Support at Home, explained without the jargon

Support at Home is the Australian Government program that funds aged care delivered in your own home. It started on 1 November 2025 and replaced the Home Care Packages program that ran before it.

If you have found the explanations so far heavy going, that is a reasonable response. The program is genuinely useful and genuinely badly explained. Here is the short version.

What it actually pays for

Support at Home funds the help that lets someone stay living at home rather than moving into residential care. That covers a wide range: nursing and allied health at one end, help with showering and dressing in the middle, and cleaning, meals, shopping and gardening at the other.

The money does not come to you. It goes to the provider you choose, who uses it to pay for the services in your plan and accounts back to you for what was spent.

Three things changed from the old program

If you or a family member were on a Home Care Package before, these are the differences worth knowing.

• Funding now arrives as a quarterly budget rather than accruing daily. Easier to plan against, and easier to see what is left.
• Services are grouped into three categories — clinical care, independence, and everyday living — and which category something falls into determines what you contribute toward it.
• Clients were sorted into grandfathered, hybrid or new, depending on where they were when the program changed. That affects which contribution rules apply to you.

The bit that surprises people

Not every service costs you the same, even out of the same budget. Clinical care — nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy — has no participant contribution at all. Everyday living services like cleaning and gardening attract the highest contribution. Independence supports like personal care sit in between.

This matters when you are planning. Two people with identical funding can end up paying very different amounts out of pocket depending on what mix of services they use.

How much funding is available

There are eight classification levels. Your assessment places you in one, and that sets your quarterly budget. Level 1 is modest — a bit of help around the house. Level 8 is the highest level of at-home support available, for people with substantial daily and clinical needs.

You do not choose your level. It comes out of the assessment, which is why being honest about your hard days rather than your good ones matters so much.

Where to start

Everything begins with My Aged Care, either at myagedcare.gov.au or on 1800 200 422. That is the front door for all government-funded aged care, and you can call for yourself or on someone else’s behalf.

From there it is an assessment, then a classification, then choosing a provider. None of it commits you to anything until you sign a service agreement.