The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing states it plainly: The Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) price is $303.19 from 1 October 2026. The page carrying it is stamped last updated 1 October 2026, the day the price took effect and two days after the previous one lapsed.

That is a rise of $7.55 on the $295.64 that ran from 1 October 2025, or 2.55 per cent. For a home, the figure is multiplied by each resident’s classification weight and base care tariff, so it moves every bed in the country at once.

The government took the recommendation to the cent

The Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority recommends the price and the government sets it. This year there is no daylight between them. IHACPA’s advice says The Pricing Authority recommends the AN-ACC price for the period 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2027 to be $303.19 per NWAU, and $303.19 is what the department has published.

Worth noting because it is not always so: the Authority also recommends that the class price weights set from 1 October 2025 be retained, and records that it acknowledges the concerns of the Minister for Health and Ageing in relation to stability of funding for residential care homes. The weights are the part that would redistribute money between homes. They have not moved.

Where $303.19 comes from, which is the part worth reading

The advice sets out the derivation in one sentence: The recommended AN-ACC price from 1 October 2026 was calculated by indexing the average cost per NWAU of $252.14 in 2023–24, adjusted to meet the care minutes responsibility, by a total of 19.6%. A further $1.56 was then added to cover costs associated with outbreak management.

So the number funding beds from this month is anchored to what care cost in 2023-24, carried forward by an indexation factor. That is not a criticism of the method, which is how a cost-based price has to work when audited cost data takes years to assemble. It is the thing to hold in mind whenever the price is described as reflecting current costs. It reflects measured costs from three financial years ago, plus an estimate of what has happened since.

The 19.6 per cent is itself three things, which the advice lists as Fair Work Commission work value case decisions (5.8%), superannuation guarantee increases (0.8%) and inflation and wage rises (12.2%).

Those three numbers do not add to 19.6, and that is not an error

5.8 plus 0.8 plus 12.2 is 18.8, not 19.6, and a careful reader will notice. The components compound rather than add: applying them in sequence gives 19.66 per cent, which is the stated total. We checked the whole derivation the same way. Indexing $252.14 by 19.6 per cent gives $301.56, and adding the $1.56 outbreak component gives $303.12, seven cents under the published $303.19. The gap is the care-minutes adjustment the sentence describes, which is applied to the base before indexation.

What the department attributes to wages

Of the new price, the department says $1.91 is attributable to the 1 August 2026 FWC award wage increases for aged care nurses and $0.05 is attributable to the 1 October 2026 and 30 June 2027 FWC award wage increases for allied health professionals. Together that is $1.96 of the $7.55 rise, a little over a quarter of it.

The money is not unconditional. Providers are required to attest in the Quarterly Financial Report that they have passed on additional funding to increase minimum award rates for aged care workers. The attestation is a provider’s own statement in a return, which is a lighter instrument than an audit, and it is the only mechanism named.

The timing, because we have been counting

This masthead tracked the missing price through five dated re-checks, on 18 and 29 July and 5, 18, 23 and 29 August, and each time the 2026-27 figure was not published and IHACPA’s residential pricing advice page listed nothing later than 2025-26. That reporting was accurate. IHACPA’s page records the advice as published on 2 September 2026, four days after our last check, though the document itself is dated July 2026.

The sequence is therefore: advice written in July, published on 2 September, price effective 1 October, and the department’s page confirming the figure on the day it started. Providers building 2026-27 budgets had the recommendation from early September and the confirmed price on the morning it applied.

One smaller consequence of the same reorganisation: the department’s funding updates page, which used to carry a dated log of exactly these changes, no longer exists. The price is now stated on the general funding page instead, without the change history that made it possible to see when a price last moved.