AUSTRALIA | The Support at Home programme In Australia was intended to simplify home care and direct more funding towards services. For providers, however, the new operating model has created a much more immediate question: how much does it now cost to administer each hour of care?
The answer matters to home-care operators, their boards and the older Australians receiving services. When administration, travel, compliance and coordination must be recovered through the price of each service, the hourly rate can rise even when the worker delivering the care is being paid much the same.
Support at Home began on 1 November 2025 alongside Australia’s new Aged Care Act. Under the previous Home Care Package model, providers could charge separate package management and care management fees. Support at Home requires that administration and other delivery costs be incorporated into the service price.
The change was intended to make prices easier for participants to understand. It has also made the true cost of administration harder to see.
A price for an hour of domestic assistance, personal care or nursing is no longer simply the cost of the worker’s time. It may also need to cover scheduling, travel, payroll, supervision, documentation, care planning, quality assurance, compliance, software, invoicing, cancellations, and subcontractor management.
Providers must publish prices, keep service information current across their My Aged Care operational outlets and ensure that standard business-hours pricing is recorded for each active service. They must also clearly explain prices to participants and reflect them in service agreements.
The work continues after the service has been delivered.
Providers must claim the agreed unit price and the number of units delivered, claim against the correct funding source, invoice participants for any contribution and retain evidence for services and purchases, including those supplied by third parties.
Each requirement is understandable on its own. Together, they create an administrative chain around every visit.
A roster change may affect the worker, travel time, the service category, the price charged and the participant contribution. A cancellation may require the provider to determine whether any cost can be recovered. A subcontracted service needs to be matched against the participant’s budget, the supplier's invoice, and the claim submitted to the government.
If the provider’s rostering, care management, payroll, and claiming systems do not exchange information cleanly, the gap is filled by staff.
That is where the commercial cost begins to build.
The administrative burden cannot be treated as overhead that remains roughly the same regardless of client numbers. Much of the work is attached to individual participants, services and transactions. More clients can mean more service agreements, budget reviews, price updates, statements, contribution calculations, claims and reconciliations.
For larger operators, technology may automate some of this work. Smaller providers may have less capital to replace systems or employ specialist finance, compliance and data teams.
They may also have fewer clients to spread the fixed cost across.
The risk is that providers respond in one of three ways. They increase service prices, reduce the range of services they offer, or withdraw from locations where travel and administrative costs cannot be recovered.
Rural and remote delivery is particularly exposed. A one-hour service may require considerable travel, and cancellations can leave the worker’s paid time and vehicle costs unpaid and without a corresponding service claim. The Australian Government continues to provide thin-market grants to eligible rural, remote, and specialist providers, indicating that standard pricing alone may not sustain all forms of delivery.
The pricing debate has become more difficult because providers are expected to include administration costs in service prices. At the same time, consumers compare those prices with the time they actually spend in their homes.
An older person may reasonably ask why an hour of assistance costs substantially more than the worker’s wage. The provider must explain that the price supports the full operating system required to recruit, schedule, supervise, insure and account for that worker.
That explanation does not remove the need for scrutiny. It does show why a high hourly rate is not, by itself, evidence of excessive profit.
The Australian Government had planned to introduce formal Support at Home price caps from July 2026. It paused that move in May, saying providers needed more time to adjust and that the market needed to become more stable. The Government instead introduced stronger consumer protections, including quarterly publication of national pricing information and greater powers to seek refunds where providers overcharge.
The decision highlights the problem facing policymakers. Set the cap too high, and participants may pay more than is reasonable. Set it too low, and providers may reduce services, exit thin markets or attempt to recover costs elsewhere.
The Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority has now released its 2026–27 pricing advice. The work used cost information from 135 services covering more than 35,000 clients and separately examined labour, non-labour and administration components. However, the recommended prices are advice to the government, not formal provider price caps or mandatory benchmarks.
That data provides a useful national view, but averages will not settle the viability question for individual operators.
Administration costs may vary according to provider scale, geography, workforce model, use of subcontractors, participant complexity and the capability of existing technology. A metropolitan provider with dense routes and integrated systems may have a very different cost base from a regional not-for-profit coordinating a dispersed workforce across several towns.
The sector now needs more transparent operating information.
Providers should be able to identify how much staff time is spent on care delivery compared with scheduling, documentation, claims processing, participant communication, and compliance. They should also know the cost of processing each claim, producing each monthly statement and managing each service agreement.
Without that detail, administration risks being treated as an unavoidable percentage added to every service rather than a cost that can be measured and improved.
Boards should also ask whether new systems are reducing manual work or simply shifting it between teams. A software implementation may automate claiming, but create additional work for care staff entering data. A centralised roster may improve utilisation but reduce local flexibility. More detailed participant statements may improve transparency, but increase the workloads of finance and customer service.
The commercial measure is not whether a provider has installed new technology. It is whether the cost per delivered service has fallen without weakening care continuity or accuracy.
Support at Home has made administration part of the service price, but that does not make administration free. Providers still need to schedule the visit, manage the worker, document the care, calculate the contribution, issue the statement and submit the claim.
Until the sector can show what those activities cost, it will remain difficult to determine whether higher prices reflect efficient care delivery, unavoidable regulatory work or systems that have not yet caught up with the reform.
Support at Home will ultimately be compared not only by the number of services funded, but by how much of each participant’s budget reaches the worker at the front door.
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