Support at Home: What the 2025 Aged Care Reform Means for Your Operations
Australia's Support at Home program replaced Home Care Packages on 1 July 2025. Here's what changed for rostering, compliance, and day-to-day coordination — and what your software needs to handle now.
What changed on 1 July 2025
Australia's Home Care Packages program ended on 30 June 2025. From 1 July, it was replaced by Support at Home — a fundamentally different funding model that changes how budgets are structured, how services are claimed, and what providers are required to report.
The shift is not cosmetic. Home Care Packages had four levels (1 through 4) with annualised budgets. Support at Home introduces eight funding levels, each tied to a quarterly budget that must be actively managed against specific service categories. The previous model let providers carry unused funds across quarters with relatively light oversight. Support at Home tightens that significantly.
For a care coordinator, this is not an IT project or a compliance team's problem. It changes what you do on a Tuesday.
What it means for rostering
The core operational shift is that budget tracking moves from a background administrative function to something that sits alongside your roster.
Under Home Care Packages, a coordinator might check a client's remaining annual budget monthly, adjust service hours broadly, and let the finance team reconcile claims. Under Support at Home, each client has a quarterly budget broken into service categories: independence supports, everyday living, social supports, assistive technology, and home modifications among them. Services you roster must be coded to the right category. If a client's independence supports budget runs out mid-quarter, you cannot simply pull from another category without documentation and a plan review.
In practice this means:
- Before you roster a shift, you need to know which service category it draws from and how much of that category's quarterly budget remains.
- When a client's needs change, the change flows immediately into how you can roster and claim — not at the end of the quarter.
- Unspent funds in some categories do carry forward, but the rules vary by category and client circumstance. You cannot assume carryover.
The volume of budget decisions a coordinator makes per client per week has increased. Any rostering tool that shows you shift assignments without surfacing budget context is going to create problems.
Compliance implications
Support at Home introduced new quality indicators that did not exist under Home Care Packages. Providers are required to collect and submit data on falls, pressure injuries, use of physical restraint, and unplanned weight loss — with monthly reporting to the Department.
For workforce management, this has two practical effects.
First, incident documentation becomes more time-sensitive. Under the previous model, a fall could be documented and reviewed within a reasonable window. Under Support at Home quality indicators, the expectation is that incidents are captured, categorised, and available for reporting within the same month they occur. If your carers are logging incidents on paper or in a separate system from your roster, you have a coordination problem.
Second, the monthly reporting cycle means compliance is not a quarterly or annual event anymore. Every month, someone in your organisation is compiling data. That process needs to be systematic, not manual. Providers who relied on a spreadsheet audit trail under Home Care Packages will feel this pressure almost immediately.
What providers need from their software now
The shift to Support at Home exposes gaps in tools that were built around the older model's assumptions. Specifically:
Budget visibility at the point of scheduling. Your rostering tool needs to show, per client, how much of each service category budget has been used and how much remains in the current quarter. This is not a finance team view — it is a coordinator view, and it needs to be visible when you're assigning shifts.
Service category coding on shifts. Every shift needs to be coded to a Support at Home service category at the point of creation or assignment. If your system doesn't support this, you're generating claims data manually after the fact, which is where errors enter.
Incident capture integrated with the roster. When a carer logs an incident on a shift, it should attach to that client's record with the date, time, and shift context already populated. Incidents captured in isolation are harder to report accurately.
Worker qualification tracking. Support at Home strengthens requirements around worker credentials for certain support types. If you're rostering workers to independence supports or complex care, the system should be able to confirm the assigned worker holds the right qualifications before the shift is confirmed.
Audit-ready activity records. Monthly reporting requires that you can produce an accurate account of what services were delivered to each client, by which worker, on which date. That needs to come from your system, not from reconstructed notes.
A practical checklist for coordinators
Before your next client review or team meeting, work through these questions for your current software:
- 1.Can you see a client's remaining quarterly budget by service category from the scheduling view?
- 2.Does the system require (or allow) service category coding on each shift or visit?
- 3.When a carer logs an incident on their mobile, does it automatically attach to the client's record with full shift context?
- 4.Does the system alert you when a worker assigned to a shift has a qualification that has expired or is expiring within 30 days?
- 5.Can you pull a report showing all services delivered to a specific client in the current quarter, broken down by category?
- 6.Is your monthly quality indicator data (falls, pressure injuries, weight loss, restraint) being captured in a structured format, or are you relying on free-text notes?
If the answer to more than two of these is "no" or "not easily", your current tool is adding coordinator workload rather than reducing it.
What stays the same
Not everything changed. The core workflow of a care coordinator — matching workers to clients, managing availability, communicating schedule changes, keeping client records current — is the same work it was before 1 July 2025. The SCHADS Award obligations for worker rostering and pay conditions have not changed. The requirement to maintain clear communication records and care plans remains.
Support at Home layers new budget and compliance complexity on top of existing operational demands. It does not replace those demands. Providers who were already stretched thin on administration will feel the new requirements most acutely.
Where Teiro fits
Teiro is a care workforce platform built for Australian providers managing the operational side of care delivery. It handles rostering, carer communication, client records, compliance tracking, and incident capture in one place.
If you're evaluating whether your current tools are ready for Support at Home, or if you're setting up a new service, book a demo and we can walk through how the platform handles budget-tracked rostering and compliance documentation.