Support at Home, explained

Support at Home is the Australian Government programme that pays for help at home for older people. It started on 1 November 2025 and replaced Home Care Packages and Short-Term Restorative Care. The Commonwealth Home Support Programme is separate for now and moves across no earlier than 1 July 2027.

If you had a Home Care Package, you were moved onto Support at Home at a funding level equivalent to the package you had. You did not need to reapply.

Three categories, three different contributions

Every service sits in one of three groups, and the group decides what share of the price you pay. Your exact rate inside those ranges is means-tested — the Department works it out from your income and assets and writes to you with the figure. Nobody at a provider decides it.

• Clinical supports — you pay nothing. Nursing, wound care, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, podiatry, dietetics, care management. Fully government-funded for everyone, including self-funded retirees.
• Independence — you pay 5% to 50%. Personal care, help getting around, transport, respite, social support, assistive technology. Full pensioners pay 5%; self-funded retirees pay 50%; part-pensioners sit somewhere between.
• Everyday living — you pay 17.5% to 80%. Cleaning, laundry, gardening, home maintenance, meals and shopping. Full pensioners 17.5%, self-funded retirees 80%.

The logic is that clinical care is health care, and the government funds it in full; the closer a service gets to ordinary household spending, the more of it you cover yourself.

One change worth diarising

From 1 October 2026, personal care moves from Independence to Clinical. If you receive help with showering or dressing, your contribution for it drops to nothing on that date.

How the money arrives

Your funding comes as a quarterly budget. Ten per cent of it is set aside for care management — the work of coordinating your services, reviewing your plan, and dealing with the paperwork. The rest pays for the services themselves.

If you do not spend the whole quarter's budget, you keep either $1,000 or 10% of the budget, whichever is greater. Anything above that goes back to the government. It is worth knowing which way round that is: on an $8,000 quarterly budget, 10% is $800, so the amount you keep is $1,000.

Two shorter pathways

Alongside ongoing services there are two time-limited pathways. The Restorative Care Pathway funds around $6,000 over up to sixteen weeks, usually after a fall, a hospital stay or a period of decline, and is aimed at getting you back to where you were. The End-of-Life Pathway funds around $25,000 over twelve weeks, extendable to sixteen.

Where to check any of this

The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing publishes the classifications, the budgets and the contribution rates, and the figures are indexed each 1 July. Our own fee schedule lists what each service costs, and the budget estimator will show you what a week of support works out to against your quarterly budget.

If you would rather have someone explain it than read it, ring us on (03) 5229 0722.