The regulator checked 25 Support at Home providers on pricing and paperwork. Four were fully compliant

The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission has published a prudential review of Support at Home providers, the only Support at Home review listed on its reviews page, run from January to June 2026. Of 25 providers it looked at, 4 were fully compliant. Eighteen had problems they then fixed with the Commission, and the Commission says three non-compliant providers are being case managed; it is investigating one of them. The weakest result was on the thing families most need: only 32 per cent of the providers met the price publishing requirements, and 36 per cent the rules on service agreements, budgets and monthly statements. These 25 were not a random sample, so this is not a rate for the sector. It does show the regulator finding gaps in two obligations the government leaned on when it paused price caps in May.

6 October 2026 Checked 6 Oct 2026 6 primary sources

What the Commission checked, and what it found

Prudential reviews are the Commission’s financial check on providers. For home care, its reviews page says these reviews replace our home care package pricing audits from November 2025, when Support at Home began. This one asked six things of each provider: how it set prices, how it communicated them to older people, that it was not charging separately for package management and travel, that it had written consent before charging a price different from the service agreement, that its Aged Care Financial Report and Quarterly Financial Report went in on time, and, for providers in registration categories 4 and 5, that it met the Financial and Prudential Management Standard.

The headline result, in the Commission’s words: Four providers were fully compliant, and 18 providers had compliance issues. These 18 providers worked with us to fix the non-compliance. That leaves three. The report says Three providers didn’t achieve compliance within the agreed time, and describes them without naming them. One was non-compliant in every area and didn’t provide the information we asked for, even after repeated requests. One was non-compliant in almost every area and also did not provide information after extensions. The third worked with the Commission but could not fix its problems in time. On what has happened since, the report says We're currently investigating one of the providers, that the second has since fixed its non-compliance, and that the Commission is still gathering evidence from the third.

Share of the 25 reviewed providers that complied, January to June 2026
Requirement	Complied, as published	Providers, our arithmetic
Price publishing	32%	8 of 25
Service agreements, budgets and monthly statements	36%	9 of 25
Financial and Prudential Management Standard	36%	9 of 25
Financial reporting	72%	18 of 25
Fully compliant on everything	4 providers	16%

Percentages as published by the Commission, which describes them as the position At the time of the review, before the providers fixed the problems. The third column is our arithmetic on a base of 25, and every percentage converts to a whole number of providers, which is a useful check that 25 is the base. The final row’s percentage is ours: 4 of 25.

Why the price publishing figure matters most

Financial reporting, the paperwork providers send to government, was the best result at 72 per cent. The two results about what an older person actually sees were the worst.

That matters because of what happened in May. When the government paused Support at Home price caps, the department said providers must continue to, among other things, be transparent and publish the price they most frequently charge for each service on the My Aged Care website. One of the new protections it announced was to let the Commission take regulatory action against providers who are choosing not to meet their clear requirement to issue monthly statements. Published prices and monthly statements are part of what the government chose to rely on in place of a ceiling.

In this review, published prices and monthly statements are where the providers fell short. The non-compliance the Commission lists under pricing includes not publishing prices on My Aged Care, making it hard for older people to find information they needed, prices on My Aged Care different to website and charging travel separately. The missing or wrong prices were mainly for allied health, meal delivery, indirect transport and required non-standard pricing. Under service agreements it lists agreements that were missing, incomplete or out-of-date, and monthly statements were incorrect, incomplete or issued late.

Our view: allied health is among the services where the department’s own price data showed the widest spread between providers, as we reported in August. A participant comparing an allied health price is already comparing within a wide range; a provider whose price is missing or differs between My Aged Care and its website takes away the one fixed point they have. Twenty-five selected providers prove nothing about the whole sector. They do show the regulator finding, in this review, gaps in exactly the obligations the price-cap pause leans on.

Why this is not a sector rate

The report does not say how the 25 were chosen. The Commission’s page on these reviews says it may select a Support at Home provider in registration category 4 or 5 where you have a history of late financial report submissions, or where it thinks the review would benefit the provider. A sample built that way would likely do worse than average, so 4 in 25 should not be read as 16 per cent of the sector.

It is also not comparable with the last home care exercise. The Commission’s audit of 54 Home Care Packages providers, run from November 2023 to June 2024 under the old Act and old pricing rules, reported that The audit found that most providers complied with the new pricing rules. It published no percentages, the rules were different, and the program it audited no longer exists. The two results sit side by side; they do not make a trend.

Providers also told the Commission what was hard. Among the challenges it lists are older people often relying on providers to explain pricing, fees and complex government changes, hardship arrangements, and pricing and travel charges for rural and remote providers.

What to check in your own paperwork

Every item below is a requirement the Commission set out in its Support at Home pricing bulletin, and every one is something this review found providers getting wrong.

No separate travel or package management fee. The bulletin says providers can no longer charge additional fees or surcharges separately, and that The unit price must include package management, travel and other costs of providing a service. A travel line on a statement is worth asking about.

Your service agreement should list prices. It must include the services, the prices the provider will charge, and the reasons if those prices are higher than the ones on the provider’s website.

Your monthly statement should be itemised. It must show your current quarterly budget, an itemised list of what was delivered in the month, and what was charged for each.

Check the price on My Aged Care against the provider’s own site. A difference is one of the problems the review found. The department said in May that the Commission would be empowered to order refunds for services where providers are found to be overcharging, and the bulletin says the Commission can ask providers for service agreements and monthly statements when it is handling a complaint.

What comes next

The Commission will look again in November. Its latest Quality Bulletin says In November 2026, we’ll do a targeted review with selected Support at Home providers, testing understanding of and compliance with the Financial and Prudential Management Standard, and After the review, we’ll share a report that includes our findings, and common mistakes and issues for providers to think about. The prudential review itself says future reviews may assess a larger number of providers.

Sources

Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, Prudential review of Support at Home providers: January-June 2026 (web page, read 6 October 2026; the page carries no publication date): the six review areas; that 4 of 25 providers were fully compliant, 18 had compliance issues and worked with the Commission to fix them, and 3 did not achieve compliance within the agreed time; the description of those three and that one is being investigated, one has fixed its non-compliance and the Commission is working with the third; the four published compliance percentages, stated as at the time of the review; the listed non-compliance under pricing and service agreements, including the services mainly affected; and the challenges providers reported.
Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, Aged Care Quality Bulletin #9-2026 (web page, read 6 October 2026): the summary of the prudential review linking to the report; that the Commission will run a targeted review with selected Support at Home providers in November 2026, what it will assess, who may be selected, and that a report on findings will follow.
Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, Financial, prudential and governance reviews (web page, read 6 October 2026): that Support at Home prudential reviews replace the home care package pricing audits from November 2025, and the criteria on which the Commission may select a Support at Home provider for review.
Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, Regulatory Bulletin RB 2026-1: Support at Home pricing (pdf, 13 pages, version 2.0, publication date 30 June 2026, downloaded and read 6 October 2026): that providers can no longer charge additional fees or surcharges separately and the unit price must include package management and travel; what a service agreement and a monthly statement must contain; and that the Commission can ask for service agreements and monthly statements when handling a complaint.
Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, New consumer protections for Support at Home services (news item, published 20 May 2026, read 6 October 2026): the pause of price caps; the new protections including Commission powers to order refunds for overcharging and to take regulatory action over monthly statements; and that providers must continue to publish the price they most frequently charge for each service on My Aged Care.
Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, Home Care Packages pricing audit: compliance with pricing changes (insights report, published 19 March 2025, read 6 October 2026): the audit of 54 home care providers from November 2023 to June 2024 under the previous Act, and its finding that most providers complied with the new pricing rules.

How we read this, and its limits. The compliance percentages are the Commission’s; the provider counts beside them and the 16 per cent figure are our arithmetic on the 25 providers the report says it reviewed. The report’s opening summary says three non-compliant providers are being case managed, while its later detail says one of the three has since fixed its non-compliance; we report the later, more specific account. The report names no provider and neither do we. It does not say how the 25 were chosen; the selection criteria we quote are from the Commission’s current page describing these reviews, and we have not asked the Commission whether they were the criteria used for this review. As read on 6 October 2026 the report page carries no publication date and the Internet Archive holds no capture of it, so we can say only that it was public by the time of Quality Bulletin #9-2026, which links to it. The link between allied health non-compliance and the price spread is labelled as our view and rests on the department’s November to December 2025 price summary, as reported in our August piece.

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