The median wait for home care services has doubled to 245 days

Where the time goes: the three stages

Getting help at home has three waits stacked end to end, and the public numbers measure each:

• Waiting to be assessed. In 2024-25 the median wait for a community-based assessment was 43 days from registration, and one in ten people waited 192 days or more. (Assessments arranged in hospital happen almost immediately: a median of one day.)
• Waiting for a package to be assigned. Once approved, the median wait to be assigned a funded package was 204 days in 2024-25, up from 78 days the year before. This queue, not paperwork, is the heart of the blow-out: approval says you need care; assignment is when the funding exists.
• Waiting for services to start. From approval all the way to a provider actually delivering services: a median of 245 days, up from 118.

Who gets seen faster

The system does triage. People assessed as high priority had a median wait of 12 days to package assignment and 40 days to services starting, figures that have stayed short even as the general queue lengthened. The gap between 40 days and 245 days is the practical meaning of the priority classification, which makes it worth asking about directly: if circumstances have worsened since assessment (a fall, a carer no longer coping, a hospital stay), a reassessment of priority is a legitimate thing to request, and hospital-arranged assessments run on an entirely different clock.

The residential side, for comparison: for people entering permanent residential care within a year of approval, the median elapsed time was 71 days. Across all entries, the overall median wait to enter residential care was 162 days in 2024-25, near its ten-year high (163 days in 2020-21, versus 84 days in 2015-16).

What these numbers do and do not say about Support at Home

An honesty note that most coverage of these figures skips: the 2024-25 year ended on 30 June 2025, four months before Support at Home replaced the Home Care Packages program on 1 November 2025. So the 245-day median is the queue the old program built and the new program inherited, not a verdict on the new program. The first official wait-time figures with Support at Home in them arrive in next January’s report, and that is the number that will show whether the redesign moved the queue. In the meantime the consumer peak OPAN reported in March 2026 that its advocates were still seeing “lengthy assessment and reassessment wait times”, which is an attributed observation from the people taking the calls, not yet a dataset. The Government’s own accountability reviewer has warned about what long waits do: pushing people toward residential care they did not want.

While you wait

• Ask where you are in the queue. My Aged Care can tell you your approval date, priority category and assignment status; keep the reference number from the approval letter handy.
• Raise changed circumstances. Priority is not fixed; if needs have escalated, say so and ask for reassessment.
• Use the advocates. OPAN’s advocacy service is free, independent and funded for exactly this; the Government expanded its funding in May 2026.
• Interim help exists. The Commonwealth Home Support Programme continues to operate separately until at least mid-2027 and can provide entry-level services while a package is pending; the assessment service can advise on it.

Primary sources

1. Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services 2026, Part F section 14: Aged care services (Part F PDF), released 29 January 2026.
2. OPAN media release, 6 March 2026 (advocates’ reports of assessment wait times).
3. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, 20 May 2026 (expanded OPAN advocacy funding; CHSP status).

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