Support at Home replaced Home Care Packages on 1 November 2025. In May the government deferred the price caps it had planned and put consumer protections and published pricing in their place. The National summary of Support at Home prices is the centrepiece of that bet: a Department of Health, Disability and Ageing fact sheet, published 19 May 2026, reporting what providers actually charged participants across November and December 2025.
It is written for participants, and it is careful about what it is. The Department says
plainly of the figures: These are not price caps and are not recommended prices.
What the range actually means, because it is easy to misread
Each service gets a median and a range. The median is the middle price. The range is not
the highest and lowest anybody charged, and reading it that way understates the picture
badly. In the Department’s words, The price range shows where most of the prices fall
for each service across providers.
The lower figure is the point where 25 per cent of
prices sit below it; the upper is where 75 per cent sit below it.
So the practical test for a participant is blunt: if your price is above the upper figure,
your provider is charging in the top 25% of prices.
Not an outlier. Just the top
quarter. And because these are quartiles rather than extremes, the true distance between the
cheapest and dearest provider is wider than anything printed here.
Where the spread lives
Set the services side by side and the pattern is immediate. Routine domestic help is priced almost uniformly. Clinical and allied health is not.
| Service | Median | 25th | 75th | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Care management | $120 | $30 | $150 | 5.0x |
| Exercise physiologist | $132 | $44 | $212 | 4.8x |
| Continence management (non-clinical) | $82 | $32 | $149 | 4.7x |
| Diversional therapist | $150 | $50 | $200 | 4.0x |
| Art therapist | $120 | $81 | $249 | 3.1x |
| Social worker | $206 | $100 | $268 | 2.7x |
| Podiatrist | $165 | $120 | $215 | 1.8x |
| Physiotherapist | $194 | $143 | $224 | 1.6x |
| Registered nurse | $180 | $160 | $195 | 1.2x |
| Individual social support | $111 | $105 | $120 | 1.1x |
| General house cleaning | $110 | $100 | $117 | 1.2x |
| Flexible respite | $115 | $105 | $121 | 1.2x |
The Spread column is ours: the 75th percentile divided by the 25th, which is simply how many times more the top quarter charges than the bottom quarter. Everything else is the Department’s.
Nursing is tight. Cleaning, laundry and social support are tight. The wide ones are care management, exercise physiology, continence management, diversional and art therapy, and social work. Two of those are not incidental extras: care management is the service that organises all the others, and it carries the widest spread in the table.
Why this is the argument for caps, made by the alternative to caps
The government’s reasoning for deferring caps was that publishing prices would let participants exert pressure themselves. That works when a buyer can judge what they are buying. The data shows the dispersion is concentrated exactly where they cannot.
A participant can tell whether a house was cleaned well. They cannot readily tell whether an hour of care management at $150 was worth five times an hour at $30, or whether the $44 exercise physiologist is a bargain or a shorter session with a less experienced clinician. The market is tight where judgement is easy and loose where judgement is hard, which is the ordinary shape of information asymmetry, and it is visible in the government’s own table.
That is our reading, and the Department is careful not to make it. Its fact sheet says a provider charging above the range is not necessarily charging an unreasonable price, and that a price is not automatically reasonable merely for sitting inside the range. A reasonable price, it says, reflects the cost of delivering the service. That is fair, and it cuts both ways: a high price may reflect a longer visit, a scarcer clinician or a rural drive, and a low price is not proof of value. We are not saying any provider is overcharging. We are saying the spread is large, it is concentrated where scrutiny is hardest, and that is precisely the condition price regulation is usually designed for.
What a participant can do with this
Two things follow that are directly usable. The first is that the fact sheet is a
benchmark you are entitled to raise: the Department states that
Your provider must explain to you how they have set their prices and what the price
covers.
A provider in the top quarter should be able to say why.
The second is a point about contributions that is easy to miss. The published prices are
what is charged to a participant’s budget, and the Department notes they are
inclusive of the contribution paid by individual participants
. What you personally pay
depends on the service category and your means assessment, and importantly,
no one will pay any contributions for clinical care services
. So a high clinical price
is not money out of your pocket, but it is money out of your budget, which is the same
constraint arriving by a different route.
The test this data has not yet faced
The fact sheet describes itself as quarterly. As at today it is the only edition that exists, covering a two-month window that ended more than eight months ago and began the same month the program did. So it measures the starting point, not the effect of publishing it.
The second edition is the one that matters, because it will be the first comparable quarter and therefore the first real evidence on whether transparency alone moved prices, which is the bet the deferral made. We checked the pricing resources collection on 4 August 2026 and it still contains only this edition. We will read the next one when it lands.
A note on the figures
Every median and quartile above is transcribed from the table in the National summary of Support at Home prices, November to December 2025, which we downloaded as a PDF and read directly rather than using any summary of it. We have reproduced twelve of its one-hour services, chosen to show the widest and narrowest spreads; the document also carries 30-minute and non-time-based tables we have not used here. The Spread column is our own arithmetic, the 75th percentile divided by the 25th, rounded to one decimal place.
What we have not done. These are quartiles, not maximum and minimum, so the full range of prices charged is wider than the table shows and we cannot say by how much. This is a single two-month window at the very start of the program, and prices may have moved since. The data is national, so it cannot tell you what is normal in your town, and it does not adjust for session length, clinician seniority, travel or rurality, any of which can legitimately explain a higher price. Two services returned no figure because too few providers reported them. Nothing here is advice about any individual provider, and we name none.
One document is easily confused with another. A separate fact sheet in the same collection, the summary of indicative Support at Home prices, reports what home care providers said they intended to charge before the program commenced. It is not this document, and the two are not comparable.
Sources
- Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, National summary of Support at Home prices, November to December 2025 (PDF, 8 pages, published 19 May 2026, downloaded and read 4 August 2026): every median and quartile in the table above, the definition of the range as the 25th and 75th percentiles, the statement that the figures are not price caps or recommended prices, the guidance that a provider above the range is not necessarily unreasonable, the requirement that a provider explain how it set its prices, and the treatment of participant contributions including that no one pays a contribution for clinical care.
- Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Support at Home pricing resources (collection page, read 4 August 2026): that the November to December 2025 edition remains the only national summary published as at that date.
Work in aged care, or read this data differently? The correction form is on our tips page; we check every correction against the cited sources and log the outcome here.