Support at Home is the Australian Government program for aged care delivered in a person's own home, replacing Home Care Packages and the Short-Term Restorative Care Programme. Older people are assessed into classification levels with a quarterly budget, and contribute to the cost of their care according to their means and the category of service they receive.
For providers, this is not a rename. The funding mechanics change in ways that touch billing, cash flow and the software you run on.
What Support at Home changes operationally
1. Quarterly budgets replace accruing funds
Under Home Care Packages, unspent funds accumulated. A client could build a balance over months and spend it later, and that balance followed them between providers. Support at Home works to a quarterly budget instead, with limited carry-over.
The practical consequence is that underspend is no longer banked indefinitely. Service planning has to fit the quarter, and a client who is under-serviced for two months cannot simply catch up in month twelve. Providers whose systems were built around unspent-funds tracking need reworking rather than remapping — the concept the software is organised around has gone.
2. A defined service list
Support at Home organises services into categories — broadly clinical care, independence, and everyday living — with a defined list of services under each. This is more prescriptive than the package model, where the care plan had wider latitude.
It also determines what the client pays, which brings us to the third change.
3. Means-tested contributions, by service category
Client contributions vary by both the person's means and the category of service. Clinical care attracts no client contribution. Independence and everyday living do, at rates that differ.
| Service category | Client contribution |
|---|---|
| Clinical care | None |
| Independence | Means-tested |
| Everyday living | Means-tested, at the highest rate of the three |
This is the change with the largest administrative footprint. A provider now has to categorise every service correctly, calculate a contribution per client per category, invoice it, collect it, and reconcile it — alongside the government subsidy, which arrives separately. That is an accounts-receivable function that home care providers did not previously need at this scale.
What this means for your systems
Working backwards from the changes above, a system needs to:
- Hold a quarterly budget per client and show consumption against it during the quarter, not after
- Map every delivered service to its category, because the category sets the contribution
- Calculate contributions per client from their assessed means
- Produce a client statement that separates subsidy from contribution intelligibly
- Track contribution debtors — an aged receivable that did not previously exist
- Report to the Data Exchange on sessions delivered, which is not the same data as what was invoiced
That last point catches providers whose systems only record billable events. DEX reports sessions of service, and reconstructing session data by hand at the end of a reporting period is a job nobody has time for.
Where SIRS fits
The Serious Incident Response Scheme continues to apply. Reportable categories include unreasonable use of force, unlawful or inappropriate sexual conduct, neglect, psychological or emotional abuse, unexpected death, stealing or coercion, and unexplained absence. Priority 1 incidents are reported within 24 hours, Priority 2 within 30 days.
As with the NDIS, external reporting is only half the obligation: providers must operate an incident management system that records, investigates and learns from incidents whether or not they meet the reportable threshold.
If you deliver both NDIS and aged care
A meaningful number of Australian providers do, and they are usually running two systems because the funding models never matched.
The delivery side is largely the same work — the same workers, the same rostering constraints, the same award, often the same suburbs. It is the funding, claiming and reporting that differ. That makes a single operational platform with two funding engines a better fit than two complete systems, if only because a support worker should not need two apps to see one day's shifts.
Program rules, classification levels, contribution rates and caps are set by the Department of Health and Aged Care and are subject to change. Confirm current settings before making commercial decisions.
Related reading
- Support at Home, defined
- Home Care Packages, and what replaces them
- The Serious Incident Response Scheme
- DEX reporting obligations
- My Aged Care and referrals
Sources
The rules described above come from the following, which are the authority on each and are updated more often than any article:
