From 1 October you cannot be asked to contribute to the cost of showering or dressing. The tool for checking whether prices moved is three months late

What changes on 1 October

Support at Home splits services into contribution categories. Clinical care is the category nobody pays into: the price summary says plainly that no one will pay any contributions for clinical care services. Independence and everyday living are the categories where a participant contribution applies, scaled by a means assessment.

Personal care has been on the paying side of that line. From 1 October it is not. The consumer protections fact sheet lists what you cannot be charged, and one of the items is to be asked to contribute to the cost of clinical care, including care management. From 1 October 2026, this includes personal care (which includes showering, dressing and continence management).

If you are a participant, or you manage a parent’s package, that sentence is the one to keep. From that date a contribution line against assistance with showering, dressing or continence management is not something you should be seeing. The fact sheet says what to do if you do: If you see charges for these items, in the first instance you should speak to your provider.

The department expected prices to move, and said so

Here is the part that makes this more than an administrative note. When the government deferred Support at Home price caps, it replaced them with a package of consumer protections, and one of the listed protections is close monitoring by us and the Commission of any changes in the price of personal care as it moves to the clinical supports contribution category from 1 October 2026.

That is the department saying, in its own document in May, that a category change of this kind can move a price, and that it would be watching. The logic is not hard to follow. When a service stops drawing a participant contribution, the participant stops being the person who notices the price.

The public instrument for noticing is overdue

The same fact sheet lists the tool. Among the additional protections is publishing a new National Summary of Support at Home Prices each quarter on our website, showing the median and the range of prices charged by providers so older Australians and their families can see how their provider compares. Elsewhere it tells participants they can compare their provider with the National Summary of Support at Home Prices, which will be updated each quarter on our website.

One has been published. It covers November to December 2025, it was published on 19 May 2026, and it scheduled its own successor: The Department expects to produce these pricing summaries on a quarterly basis. The next summary is scheduled for publication in July 2026 and will reflect the January to March 2026 quarter.

As at today, 30 September 2026, that second summary has not been published. The department’s Support at Home pricing resources collection still lists only the November to December 2025 edition, and the collection’s own last-updated stamp is 24 June 2026. So the comparison tool a participant is pointed at from 1 October describes a quarter that ended nine months ago, and it is roughly three months past the date the department set for its replacement.

We have said before that the first summary was worth having, and it was. This is not an argument that the department publishes nothing. It is that a transparency measure adopted in place of price caps only works at the cadence it was promised at, and the first test of that cadence has been missed, in the quarter before a category change the department itself said it would be watching prices through.

What the one published table actually says about personal care

Since it is the only table there is, it is worth knowing what it shows for the services that change category on 1 October. These are national medians for weekday services, from claims for the November to December 2025 period.

Medians as published. The final column is our arithmetic, doubling the published 30 minute median and comparing it with the published 1 hour median. The summary also publishes a range around each median, which for continence management at 1 hour runs from $32 to $149.

Two half-hour visits cost more than one hour-long visit, in every one of these services. For continence management the two half-hours come to $110 against $82 for the hour, a premium of about a third. That is not evidence of anything improper: a visit has fixed costs that do not halve when the visit does, and travel is the obvious one. But it is a lever a participant on a fixed budget may not know they have, and the direction is consistent across all three services.

Our earlier piece on this table deliberately left the 30 minute tables unused. They are used here because the services they cover are the ones changing category on 1 October.

What a participant or family should do this week

Three things, all supported above.

Compare the October statement with the September one. Providers must issue monthly statements. The change takes effect on 1 October 2026, so the October statement is the first one in which a personal care contribution should be absent.

Know that a published price is not a cap. The summary says its ranges are not price caps and are not recommended prices, and that a provider charging above the range is not necessarily charging a price that is unreasonable. It is a comparison tool, and it is the department’s, not ours.

You can move. The fact sheet is explicit that you can change providers if you think prices are too high, and that Providers are not permitted to charge entry or exit fees if you change your provider.

What we will check

Two things, and we will publish either answer. Whether the second National Summary appears, and what it shows for the January to March 2026 quarter. And whether the third, when it comes, covers the quarter in which personal care changed category, because that is the one that answers the question the department said it would be monitoring.