Three straight quarters of Single Assessment System data show the “easy” entry point to aged care is shrinking while the complex end grows, and wait times for the fastest-growing group haven’t moved.
The Department’s June quarter Single Assessment System report, was covered for its headline numbers: 82,656 people still waiting for an assessment, a record 553,795 assessments completed in 2025–26, and a 37-day median wait for comprehensive assessments nationally.
But line up all three quarterly reports published so far this year (December, March and June) and a more specific structural story emerges: the type of assessment that used to be the front door to aged care is disappearing, in real numbers, not just as a shrinking share of a growing pie, and the group taking its place is stuck with the same long wait it had six months ago.
Home support assessments are falling every quarter, not just losing share
Home support assessments, the standard entry-level assessment conducted by non-clinical assessors, fell in raw volume in each of the three reported quarters:
That’s a drop of nearly 4,700 completed home support assessments, 8.2 per cent, in six months, even as overall assessment volume rose from 127,649 to 133,359 to 140,028 over the same period.
Annually, the fall is starker still: 291,241 home support assessments in 2024–25 down to 235,514 in 2025–26, a 19 per cent year-on-year decline, even as the total number of assessments completed nationally hit a record.
Comprehensive assessments, for people with more complex needs, requiring a clinical assessor, moved in the opposite direction every quarter: 57,815 → 66,140 → 74,511. They are now a majority of all completed assessments, 53 per cent in the June quarter, up from 45 per cent in December.
Support at Home is likely reshaping the numbers
The shift is not necessarily a sign that older Australians are presenting with more complex needs than before.
The reports themselves describe a mechanism that would produce exactly this pattern: where a home support assessment results in a Support at Home outcome, the assessment must be converted into a comprehensive assessment for approval by a clinical assessment delegate.
Support at Home replaced the Home Care Packages Programme on 1 November 2025, close to the point where this shift in the data begins to show.
As more people who would once have exited the system with a home support-level CHSP outcome are instead assessed as needing a Support at Home package, they are reclassified into the comprehensive bucket by definition, regardless of whether their underlying needs have changed.
The practical effect is the same either way: a growing share of the assessment workforce’s caseload now requires a clinical assessor, rather than a non-clinical one, a shift with workforce and rostering implications that go beyond what the report’s topline figures show.
The fastest-growing group has seen no improvement in wait times
Comprehensive assessments recorded the longest median wait time in every single quarter, and it has not improved:
Home support wait times, by contrast, improved over the same period, from 25 to 23 to 21 days nationally.
The record year in assessment volumes obscures an uneven picture underneath it: the fastest pathway got a little faster, while the group now making up the majority of all assessments sat at the longest wait time in the system for three consecutive quarters.
Comprehensive assessment candidates, by definition, are the people with the most complex needs, and the least capacity to absorb a five-week wait.
Queensland is going backwards while the rest of the country improves
National headline wait times look stable, holding at 26, 25 and 26 days across the three quarters. But that masks a clear state-level divergence.
Queensland’s overall median wait time worsened every quarter, rising from 30 to 30 to 34 days, the only state or territory with a consistent worsening trend across all three reports. Tasmania, by comparison, improved over the same period, from 36 to 33 to 30 days.
The deterioration in Queensland is not being driven by comprehensive assessments, which actually improved there between the December and June quarters, from 49 to 37 to 41 days.
Instead, it is the “easy” pathway that has slowed: Queensland’s home support wait times climbed every quarter, from 27 to 32 to 34 days, taking the state from mid-table to the longest home support wait of any state or territory by June, even as the national home support median fell.
Backlog clearance sped up sharply in the June quarter
The number of referrals on hand, people who have been referred for an assessment but have not yet completed one, fell every quarter:
The pace of the reduction more than tripled between the March and June quarters, a sharper improvement than the flat year-on-year comparisons elsewhere in the report suggest.
The Department’s own reporting notes that assessment volumes and regional figures can shift on later data extracts, so whether this pace holds will become clear only once the next quarterly report is published.
