The Fair Work Commission has changed three aged care awards over recent years: the Aged Care Award, the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services (SCHADS) Award and the Nurses Award. Most of those changes have already been made, including several pay rises since 2022. Tomorrow’s is the last of the agreed increases for nurses under the Aged Care Award.
The Commission’s framing of what follows is careful and worth repeating exactly: when awards change, providers “may need to change their business and pricing models”, but they “can’t make changes that have a negative effect on the quality and safety of care and services to older people receiving funded aged care services”. Price may move. Care may not shrink to fund it.
The three practices, and what each looks like on your paperwork
1. Minimum service times as a standard rule. The Commission names “minimum service times, such as 2-hour shifts, in service agreements” as unacceptable. Its reasoning is that you “should only provide and charge for services for the time needed”, and while “sometimes 2-hour services are appropriate, they should not be a standard minimum requirement and must be based on the person’s assessed needs”.
That is the distinction to check. A two-hour visit because two hours of care was assessed is fine. A two-hour minimum applied to everyone, including someone whose assessed need is forty-five minutes, is not, and it converts unused time into billed time.
2. After-hours rates on standard-hours work. The Commission names charging incorrectly “for services that extend across standard and after-hours periods”, and is specific about the fix: “You must charge for time worked during standard hours at the standard rate, not the higher after-hours rate.”
In practice that means a visit straddling the boundary should be split, not rounded up to the more expensive rate. If a service began before the after-hours threshold, the earlier portion is standard-rate time.
3. Blaming the award for longer minimum visits. The third is the one that is hardest to see from the outside, and the Commission calls it what it is: using “misleading terms and conditions, such as claiming that changes to an award mean you need to apply longer minimum service times”. Its answer is a single sentence that does a lot of work: “Award changes might affect staffing costs and pricing, but they don’t change the amount of care a person needs.”
An award sets what a worker is paid per hour. It says nothing about how many hours a particular older person requires. Any explanation that runs from the first to the second is, on the regulator’s own account, misleading.
What the Commission says it will do
“If we find providers doing any of these, we will take action to protect older people.” That is the whole of its stated enforcement position on the point, and it is worth noting it is written to providers in a provider bulletin rather than announced to the public.
Our view, labelled as such: publishing this before the pay rise rather than after it is the useful part, and it is a better piece of regulation than an enforcement action would be. The three practices are precisely the ones a provider under genuine cost pressure would reach for first, and each can be dressed as an administrative necessity. Naming them in advance removes the excuse. Whether it removes the practice depends on whether anyone checks their service agreement, which is why they are set out here.
If something on your agreement or invoice matches one of the three, the Commission’s complaints line is 1800 951 822. Its own guidance elsewhere is that every complaint is assessed and can inform regulatory action.
How we sourced this
The three changed awards, the statement that most changes are already made including several pay rises since 2022, the 1 August 2026 final increase for registered and enrolled nurses covered by the Aged Care Award, the principle that providers may change business and pricing models but not in ways that negatively affect quality and safety of care, all three named unacceptable practices with the Commission’s reasoning quoted, and the enforcement statement are from the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission’s Aged Care Quality Bulletin #7-2026, read on 31 July 2026.
We have not read the award instruments themselves, so the description of what the Fair Work Commission changed is the regulator’s summary rather than our reading of the awards. The worked explanations of what each practice looks like on an invoice are ours, drawn from the Commission’s stated reasoning; they are illustrations rather than legal advice, and no claim is made about any provider. The paragraph beginning “Our view” is opinion built on the sourced facts above it.
Primary sources
- Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, Aged Care Quality Bulletin #7-2026 (read 31 July 2026), and in particular its article “Aged care awards change”: the three awards changed by the Fair Work Commission, the 1 August 2026 final agreed pay increase for registered and enrolled nurses under the Aged Care Award, the limit on changing business and pricing models, the three unacceptable practices covering minimum service times, after-hours charging and misleading terms and conditions, and the statement that the Commission will take action.
- The Long View, From 1 August, aged care nursing pay rises for the last time under the work value case: our earlier reporting on the increase itself.
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