The government rates home care workers as short in every state. Residential aged care workers it rates as no shortage

What the list is, and what its four words mean

The Occupation Shortage List is produced annually by Jobs and Skills Australia and is, in its own description, a list of occupations in shortage in Australia and in each state and territory, assessed at a point in time. The 2025 edition assessed 1,022 occupations and rated 293 of them, or 29 per cent, in national shortage. That is down four percentage points on 2024 and 7.5 points below the 2023 peak of 36.2 per cent, so the national picture is easing rather than worsening.

Four ratings are used, and the difference between them is the whole reason this story exists. In the report’s own words: Shortage: An occupation is in national shortage or overall shortage; Metropolitan shortage: An occupation is in shortage in metropolitan area(s); Regional shortage: An occupation is in shortage in regional area(s); No shortage: An occupation is not in shortage.

So a rating of no shortage is not a claim that the job is easy to fill everywhere. It is an assessment that, on the evidence JSA weighed, the occupation is not in shortage at that level. Hold that distinction, because it does a lot of work below.

The aged care occupations, as rated

These are every aged care occupation in the 2025 list, on the OSCA 2024 basis that the report uses for its main results. The first column is the national rating; the rest are the states and territories.

Three occupations are short in all nine ratings: the community support worker, the aged care registered nurse, and the team leader. The residential care worker is short in two, and both are the thin, remote labour markets of Western Australia and the Northern Territory. The same two jurisdictions are the only ones short of aged care coordinators.

Why the home and residential split is the finding

The two frontline roles are not far apart in the work they do. One supports an older person in their own home; the other does much the same in a facility. The list rates the first as short everywhere and the second as short nowhere except WA and the NT.

That maps onto where the sector is going. Support at Home began on 1 November 2025 and the policy direction for a decade has been to move care into people’s homes, which means demand for the home care workforce is growing against a residential workforce whose bed numbers grow slowly. A shortage rating is a judgement about demand against supply, not a headcount, so an occupation can be hard to staff and still be rated no shortage if supply has kept pace with it.

It also fits the shape of the two jobs. Home care work is dispersed, often part-time, requires a car and unpaid travel between clients, and is harder to roster than a shift in a building. Those are the conditions that make an occupation hard to fill even where the pay is comparable, and they apply to the community role and not the residential one.

What this rating is, and is not

Two caveats matter enough to state before anyone quotes these ratings at a workforce meeting, and both come from JSA itself.

First, the state and territory results are not purely modelled. The report says outcomes for states, particularly where these differed from the national outcome, were based on the feedback received from Jobs and Skills Councils, Commonwealth Government departments and state government stakeholders, and that variations reflect both real labour market differences and different methodologies and consultation mechanisms used by each stakeholder who provided feedback. So the WA and NT residential ratings are informed judgements shaped by who was consulted there, not counts of unfilled beds.

Second, the classification is in transition. The 2025 main results sit on the new Occupation Standard Classification for Australia, and JSA says the switch was made because the list is embedded in migration and apprenticeship policy, but that strong assumptions on mapping ANZSCO to OSCA were used as little OSCA-based data exists. The older ANZSCO 2022 version is published alongside it, and on that basis the equivalent split still shows: Aged or Disabled Carer is in shortage in all nine ratings while Personal Care Assistant is no shortage in seven of nine and Nursing Support Worker in all nine. The two classifications do not carve the work up the same way, and neither should be read as a headcount.

Our view

The useful thing here is not that the government has understated a crisis. It is that the phrase “aged care workforce shortage” is doing too much work, and the national dataset that policy actually runs on does not support using it as one number. Migration settings, apprenticeship incentives and skills funding all key off this list, so an occupation rated no shortage is not merely described differently, it is treated differently.

Our view is that the split is real and the reason for it is mostly structural rather than about the work being harder. Home care demand is growing fastest because policy moved it there, and the job carries travel, dispersion and rostering costs a facility shift does not. If that is right, the response to a home care shortage is not the same as the response to a residential one, and treating them as a single problem will fund the wrong thing.

What we would want next, and have not got: whether the residential no-shortage rating holds once the Support at Home transition finishes moving demand, and what JSA heard from the aged care Jobs and Skills Council that produced these particular state ratings. The report names the consultation as an input without publishing what was said.

Primary sources

1. Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025 Occupation Shortage List, 6 digit ANZSCO and OSCA (XLSX, downloaded and read 29 August 2026): every rating in the table above, taken from the “2025 OSL (OSCA 2024)” sheet, and the ANZSCO 2022 comparisons for Aged or Disabled Carer, Personal Care Assistant and Nursing Support Worker taken from the “2025 OSL (ANZSCO 2022)” sheet. The workbook’s Contents sheet carries the note that the list uses the ratings Shortage (S), Metro Shortage (M), Regional Shortage (R) and No Shortage (NS).
2. Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025 Occupation Shortage List: Key Findings Report (PDF, downloaded and read 29 August 2026): that the list covers occupations in shortage in Australia and in each state and territory and is a point-in-time assessment; that 293 of 1,022 assessed occupations, or 29 per cent, were in national shortage in 2025, four percentage points below 2024 and 7.5 points below the 2023 peak of 36.2 per cent; the quoted definitions of the four ratings; the quoted explanation that state outcomes were based on feedback from Jobs and Skills Councils, Commonwealth departments and state government stakeholders and that variations reflect different methodologies and consultation mechanisms; and the quoted statement that strong assumptions on mapping ANZSCO to OSCA were used because little OSCA-based data exists.
3. Jobs and Skills Australia, Occupation Shortage (read 29 August 2026): the page carrying the 2025 list, the Key Findings Report, the Additional Insights Report, the methodology and the downloadable data.

Methodology. The interactive shortage tool on the JSA site did not render for us, so we took the underlying workbook instead and read the ratings out of it directly rather than relying on the tool or on any summary of it. Every rating in the table is a cell in that file. The percentages we quote for the national picture are JSA’s own, not our arithmetic. We have not contacted Jobs and Skills Australia, so the question about what the aged care Jobs and Skills Council told them is stated as open rather than answered.

Work in home or residential aged care and see these ratings differently, or know what went into the state assessments? Tell us and we will check it against the source file and log the outcome here.