This is the third edition of our quarterly read of the department’s Star Ratings workbook, which rates every residential aged care home in the country. The August edition found that the sector looked worse on staffing only because 235 homes had joined the published figures, and nearly four in five of them were at 1 or 2 stars. It ended on a prediction we said we would check: if the 210 services still without an overall rating resembled those 235, the national staffing figure had further to fall. Here is the check, and it went the other way.
The prediction, scored
Of the 210 services with no overall rating in August, 104 have one in October, 101 are still unrated, and 5 are no longer in the workbook. The 104 are weaker than the homes already being rated. Their mean overall rating is 3.33 stars against 3.83 for homes rated in both extracts, and 59 of them, 56.7 per cent, are at 1 or 2 stars on Staffing, about twice the rate among established homes.
So the direction we expected held. The size did not. The 235 we extrapolated from were 79.6 per cent at the bottom; these were 56.7. Meanwhile the homes already in the figures improved: among the 2,324 homes with an overall and a Staffing rating in both extracts, the share at 1 or 2 Staffing stars fell from 30.0 to 28.0 per cent. That improvement outweighed the newcomers, and the whole-cohort figure moved from 717 of 2,390 homes (30.0 per cent) to 725 of 2,453 (29.6 per cent).
Staffing rating, 1 or 2 stars, homes with an overall rating
| Group | Homes | At 1 or 2 Staffing stars |
|---|---|---|
| All homes with an overall rating, August | 2,390 | 717 (30.0%) |
| All homes with an overall rating, October | 2,453 | 725 (29.6%) |
| Rated in both, as they stood in August | 2,324 | 698 (30.0%) |
| Rated in both, as they stand in October | 2,324 | 650 (28.0%) |
| Unrated in August, rated in October | 104 | 59 (56.7%) |
Why we were wrong: our prediction compared two different groups
Going back over August’s numbers to score the prediction showed a flaw in it, and it is ours. The 235 homes were homes that had gained a Staffing rating. The 210 were homes without an overall rating. Those are different groups. A home can carry a Staffing star and still have no overall rating, because the overall score needs all four sub-ratings. Of the 104 homes that gained an overall rating this quarter, 94 already had a Staffing star in August. Their staffing was already visible; what they lacked was something else.
The group that really matched the 235, homes with no Staffing star at all, was much smaller by August: 105 of the 2,600 rows in the workbook. It behaved nothing like them. Of the homes in both workbooks that had no Staffing star in August, 44 gained one in October, and only 4 of them are at 1 or 2 stars. Their mean Staffing rating is 4.39; 29 of the 44 are at 5 stars. The homes that were going to drag the figure down appear, for the most part, to have arrived already.
Set that chart beside the one in the August edition and the reversal is the story. In August, the newly rated group was overwhelmingly at the bottom. In October, the newly rated group is small and mostly at the top.
1-star homes are back, and they mean something specific
August had no home at 1 or 2 stars overall. October has seven: three at 1 star and four at 2. Four of them dropped two or more stars in a quarter, the only homes to move that far in either direction.
Homes at 1 or 2 stars overall, October 2026
| Home | Location | Overall | Compliance | Overall in August |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seven Hills Nursing Home | Seven Hills NSW | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| Clifton Nursing Home | Clifton QLD | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| John Curtin Aged Care | Creswick VIC | 1 | 1 | no rating |
| Alexander Aged Care | Brookvale NSW | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| Mount Martha Valley | Safety Beach VIC | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| The Oaks Aged Care Facility | Yahl SA | 2 | 2 | no rating |
| Lutheran Homes Horsham | Horsham VIC | 2 | 4 | 3 |
Six of the seven are there because of their Compliance rating, not because their care
averaged out low. The department’s
Star
Ratings Provider Manual makes Compliance a veto rather than a weight: An aged care
home that receives a 1 star Compliance rating will receive a 1 star Overall Star Rating
regardless of how they perform in other sub-categories.
A 2-star Compliance rating caps
the overall at 2. The manual says a 1 or 2 star Compliance rating results from a regulatory
decision, set by its type and severity. Seven Hills Nursing Home, for example, is rated 4
stars on Staffing in October, and Clifton Nursing Home 5.
Lutheran Homes Horsham is the exception, and the only home in the country at 2 stars on the ordinary arithmetic. Its sub-ratings are 2 for Residents’ Experience, 4 for Compliance, 2 for Staffing and 1 for Quality Measures. On the manual’s weights of 33, 30, 22 and 15 per cent that is a score of 2.45, which falls in the band that publishes as 2 stars. It was a 3-star home in August.
We have not looked up the regulatory decision behind any of these Compliance ratings, and the workbook does not say what it was. A low rating describes the home’s standing on the day of the extract; the manual also allows a decision to reach every home a provider runs, not only the home where an issue arose.
The rest of the quarter
Among the 2,324 homes rated overall in both extracts, 267 went up and 262 went down, and the mean was flat at 3.83. Nationally, 68.7 per cent of rated homes hold exactly 4 stars, against 69.4 per cent in August. On care minutes, 769 of the 2,537 homes with complete data miss at least one of their two legislated targets, 30.3 per cent, against 31.1 per cent of 2,505 in August. Since May 2026 the Staffing star is close to the same test, because a home must meet both targets to rate 3 stars or more.
Westmont Homestead at Baranduda, which fell from 4 stars to 1 between February and May and recovered to 3 in August, holds 3 again.
Our view, labelled as such
Our August prediction was wrong, and wrong for a reason we should have caught when we made it: it treated “unrated” as one group when the workbook has two. The finding it rested on still stands. A quarter’s whole-sector change mixes what happened to homes with who is being counted, and this quarter shows the same thing from the other side: the newcomers pulled the figure up a little and the established homes pulled it down by more.
The more useful finding for a family is the second one. A 1 or 2 star home is not a home whose care averaged out low; with one exception this quarter, it is a regulatory finding showing through. The four sub-ratings tell a family which it is, and the department publishes them alongside the overall star.
101 homes still have no overall rating. We will report where they land when the next extract is published, with both counts and without a forecast.
How we worked this out
Every figure comes from two workbooks published by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing: the October 2026 Star Ratings quarterly data extract, extracted from the department’s provider system on 13 October 2026 according to its Notes sheet and downloaded on 15 October, and the August 2026 extract we analysed for the previous edition, extracted on 20 July 2026. The counts are ours, computed with scripts kept alongside the data so the same method runs each quarter.
Two bases, named. The whole-cohort figures count homes with a published overall rating, as the August edition did. The chart counts homes with a Staffing star in both extracts whatever their overall rating, 2,431 of them, which is why its figure differs a little from the table’s.
The join changed this quarter, and why. The workbook has no persistent service identifier. The August edition matched homes on service name, provider name and suburb. Measured across the May and August workbooks, provider name is the field that churns, so this edition matches on service name and suburb, which pairs about 18 per cent more homes. Four name-and-suburb pairs appear twice in each workbook; those homes are left unmatched rather than risk pairing the wrong two. A renamed home still drops out of the matched set.
What we mean by rated. A home counts as rated where the workbook records a whole number in that column; a blank is unrated, not zero.
What we have not done. We have not established why any home was unrated or what regulatory decision lies behind any Compliance rating, and we do not assert one. We have not contacted the department or the providers named, and we would publish a response from any of them.
Sources
How this piece was made. Researched and written by AI systems, under editorial rules a human publisher sets, from the 3 primary sources below. How The Long View works.
- Star Ratings quarterly data extract, October 2026, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing (published 13 October 2026, data extracted 13 October 2026, workbook downloaded 15 October and analysed 16 October 2026): every October figure here, including the 2,602 service rows, the 2,453 with an overall rating, the sub-ratings of the seven homes at 1 or 2 stars, and the care-minutes targets and actuals.
- Star Ratings quarterly data extract, August 2026, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing (data extracted 20 July 2026): the comparison quarter and every August figure.
- Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Star Ratings Provider Manual (PDF, version of 18 September 2026, read 16 October 2026): the Compliance veto and 2-star cap, that a 1 or 2 star Compliance rating follows a regulatory decision and may apply to all of a provider’s homes, the sub-rating weights, the rounding bands, and the rule that a home must meet both care minute targets to rate 3 Staffing stars or more.
- The Long View, 235 homes just appeared in the staffing statistics: the August edition and the prediction this piece checks.
- The Long View, How aged care Star Ratings are calculated: the weights and the Compliance veto, explained.
Spotted an error? The correction form is on our tips page; we check every correction against the cited sources and log the outcome here.