What help at home actually costs

Cost is the question people are most reluctant to ask and most anxious about. It is also answerable, so here it is plainly.

Three numbers decide what you pay

The price of the service, the category it sits in, and your contribution rate. Multiply the first by the third and that is your share; the government covers the rest out of your quarterly budget.

The price

Ours is published in full, service by service, on our fee schedule. To give you the shape of it: personal care is $119 an hour with a two-hour minimum, domestic cleaning $109 an hour, gardening $120, an Enrolled Nurse $174, a Registered Nurse $224. Nights, weekends and public holidays cost more, and those rates are published too.

Anything not on the schedule is charged at cost plus 10%, or at whatever we agree with you beforehand. We ask for two business days' notice to cancel a booked visit.

The category

Clinical care costs you nothing. Independence services are 5–50%. Everyday living is 17.5–80%. There is more on why in Support at Home, explained.

Your rate

Means-tested by the Department, which writes to you with it. Full pensioners are at the bottom of each range, self-funded retirees at the top, part-pensioners in between.

A worked example

Two hours of personal care a week, for a full pensioner. Two hours × 13 weeks × $119 is $3,094 a quarter. At 5%, your share is about $155 for the quarter — roughly $12 a week. The government's share, about $2,939, comes out of your quarterly budget.

The same two hours for a self-funded retiree at 50% would be about $1,547 for the quarter, and would draw about half as much from the budget.

You can run your own version of this on the budget estimator. It does not ask for your income, your assets or your contact details.

What the budget has to stretch to

Ten per cent of every quarterly budget goes to care management before any service is booked. What is left is what buys hours. It is the single most common surprise, so it is worth doing the arithmetic before you plan the week.

If the funding does not cover what you need

Two options, and both are normal. You can prioritise — most people find that clinical care and personal care matter more than having the lawns done, and the lawns can be paid for privately. Or you can pay privately for extra hours on top of your funded ones, at the same published prices.

What should not happen is a surprise. If you ever get an invoice you were not expecting from us, ring and we will explain it or fix it.