines>.
• 5. Therapeutic Goods Administration, Complying with the Restrictions on Advertising Prescription Medicines to the Public (Guidance, 18 June 2026) <https://www.tga.gov.au/resources/guidance/complying-restrictions-advertising-prescription-medicines-public>.
• 6. Therapeutic Goods Administration, Advertising Health Services That Involve Therapeutic Goods (Guidance, 18 June 2026) <https://www.tga.gov.au/resources/guidance/advertising-health-services-involve-therapeutic-goods>.
• 7. Therapeutic Goods Administration, ‘TGA Releases Updated Social Media Advertising Guidance to Support Improved Compliance’ (Media Release, 5 November 2025) <https://www.tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/tga-releases-updated-social-media-advertising-guidance-support-improved-compliance>.
• 8. Therapeutic Goods Administration, ‘Midnight Health Pty Ltd Issued Infringement Notices for Unlawful Advertising and Undertakes to Comply with Advertising Rules’ (Media Release, September 2025) <https://www.tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/midnight-health-pty-ltd-issued-infringement-notices-unlawful-advertising-and-undertakes-comply-advertising-rules>.
• 9. Therapeutic Goods Administration, ‘$10 Million Penalty Ordered against Peptide Clinics Pty Ltd for Advertising Breaches’ (Media Release, 23 July 2019) <https://www.tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/10-million-penalty-ordered-against-peptide-clinics-pty-ltd-advertising-breaches>.
• 10. Therapeutic Goods Administration, ‘Court Proceedings Initiated against Montu Group Pty Ltd, Alternaleaf Pty Ltd, and an Individual for Alleged Unlawful Advertising of Medicinal Cannabis’ (Media Release, 16 April 2024) <https://www.tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/court-proceedings-initiated-against-montu-group-pty-ltd-alternaleaf-pty-ltd-and-individual-alleged-unlawful-advertising-medicinal-cannabis>.
• 11. Therapeutic Goods Administration, Compliance and Enforcement: Regulatory Compliance Framework (Web Page) <https://www.tga.gov.au/safety/compliance-and-enforcement/compliance-management-enforcement#regulatory-compliance-framework>.
• 12. Therapeutic Goods Administration, Report a Perceived Breach or Questionable Practices (Web Page) <https://www.tga.gov.au/resources/resources/forms/report-perceived-breach-or-questionable-practices>.