If you are working out whether a parent should get help at home or move into care, this is the shape of the system you are choosing inside. It is not a close contest and it has not been for years.
| Program | 2017 | 2025 | Change | People added |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home care | 71,900 | 293,000 | +307% | +221,100 |
| Permanent residential care | 179,000 | 196,000 | +9.9% | +17,000 |
The percentages are the AIHW's. The two right-hand figures are our subtraction of its numbers, and they are the ones worth holding onto: for every extra person in residential care, thirteen more were being supported at home.
The growth is not happening at the same end of the system
The same page gives the age split, and it complicates any simple reading that home care is quietly replacing residential care. At 30 June 2025, 59 per cent of people living in permanent residential care were aged 85 and over, compared with 41 per cent of people using home care.
Our reading, labelled as such. Residential care is where the oldest cohort is, and it grew barely at all. Home care grew enormously and skews younger. So the system did not so much shift people from one to the other as add a very large number of people at the front door, earlier in life, while the deep end stayed roughly the size it was. That is a different thing from substitution, and it matters for a family: the fact that almost everyone now starts at home does not mean residential care has become rare or avoidable. It means the group who need it are older when they get there.
Around two in three people using aged care services at 30 June 2025 were women.
Why 30 June 2025 is the date to notice
These figures stop at 30 June 2025, and that is not a data lag so much as an edge. On 1 November 2025, as we have reported in setting out what Support at Home is, Support at Home replaced Home Care Packages and the Short-Term Restorative Care programme, on the day the new Aged Care Act commenced.
So the 293,000 figure is the last full picture of the programme that produced the 307 per cent, taken four months before that programme stopped existing under that name. The demand it represents did not go anywhere. It was handed to a new system with a new assessment structure and new budgets. Anyone judging Support at Home's first year should start from this number, because it is what the new programme inherited rather than what it created.
What we are not saying
Nothing here is a judgement about whether the growth was well managed, whether home care is better or worse than residential care, or whether either is adequately funded. The AIHW page is a count of people using services. It does not measure whether they got enough hours, waited too long, or would have preferred something else, and we have written separately about how long the wait for home care has become, which is a different question with a different source.
One measurement note, because it is the sort of thing that trips up a comparison. The residential figure above is permanent residential care. Residential respite is a separate count, so a total that includes respite will be higher than 196,000, and two published numbers that look contradictory are often just these two different measures.
How we did this
Read from the AIHW's GEN aged care data topic page, People using aged care, downloaded and read on 28 August 2026 and last updated by the AIHW on 29 May 2026. The two growth percentages, the 2017 and 2025 counts, the 85-and-over split and the proportion of women are quoted or taken directly from that page. The people-added column and the ratio of thirteen to one are our arithmetic on the AIHW's counts, and are labelled above as ours. The 1 November 2025 commencement of Support at Home comes from this masthead's earlier reporting on the programme, which is sourced there. We have not contacted the AIHW or the department; this is a reading of published national data.
Sources
- Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, GEN aged care data: People using aged care (last updated 29 May 2026, read 28 August 2026): that between 2017 and 2025 people using home care rose from 71,900 to 293,000, a 307 per cent increase; that people using permanent residential care rose 9.9 per cent from 179,000 to 196,000 over the same period; that at 30 June 2025, 59 per cent of people in permanent residential care were aged 85 and over against 41 per cent of home care users; that around two in three people using aged care services were women; and the description of the three main service types including the separate treatment of residential respite.
- Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Older Australians (read 28 August 2026): consulted for the population context behind these counts.
- This masthead's earlier reporting on Support at Home, for the 1 November 2025 replacement of Home Care Packages, and on home care wait times.