You are entitled to and assigned a General Practitioner (GP) or a fastlege in Norwegian, so long as you are registered in the National Population Register as a resident in a Norwegian municipality.
You are normally assigned a GP but you may also opt to change the GP you've been assigned to, from an official list. You are allowed to change your GP twice in one calendar year. However, you may be waitlisted if the GP you’ve selected has a full list of patients.
It is necessary to wait until the first day of the following month for the change of your GP to take effect. You may change your GP via the bytte fastlege option on the Helsenorge site. This service is available only in Norwegian.
You are not entitled to a GP if you only have a D-number instead of a standard Norwegian national identifcation number. However, asylum seekers, NATO personnel, foreign personnel sent as representatives to Norway, and their families holding D-numbers are enttiled to a GP.
You may contact Helsenorge at +47 23 32 70 00 on weekdays from 08:00 - 15:30 if you have questions regarding GPs.
Your GP will assess if your condition can be treated by the municipal health services or whether it warrants treatment from a specialist.
If it is the latter, then your GP will send a referral to the specialist health service who will in turn have 10 working days to assess whether you need only medical investigations or treatment from the specialist health service.
You can ask for your referral to be reassessed if you disagree with the specialist health service’s decision.
In the case of an emergency, a referral is not necessary.
In the case acute injury or illness, contact the out-of-hours medical service (Legevakten) at 116 117.
The health care system in Norway is subsidised, which means that patients pay only a user fee for visits to their GP and for outpatient treatment.
User fees range from approximately NOK 179 to NOK 425 depending on the time of day of the visit (daytime or evening), the location (GP office or outpatient clinic), the type of treatment that is administered and so on.
Patients receiving treatment at an outpatient clinic (without being admitted) will have to pay both a user fee for consultation with a doctor and a user fee for any tests (X-ray, ultrasound, scans) that are conducted. The fees at outpatient clinics can range from NOK 287 to NOK 403.
Children under the age of 16 get the same GP as their mother. This is applicable only if parents have joint parental responsibility and share the same address.
The child will have the same GP as the parent with whom they live with in the case of shared custody.
For more info visit Helsenorge
If you’ve paid more than NOK 3278 in user fees for public heath services in 2025, you are eligible for an exemption card (frikort) which means you no longer have to pay user fees for the rest of the calender year.
You will receive the exemption card within three weeks from the date you hit the ceiling set for user fees for the year and you will also receive a refund if you have paid in excess of the set ceiling.
You can check online for information on your user fees and exemption card.
The user fee ceiling may be revised from year to year so check online for the ceiling set for a particular year.