Australia’s aged care system has undergone its most significant overhaul in decades, but one of the reforms older Australians needed most has remained frustratingly out of reach.
Mandatory price caps on in-home aged care services were promised from the outset of the Support at Home program, delayed once, and are now the subject of yet more consultation rather than firm action. Meanwhile, providers continue to set their own prices, and older people continue to pay them.
When Support at Home replaced the old Home Care Packages program in November 2025, it brought a new model for in-home aged care funding, one designed to be simpler, more transparent, and fairer.
Under the old system, providers routinely charged 35 to 45 per cent of a client’s entire care budget in administrative and package management fees before a single hour of actual care was delivered. Funding that was meant to pay for nursing, domestic help, or personal care was quietly absorbed in overhead.
The new program was supposed to fix this. Under Support at Home, providers must bundle all costs, including administration and travel, into a single all-inclusive service price. And underpinning all of it was a promise: the government would set mandatory price caps, a hard ceiling that no provider could legally exceed for any service on the Support at Home service list.
Those caps are not fixed prices. They are ceilings. Providers remain free to charge less, and competition is expected to encourage them to do so. But no registered provider would be legally permitted to charge more than the published cap for any service.
The intent is straightforward: if older Australians know there is a maximum they can be charged, they can make informed choices, compare providers with confidence, and be protected from exploitation.
The caps were originally promised from the program’s launch date, but in December 2024 the government announced they would not be ready in time. Providers, many operating on thin margins and still adapting to sweeping regulatory change, had lobbied hard for more time.
The delay was framed as giving the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority (IHACPA) more time to undertake further consultation and provide expert advice to inform pricing arrangements, and to support service continuity for providers and participants transitioning from the existing home care system.
The government’s new deadline became 1 July 2026. That date is now weeks away, and today the government has announced not the arrival of caps but a new working group, to be convened alongside the Council on the Ageing (COTA), Ageing Australia, and the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, to continue defining what “reasonable pricing” looks like.
For the Older Persons Advocacy Network (OPAN), which has been fielding a flood of concerns from older Australians since the program launched, the announcement of more process is a poor substitute for action.
“The decision to delay pricing caps means older people will continue to face uncertainty about what they will pay for essential services,” said OPAN Director of Policy, Education and Systemic Advocacy Samantha Edmonds.
“It is critical that this process leads to clear, enforceable protections, including the timely introduction of well-designed price caps.”
The official reason for the original delay was regulatory caution, giving IHACPA the time and real-world data it needed to set prices that were genuinely fair, rather than guessing at the right numbers before the program had even launched. IHACPA acknowledged that due to the timing of the announcement, it did not have the necessary cost and activity data available to develop separate unit price recommendations for some services in its first pricing advice for 2026-27.
That is a legitimate concern. Poorly designed price caps can do damage: set them too low and viable providers exit the market, leaving older people without access to care at all. But the absence of any caps creates its own risks, and those risks fall squarely on the people least able to absorb them.
Some industry analysts have suggested the delay may also have reflected the government receiving pricing advice from IHACPA that recommended margins set much lower than the 40 per cent providers had been accustomed to charging to cover the variability of costs of service provision. Whether or not that is the case, the effect has been a prolonged period in which providers retain full freedom to set their own prices, with minimal enforceable limits.
The protections that do exist, including mandatory price publication on the My Aged Care website, requirements that providers justify their pricing if challenged, and the ability of the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission to investigate complaints, are useful but incomplete.
Transparency is not the same as a cap. Knowing what a provider charges does not help an older person who has limited local alternatives, limited digital literacy, or limited capacity to navigate a complaints process.
None of this exists in a vacuum. Older Australians accessing Support at Home services are doing so against a backdrop of persistent cost-of-living pressure.
Many are on fixed incomes, reliant on the Age Pension or superannuation, and managing the same inflationary pressures that have squeezed household budgets across the country for the past several years.
“Older people are already enduring a cost-of-living crisis and having access to reasonable and affordable care is essential for their wellbeing,” Ms Edmonds said.
The Support at Home program was designed with this in mind. It includes a lifetime cap of $130,000 on personal contributions, a “no worse off” principle for those who were already receiving care before the new system began, and a safety net for people who cannot afford to make any contribution at all.
But these protections address the outer limits of financial exposure, not the day-to-day reality of what providers charge for a given hour of domestic help or personal care.
Without price caps, older people in the same suburb can be paying meaningfully different amounts for identical services. Without local pricing transparency, another gap OPAN has identified, they have limited ability to know this, let alone act on it.
“Publishing national price summaries is positive, but older people need to be able to compare prices in their local area to ensure they can make informed choices about providers,” Ms Edmonds said.
There is a second, related problem that OPAN has consistently raised alongside the caps debate, and it compounds with every month that passes without a resolution. If the value of Support at Home packages is not indexed to keep pace with rising service costs, older people will effectively receive less care over time even if their nominal budget does not change.
“Without indexation aligned to cost pressures such as CPI, there is a real risk that package values will not keep pace with rising service costs, forcing older people to go without care,” Ms Edmonds said.
This is not a theoretical concern. Aged care is a labour-intensive industry. Wages, fuel costs, insurance, and compliance overhead have all risen significantly in recent years. If provider costs rise but package values do not, something gives, and it is usually the volume or quality of care delivered.
The government’s working group and its additional oversight measures are not nothing. Powers for the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission to order refunds, increased reporting requirements, and quarterly national price summaries are genuine steps forward. OPAN has welcomed them as such.
But they are not price caps, and they are not a substitute for them.
“We welcome the opportunity to help define what ‘reasonable pricing’ looks like and to ensure older people’s voices are central to that work,” Ms Edmonds said. “It is critical that this process leads to clear, enforceable protections, including the timely introduction of well-designed price caps.”
The Support at Home program was built on a promise that aged care in Australia would be reorganised around the needs and rights of older people, not the interests and convenience of providers. That promise has not yet been kept on pricing. The longer it takes, the more credibility the broader reform programme loses with the people it was designed to serve.
“The government must prioritise getting pricing right and provide a clear pathway to implementing caps that restore integrity and trust within the aged care system,” Ms Edmonds said.
“It is essential that the reforms deliver on their promise, ensuring older people can access affordable, high-quality care at home.”
