Star Ratings are the Government’s public scorecard for every funded residential aged care home, published on My Aged Care and released as a full quarterly workbook through the GEN Aged Care Data site. Each home gets an overall rating from 1 to 5 stars, built from four components: Residents’ Experience (a yearly survey), Compliance (regulatory status), Staffing (care minutes delivered against targets) and Quality Measures (clinical indicators such as falls, pressure injuries and medication management). We downloaded the May 2026 extract and the February 2026 extract before it, and computed everything below from those two workbooks. The method, and its limits, are in the note at the end.
The overall rating barely varies
That is a strikingly thin bottom tail. In a sector where the Government’s own financial snapshot says a third of providers are unprofitable and the regulator was, until recently, publishing a running compliance series on care minutes, the overall rating finds almost nobody at the bottom: one 1-star home, zero 2-star homes, and 77.7 per cent of homes at 4 stars or better. In our view, honestly held and based on the distribution above, a single overall star is doing very little separating work. That is not a claim the methodology is wrong; it is an observation that the compression is real and measurable, and that a family choosing between two 4-star homes needs to look one level down.
Where the differences actually live
The four components tell four different stories. Compliance is nearly binary: 84.7 per cent of homes hold 5 stars on it and only 14 homes nationally sit below 4 stars. Residents’ Experience clusters in the middle. The spread, the thing a rating exists to show, lives almost entirely in Staffing (6.1 per cent of homes at 1 star, 20.3 per cent at 2) and Quality Measures (7.4 per cent at 1 star, 16.7 per cent at 2). The full component distribution:
Component ratings, all rated homes, May 2026
| Component | 1 star | 2 stars | 3 stars | 4 stars | 5 stars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Residents’ Experience | 0 | 30 | 870 | 1,146 | 134 |
| Compliance | 1 | 0 | 13 | 320 | 1,846 |
| Staffing | 133 | 442 | 762 | 395 | 448 |
| Quality Measures | 161 | 363 | 1,058 | 350 | 248 |
One reading note that matters, which we verified inside the workbook before writing this: a home’s Compliance rating recovers once a past compliance decision ends. 999 of the 2,596 homes in the extract carry a compliance decision somewhere in their record, every one of them with an end date in the past, and 809 of those homes are back at 5 stars on Compliance. So a strong Compliance score means currently in good regulatory standing; it is not a statement that a home has never had a finding against it, and “999 homes are under compliance action” would be a false reading of the same field. We publish that here because it is exactly the kind of misreading this dataset invites.
The state league table
Overall ratings and care-minutes performance by state, May 2026
| State/territory | Average overall stars | Rated homes | 5-star homes | Miss a care-minutes target |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NT | 4.00 | 8 | 0 (0.0%) | 0.0% |
| TAS | 3.97 | 62 | 9 (14.5%) | 34.4% |
| ACT | 3.92 | 25 | 0 (0.0%) | 18.5% |
| QLD | 3.90 | 336 | 23 (6.8%) | 26.5% |
| NSW | 3.88 | 716 | 46 (6.4%) | 28.5% |
| VIC | 3.84 | 598 | 44 (7.4%) | 29.0% |
| WA | 3.68 | 226 | 2 (0.9%) | 18.9% |
| SA | 3.67 | 209 | 3 (1.4%) | 27.3% |
Tasmania is the odd one out in an interesting way: the highest 5-star share in the country (14.5 per cent, albeit on a small base of 62 homes) and simultaneously the worst care-minutes miss rate (34.4 per cent). Western Australia and South Australia sit lowest on average overall rating, with almost no 5-star homes between them. The single 1-star home in the country is in Victoria.
More than a quarter of homes miss a care-minutes target
Since October 2024 every home has had two mandated staffing targets, individually calculated from its resident mix: registered nurse care minutes per resident per day, and total care minutes per resident per day. The extract publishes each home’s target and actual for both. Of the 2,302 homes with complete data in May 2026, 1,677 (72.8 per cent) meet both targets and 625 (27.2 per cent) miss at least one: 159 miss only the RN target, 315 miss only the total target, and 151 miss both. Sector-wide the averages are comfortably above target (50.6 RN minutes delivered against a 43.4 average target; 223.0 total against 214.3), which means the misses are concentrated, not general.
The stakes on this number are rising. Both StewartBrown’s December 2025 survey and the Government’s own quarterly snapshot note that from April 2026, metropolitan non-specialised homes that keep missing their care-minutes targets stand to lose care-minutes funding, which StewartBrown quantifies at up to $33.41 per bed day at the current AN-ACC price. And as we report separately, the regulator’s own published series tracking sector care-minutes compliance stopped publishing in November 2025, just as those financial consequences switched on.
The quarter’s movers: down beat up, two to one
Matching the two extracts home by home, declines outnumbered improvements better than two to one this quarter, and the national distribution shifted accordingly: the 3-star share grew markedly (319 homes in February to 483 in May on a like-for-like cohort) while the 4-star share fell. Three homes moved two or more stars:
- Westmont Homestead (Westmont Aged Care Services Limited, Baranduda, VIC) fell from 4 stars to 1, the steepest fall in the country this quarter and now the only 1-star home nationally. That movement is what the Government’s dataset records; we have not yet reviewed the regulator’s file on this service and draw no conclusion about the reasons.
- Havilah on Palmerston (Havilah Hostel Inc, Maryborough, VIC) rose from 2 stars to 4. Its operator signed an enforceable undertaking with the regulator in October 2025; we set out that sequence, with both documents, in our enforcement explainer.
- Palm Lake Care Toowoomba (Palm Lake Care Operations Pty Ltd, Cranley, QLD) rose from 1 star to 3.
416 of the 2,596 homes in the May extract carry no overall rating at all, usually because one component (typically Staffing or Compliance) has no recorded value yet; the rows we sampled look newly registered or newly assessed rather than anything systemic. We will keep counting that cohort each quarter.
This piece is the first in a quarterly series: the next extract is due around August 2026 and we will publish the movers, the league table and the care-minutes test again when it lands.
How we worked this out
Figures come from the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing’s Star Ratings quarterly data extract, May 2026 (released 26 May 2026; the workbook’s own notes state the data was extracted from the Government Provider Management System on 5 May 2026), published via the AIHW’s GEN Aged Care Data site and mirrored at health.gov.au, compared against the February 2026 extract (released 3 March 2026). We parsed both workbooks directly; every figure is a direct read or a disclosed computed aggregate, nothing is estimated. Percentages are of homes with a published value for that measure (2,180 for overall and component ratings; 2,302 for care minutes). A home “passes” the care-minutes test only if its actual meets or exceeds its target on both the RN and total measures; each home’s targets are individually set under AN-ACC. Movers were matched on service name, provider name and suburb, the only stable join available (the extract publishes no persistent service ID), so homes that were renamed, newly registered or closed between quarters drop out of the movers count rather than being guessed at; 2,432 of roughly 2,580 to 2,596 homes matched. We did not verify individual providers’ current enforcement status against the separate ACQSC registers except where a linked document says so.
Primary sources
- Star Ratings quarterly data extract, May 2026, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, released 26 May 2026 (workbook, XLSX).
- Star Ratings quarterly data extract, February 2026, released 3 March 2026 (workbook, XLSX).
- GEN Aged Care Data, Access data hub (AIHW), the series’ publication channel.
- StewartBrown Aged Care Financial Performance Survey, December 2025, for the April 2026 care-minutes funding consequence (up to $33.41 per bed day).
- Quarterly Financial Snapshot of the aged care sector, Q1 2025-26, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, for sector profitability context.
- Enforceable undertaking, Havilah Hostel Inc, ACQSC, signed October 2025.
Spotted an error? The correction form is on our tips page; we check every correction against the cited sources and log the outcome here.