BACKGROUND:Musicians’ health education is typically not embedded in music training, despite evidence demonstrating its positive impacts on students’ musical and health outcomes. There is growing advocacy for integrated health education with systemic change towards health promotion across music education settings. Research on musicians’ health education highlights the need for organisational support to facilitate a healthy settings approach, recommending research on strategies for enhancing students’ health literacy (HL) for sustained health behaviour change.HL research indicates that health information delivery alone does not necessarily lead to better health outcomes. HL situates individuals and their health in the dynamic interaction of individual, social, and environmental determinants of health. Musicians’ health literacy (MHL) is a multidimensional construct applicable in music contexts. Multiple factors, including organisational and cultural influences on behaviours, affect MHL. Consequently, MHL theory offers a rigorous framework for developing, implementing, and evaluating the integration of musicians’ health education within music education.AIM:The aim of this paper is to explore MHL as a guiding conceptual framework, essential competency, and learning outcome for embedding musicians’ health within music education. It will examine how MHL influences: student musicians’ health-promoting behaviours; health education design and delivery; and organisational responsibility for health in music education.APPROACH:An introduction to musicians’ health education and health promotion will be followed by definition and discussion of the occupation-specific construct of MHL, positioning it within context-dependent determinants of health. A comprehensive description of MHL, including its robust conceptual development in the Musicians’ Health Literacy Questionnaire (MHL-Q19), modelled from the European Health Literacy Survey (HLS-EU), provides the theoretical foundation. This research considers how dimensions of MHL can be applied as a conceptual and competency framework for health promotion in music education.RESULTS:The four HL dimensions of the MHL-Q19 encompass accessing, understanding, appraising, and applying musicians’ health information. These four dimensions interact with three domains of health: Healthcare (competencies relating to medical or clinical issues and advice); Disease Prevention (competencies concerning risk factors for musicians’ health); and Health Promotion (competencies related to the determinants of health). The matrix formed by these dimensions and domains of MHL can be used to design and scaffold the content and learning outcomes of health promotion programmes in music education.CONCLUSION:Micro and macro components of successful health promotion depend on high levels of HL across entire organisations. The MHL conceptual model offers music education a practical framework for individual and organisational health responsibility.