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Several Australian visa types require visitors to take out overseas visitor health cover (OVHC). Bupa offers several OVHC types and all options are 100% compliant with Australian 485 and 482 visas.
Pros
- It's well-known and trusted. Bupa is the second-largest health insurer by market share in Australia, just behind Medibank, and has a global presence.
- It comes with lots of options to suit various budgets – unlike many other brands.
Con
- It can't cover everything – you'll still incur out of pocket expenses if you need medical care.
Bupa Care Australia OVHC: Our verdict
Bupa is good if:
- You need to meet condition 8501 of your visa.
- You want to avoid ambulance fees.
- You aren't covered by a RHCA.
Bupa is not great if:
- You're overwhelmed by lots of choices.
- You're coming to Australia as a student – you'll need OSHC.
Review by our insurance and innovations editor Gary Ross Hunter

Hospital Coverage
Bupa offers six OVHC plans:
- Essential Lite Visitors Cover
- Essential Visitors Cover
- Essential 50 Visitors Cover
- Mid 60 Visitors Cover
- Premium Visitors Cover
- Premium 90 Visitors Cover
| Essential Lite | Essential | Essential 50 | Mid 60 | Premium | Premium 90 |
---|
Weekly starting cost | $22.39 | $25.96 | $31.81 | $42.68 | $61.99 | $91.09 |
Hospital cover | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | Top | Top |
Amount of costs covered | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | High | High |

Ambulance coverage
Bupa will pay 100% of the cost of emergency ambulance transport across Australia. Ambulance services aren't generally free in Australia.
We looked at the 2021 Ombudsman health insurance complaints. Here's how Bupa stacked up:
- It's good if you want a reliable customer service provider – it had a better complaint ratio than most of Australia's other large funds including HCF and nib.*
- While it didn't receive many complaints compared to market share, it's not quite the best. HBF, Peoplecare and Medibank did slightly better.
This chart shows the weighted volume of complaints received by each health fund, according to the Commonwealth Ombudsman. The lower the number, the better. Only non-restricted funds with a national market share of at least 0.1% are included here. Bupa is eleventh overall in this ranking. The weighting ensures that funds are compared fairly; larger funds serve more customers so can potentially get more complaints.