Aged Care Award Pay Rates 2025-26: What Direct Care Providers Need to Know

What the Aged Care Award MA000018 covers

The Aged Care Award MA000018 is the modern award for workers in residential aged care facilities. It covers personal care workers, assistants in nursing, lifestyle officers, and other direct care and support roles employed in residential settings.

Home care is a separate matter. Workers who deliver aged care services in a client's home are generally covered by the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award 2010 (SCHADS Award MA000100), not the Aged Care Award. The distinction is about the work setting, not the client's age or funding source.

If your organisation operates both a residential facility and a home care program, your workforce may be split across both awards. This is common for large aged care providers.

Classification levels under the Aged Care Award

The Aged Care Award uses a classification structure based on skill level, qualifications, and the nature of care delivered. The main streams relevant to direct care providers are:

Each classification has a minimum weekly (or hourly) rate. These minimums are adjusted by the Annual Wage Review, which takes effect from the first full pay period on or after 1 July each year.

For the precise dollar amounts at each level, refer to the Fair Work Ombudsman's Pay Guide for the Aged Care Award, which is updated after each Annual Wage Review decision. The FWO publishes these as downloadable pay guides at fairwork.gov.au.

The work value case: why base award rates are not the operative rates

From 2022 to 2024-25, the Fair Work Commission conducted the Aged Care Work Value Case. The Commission found that direct care work in aged care had been systematically undervalued in the industrial awards. It issued three staged determinations that progressively increased minimum rates for direct care workers above the base award structure.

These determinations are separate from the Annual Wage Review. They set a higher floor for direct care roles. The base award rates as they stood before the work value case are no longer the operative minimums for these roles.

For a provider, this means two things:

First, if your payroll system was updated only for the Annual Wage Review each year and was not updated for the work value case determinations in 2022, 2023, and 2024-25, you are almost certainly underpaying direct care staff.

Second, when the Annual Wage Review sets a new increase each July, you need to apply that increase to the work value case operative rates, not to the pre-2022 base award rates. The Annual Wage Review percentage is applied to whichever minimum is currently operative.

How to find the current operative rates

The Fair Work Commission publishes the operative rates from the work value case on its website. The relevant proceedings are searchable at fwc.gov.au under the Aged Care Work Value Case matter number (AM2020/99).

The Fair Work Ombudsman also publishes Pay Guides that incorporate the work value case rates for each classification. The FWO Pay Guide is the practical reference for day-to-day payroll. It shows the all-in rate for each level after the work value case adjustments and Annual Wage Review are applied.

Do not rely solely on the base award rate table in a standard payroll system. Confirm that the system has been updated for each work value case determination.

The risk of benchmarking against base award only

Providers who set wages by looking at the base Aged Care Award MA000018 classification table and have not applied the work value case determinations are paying below the legal minimum for direct care roles.

The Fair Work Ombudsman can investigate and order back-payment plus interest and penalties. There is no cap on the back-payment period for ongoing underpayment. An organisation that has been underpaying since 2022 faces a three-year liability exposure.

Self-identified underpayment that is proactively remediated is treated differently by the FWO than underpayment discovered through a complaint or audit. If you identify a gap, the standard approach is to calculate the shortfall, pay it promptly, and notify the affected workers in writing.

Home care vs residential: which award and why

The award that applies to a worker depends on where they work and what they do, not on the age of the client or the funding source.

A worker who moves between settings in the same week may technically be covered by different awards for different shifts. In practice, most providers employ workers under one primary award and manage the edge cases with over-award payments.

If you are unsure which award applies to a specific role or arrangement, the Fair Work Ombudsman's online tool and Pay Guides are the place to start. For complex or contested situations, employment law advice is appropriate.

Annual Wage Review: how it interacts with work value case rates

The Annual Wage Review (AWR) sets a percentage increase for all modern award minimum rates each July. That percentage is applied to whichever minimum is currently operative for a role.

For direct care workers covered by the work value case, the operative minimum is the work value case rate. The AWR percentage is applied on top of that. Both movements compound over time.

Where this causes confusion: some payroll systems hold the base award rate in one field and the work value case adjustment as a separate component. After an AWR increase, the system may update the base rate field but not recalculate the total correctly. After each July increase, verify that the total operative rate for each classification matches the FWO Pay Guide, not just that the base rate field moved by the right percentage.

Practical checklist: confirming you are paying the right rate

Work through these steps to confirm compliance before the next pay cycle:

1. 1.Pull the current pay rate for one worker at each Aged Care Award classification level your organisation uses.
2. 2.Look up the current operative rate for that classification in the FWO Pay Guide for the Aged Care Award (ensure the Pay Guide reflects the most recent Annual Wage Review).
3. 3.If your rate is below the FWO Pay Guide rate for that classification, you have an underpayment. Calculate the shortfall from when the gap first appeared.
4. 4.Confirm that casual loading is being calculated on the work value case operative rate, not on the pre-2022 base rate.
5. 5.If you have an Enterprise Agreement, check each EA rate against the corresponding operative minimum. The EA must be at or above the operative minimum at every classification level.
6. 6.After each July Annual Wage Review, repeat this check for every classification level.