The cost of aged care in New Zealand

How aged care is paid for in New Zealand

New Zealand does not charge everyone the same price for rest-home or hospital-level aged care. The system is means-tested, and it works in two stages.

First, your assets are assessed. If they are above the threshold, you pay towards your care yourself, up to a capped maximum weekly contribution (see the next section). Second, once your assets have been spent down below the threshold, you apply for the Residential Care Subsidy — administered by Work and Income, part of the Ministry of Social Development — and the government pays the shortfall between your maximum contribution and the cost of your care.

For the 2025/26 year, Work and Income sets the asset threshold at approximately NZ$142,048 for a single person, and approximately NZ$284,000 where a couple's combined assets are counted. Two things matter about these figures. The thresholds are reset every year on 1 July, so the exact number changes annually. And whether your family home and car are counted depends on your situation — for a couple with one partner still living at home, the home and car are generally not counted, which changes which threshold applies. Because of that, the numbers below are the right order of magnitude for 2025/26 but should be confirmed against Work and Income for your own circumstances before you rely on them.

What you pay before the subsidy starts — the maximum contribution

While your assets are still above the threshold, you contribute towards the cost of your care, but not without limit. New Zealand caps what a resident pays at a maximum weekly contribution, set by region. Above that cap you do not pay more, even if the facility's headline price is higher — the difference is met through the subsidy or the Health NZ (Te Whatu Ora) contract once you qualify.

The current maximum contribution sits in an indicative range of roughly NZ$1,406 to NZ$1,566 a week depending on region. We label this figure indicative on purpose: we could not confirm the current weekly rate against a primary Health NZ (Te Whatu Ora) release, only against secondary aggregators. Treat it as a rough guide to the ceiling, not a precise quote, and confirm the exact current rate with the care provider or Health NZ before budgeting on it. For that reason this number does not appear in the source list at the foot of the page.

The practical takeaway is the structure, not the exact dollar figure: your contribution is capped at a weekly maximum, and once your assets fall below the threshold the state covers everything above your assessed contribution.

How many New Zealanders need care — and why the bill is rising

The demand side is well documented. Stats NZ's 2023 Census counted 828,600 New Zealanders aged 65 and over — 16.6% of the population, about one in six — and Stats NZ projects that number will pass one million by 2028. A larger, older population means a larger aged-care bill, whether that care is delivered in a facility or at home.

Falls are one of the clearest drivers of that need. ACC (2024) reports that around 30% of New Zealanders aged 65 and over fall at least once a year, and 10–20% of those falls require hospitalisation. The Health Quality & Safety Commission's Atlas of Healthcare Variation (2016 data) recorded about 27,000 people aged 50 and over hospitalised with a fall, including roughly 3,750 hip fractures — injuries that frequently mark the transition from independent living into supported or residential care. ACC has put fall-related claims for people aged 65+ at about NZ$163 million a year (2015 baseline) — we flag this one as indicative: it is an older figure we could not pin to a current ACC primary release, so it is kept out of our source list and should be checked before use. A serious fall is often the event that starts the clock on the costs this page describes.

The biggest cost isn't billed: unpaid family care

The subsidy, the weekly contribution and the facility fees are only the part of aged care that generates an invoice. The largest cost by value is carried by families, and no one is paid for it.

Infometrics, in a study commissioned for Carers NZ (with the Ministry of Social Development among the partners), valued unpaid care in New Zealand at NZ$17.6 billion a year — equivalent to about 5.4% of GDP. The same work counted 432,000 New Zealanders providing unpaid care, roughly 14% of adults or one in seven, rising to as many as ~655,000 once the Census undercount is allowed for.

It is important to read that NZ$17.6 billion for what it is: a replacement-cost valuation — an estimate of what it would cost to buy the same care in the market — not money that changes hands. It is the same method used to value unpaid care in Australia, the UK and the US, and like those figures it shows the scale of what families absorb rather than a payment anyone receives. When people ask what aged care 'costs' New Zealand, this is the number that dwarfs the rest, and it lands on households, not the health budget.

How New Zealand compares with Australia and Singapore

New Zealand's means-tested subsidy model is one of several ways a country can share the cost of aged care, and the numbers are not directly comparable because the systems are built differently. Two neighbours make the contrast clear.

In Australia, residential aged care carries a maximum basic daily fee of A$66.80 a day (about A$24,382 a year), set at 85% of the single basic Age Pension and indexed twice a year (Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, 2026) — a flat daily charge on top of separate means-tested care fees. In Singapore, long-term care is subsidised through a means-tested framework of up to 80% for citizens (50–55% for permanent residents), tiered by per-capita household income (Ministry of Health, effective 1 October 2024), and the CareShield Life insurance scheme pays a base of S$689 a month in 2026 for severe disability (CPF Board).

The point of the table below is not to rank these systems — each figure has a different basis and none maps onto New Zealand's asset-threshold model. It is to show that 'the cost of aged care' means something different in each country, so a headline number from one is not a benchmark for another.

Figures we don't publish, and why

Some numbers that circulate about New Zealand aged-care costs are absent here on purpose.

We do not headline a precise maximum weekly contribution. The roughly NZ$1,406–1,566 range appears above only as an indicative guide, because we could not confirm the current rate against a primary Health NZ (Te Whatu Ora) release — so it is not in our source list and should be checked before use.

We do not publish a single 'average monthly nursing-home price' for New Zealand. Facility prices and the extra amenity charges above the subsidised rate vary by provider and contract, and there is no single official figure that fairly represents them.

And we do not state the living-alone rate for New Zealanders aged 85 and over — the band most likely to need care — because it is not published in the 2023 Census highlights. Where a figure can be sourced, it is here with its origin; where it cannot, we say so rather than estimate.

Where a daily check-in fits — and where it doesn't

An app does not pay for aged care, arrange it, or replace it. Nothing on this page is solved by software, and the fixes for the costs above are savings, services and public funding.

There is one narrow, honest thing worth saying on a page about ageing in New Zealand. A large share of older New Zealanders live alone — 25.3% of people aged 65 and over, about one in four, according to the Stats NZ 2023 Census — and for someone ageing in place the practical daily question is simply this: if something went wrong today, how long before anybody knew? I'm Alive answers only that question. You confirm you're okay once a day; if you don't, the people you chose are told.

The daily check-in is free (the Check In plan, $0) and works on iPhone and Android. The paid plans widen the safety net rather than the check-in: Stay Protected ($29.99/year) and Complete Safety Net ($39.99/year) allow up to 10 emergency contacts and full push, email and SMS escalation, where the free plan has one contact and a capped monthly alert if you go quiet. It is a safety backstop for people living independently — not a care service, not a subsidy, and not a substitute for either.