Is Quokka free for patients?
Yes. Practices pay us, patients do not, and we add no booking fee to the price on the listing. Here is exactly how the money works, including the part that affects search order.
Last updated 11 September 2026
Yes. Patients pay nothing to use Quokka, and the price you see on a listing is the price of the appointment: we add no booking fee on top.
Who pays
Practices do, in two ways:
- A commission on bookings taken through Quokka. Where you book and pay here, we take a percentage from the practice. It comes out of what the practice receives, not out of what you pay.
- An optional membership. Practices can pay a subscription which lowers that commission.
Where a listing hands you off to the practice's own website to book, no money changes hands with us at all.
The part worth knowing
Premium membership affects the order of search results. We would rather say so here than have you work it out.
The ordering is:
- How soon the appointment is, banded by day. A slot today beats a slot tomorrow, whatever anyone pays. This is the most significant factor and it cannot be bought.
- The practice tier: premium members sit above connected, verified and unclaimed practices.
- Distance from where you searched.
So paying moves a practice up among appointments that are equally soon. It cannot put a practice with next week's availability above one that can see you this afternoon.
What paying does not buy
- It does not affect what a practice charges you. Prices are the practice's own.
- It does not buy a rating or a badge of quality. The "verified" labels describe how the practice is connected to us: whether they have claimed their listing and connected their booking system: not an assessment of their care.
- It does not buy a CQC rating. Those come from the regulator and we only ever repeat them, with the inspection date and a link.
Why we are telling you
A marketplace that takes money from one side and shows results to the other has an obvious conflict, and the usual approach is not to mention it. We would rather be the sort of thing you can check: everything above is also on our about page, and the ranking rules are the same ones the code applies.
If you find search results that do not match what is described here, tell us: that is a bug and we want to know.
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