The cost of aged care in Australia

The two figures that anchor the whole picture

Aged care is funded partly by government and partly by the person receiving it, and what an individual pays depends on the type of care and a means assessment. Two official figures anchor everything else. In residential (nursing-home) care, everyone can be asked to pay a basic daily fee, capped at A$66.80 a day — about A$24,382 a year — because it is set at 85% of the single basic Age Pension and re-indexed twice a year. For care at home, the new Support at Home program, which replaced Home Care Packages on 1 November 2025, sets eight ongoing funding classifications with annual budgets from A$11,000 to A$78,106. Everything else — means-tested care fees, accommodation payments in residential care, and what any one person actually contributes — is assessed case by case by My Aged Care, and there is no single published figure for it.

Residential aged care: the basic daily fee

In residential aged care — what most people call a nursing home — there are several possible charges, but only one has a single, published national cap: the basic daily fee. As of 2026 it is A$66.80 a day (about A$467.60 a week, or roughly A$24,382 over a year). The figure isn't arbitrary. The government sets it at 85% of the single basic Age Pension, which is why it moves — it is re-indexed every March and September when the pension is adjusted. On top of the basic daily fee, a resident may also face a means-tested care fee and an accommodation payment (a lump-sum refundable deposit or an equivalent daily payment). Those two are set individually by a My Aged Care assessment of income and assets, vary enormously between people and facilities, and are not published as a single figure — so this page does not put a number on them. Treat the A$66.80 basic daily fee as the one fixed, comparable cost, and everything above it as individually assessed.

Support at Home: the home-care budgets, from 1 November 2025

Most older Australians want to stay in their own home, and the program that funds that changed name and structure on 1 November 2025, when Support at Home replaced the old Home Care Packages. Under Support at Home there are eight ongoing funding classifications, each carrying an annual budget: the lowest, Classification 1, is A$11,000 a year; the highest, Classification 8, is A$78,106 a year. Which classification a person receives is decided by an assessment of their care needs, not their wealth. What they contribute out of that budget, however, is means-tested — and the split depends on the type of service. For a full pensioner, the government funds 100% of clinical care (nursing and allied health), so the participant pays 0%; the participant pays 5% toward 'independence' services (things like personal care and respite) and 17.5% toward 'everyday-living' services (things like cleaning, gardening and meals). Self-funded retirees pay more on the same sliding scale. The design principle is explicit: clinical care is treated as an entitlement; help with daily living is shared.

Who the aged-care bill lands on

The scale of these costs matters because of how many people they reach — and how many face them without anyone else in the house. There are about 4.2 million Australians aged 65 and over, 16% of the population in 2020, and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare projects that share will reach 21–23% by 2066. A large minority of them live alone: on the 2021 Census, 31% of older Australian women and 18% of older men lived alone, rising to 35% of everyone aged 85 and over — the age group most likely to live by themselves. Lone-person households are now 26% of all Australian households, and 55% of the people in them are women. Living alone does not make care more expensive, but it changes who notices when something goes wrong, and who is there to arrange help — which is a separate problem from the cost, and the only one a check-in habit speaks to.

The cost of what aged care often tries to prevent: falls

A large part of what aged care spends money on is downstream of one event: a fall. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates falls cost the health system about A$5 billion in 2022–23, among the highest-spending of any condition. In 2023–24 there were 248,211 fall-related hospitalisations — 43% of all injury hospitalisations, the single leading cause — and 6,698 fall deaths, again 43% of all injury deaths. When a fall does happen, help does not arrive at the same speed everywhere: for the most urgent (Code 1) ambulance call-outs in 2024–25, the median response ranged from 10.3 minutes in Western Australia to 16.3 minutes in the Northern Territory, and the 90th-percentile wait — the slow tail — ranged from 17.8 minutes in the ACT to 47.9 minutes in the NT. None of this is a cost a check-in app can remove. What it speaks to is a narrower thing: the value of someone being told sooner rather than later that a person who lives alone has not checked in today.

Where a daily check-in fits — and where it does not

It would be easy, on a page about the cost of aged care, to imply that an app is a cheaper substitute for it. It is not, and we won't pretend otherwise. A daily check-in cannot deliver nursing, cannot help someone wash or eat, and cannot pay a residential-care bill. Those needs are met by the Support at Home budgets and residential fees described above, and by the people — often unpaid family — who do the work.

What a check-in does is narrow and practical. For someone who lives alone and is largely independent, it answers one question: if something went wrong today, how long before anybody knew? You confirm you're okay once a day; if you don't, the people you chose are told. That is a safety habit for the years before, or alongside, formal care — not a replacement for it.

I'm Alive is a daily check-in app. You confirm you're okay once a day; if you don't, the people you chose are told. The daily check-in is free (Check In, $0) and works on iPhone and Android, and even on the free plan a missed check-in alerts your contact — up to once a month, by push and email. Stay Protected ($29.99/year) adds unlimited alerts and full escalation including SMS, and raises your emergency contacts from one to up to ten; Complete Safety Net ($39.99/year) adds location on the move, and there is a one-time Stay Connected & Travel Safely upgrade at $4.99. It is not aged care, it is not a medical device, and it never calls emergency services — it tells the people you chose.