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If you've got a parent receiving home care support, there's a genuinely good change landing on 1 October 2026: personal care services under the Support at Home program are moving into the "clinical supports" category, which means no more out-of-pocket contribution for things like showering, dressing and continence management.
It's a small line item in a much bigger reform story, but for families currently budgeting around a parent's home care costs, it's real money back in the picture.
Support at Home replaced the old Home Care Packages system on 1 November 2025, alongside the broader Aged Care Act 2024, the biggest overhaul of the sector in close to three decades. It introduced eight funding classifications (from roughly $10,700 to $78,000 a year), quarterly budgets instead of one annual pool, and government-set price caps on services from 1 July 2026 to stop overcharging.
If a parent or client transitioned across from an old Home Care Package, most of that happened automatically, but it's worth checking their current classification and quarterly budget if no one's looked at it since the switch.
Personal care; showering, dressing, mobility support, continence management, currently sits in a category that can attract an income-tested co-contribution for some participants. From 1 October, it moves to "clinical supports," which are fully government-funded regardless of income or assets, the same as nursing and physiotherapy already are.
In practical terms: if you or a family member have been paying a contribution toward personal care under Support at Home, that cost should disappear from your quarterly statement from October. It's worth confirming this actually happens rather than assuming it, provider billing systems don't always catch every reclassification cleanly on day one.
This doesn't touch the "everyday living" category; cleaning, gardening, meal prep, transport, which can still attract contributions depending on income and assets. It also doesn't change the quarterly budget amount itself; it just shifts what that budget has to stretch to cover, which for many participants effectively frees up more of their existing budget for other services.
It's a genuinely welcome change, and one that's easy to miss if you're not actively checking your aged care statements. If you've got a parent in the Support at Home system, or you're building aged care into your own retirement plan, this is a good prompt to check the numbers are current, not just assume the reform is background noise.
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