Your ACAT Assessment Said You Qualify: Now What? The Next 5 Steps Explained
The phone call comes, or maybe the letter does, and someone tells you that yes, you qualify. You’ve been approved for Support at Home funding.
Then you sit there with a bit of paper (or a bit of news), and you realise nobody actually told you what to do with it.
We hear this all the time. Qualifying is supposed to feel like a green light, but for a lot of people it’s the moment the system gets murkier, not clearer. There are letters that arrive months apart. There’s a queue you didn’t know you’d be joining. There’s a Services Australia thing nobody mentioned. And then suddenly there’s a 56-day clock and you’re meant to know what to do.
So we’ve laid it out. In our last blog, we talked about How to Prepare for Your ACAT Assessment. Now, we explore what happens after an ACAT assessment determines you as eligible for Support at Home funding – here’s a step-by-step guide for what comes next (between the day you qualify until the day someone walks through your front door to help).
Step 1: Read Your Notice of Decision Letter (Again)
The first thing you’ll get is your Notice of Decision letter. (Sometimes called your ‘assessment outcome’.) It comes from the assessment organisation – not directly from My Aged Care, even though everything funnels through them eventually.
The letter contains a lot, and it’s worth slowing down for. It will tell you:
- What services you’ve been approved for;
- Your classification level: One of eight, from Classification 1 to Classification 8, each tied to a different annual budget;
- Your priority category: Urgent, high, medium or standard, which affects how soon you’ll be funded;
- A copy of your support plan;
- And importantly, your right to ask for a review if any of it doesn’t feel right.
What it won’t tell you is when your funding will actually become available. That’s a separate letter, and we’ll come to it.
If anything in the Notice of Decision feels off – maybe the classification feels too low, maybe a service you really need isn’t there – it’s important to flag it as soon as possible. We’ve written separately about why the assessment algorithm has been controversial, and you have every right to ask for a review.
Step 2: Get Your Income and Assets Assessment Going – Now, Not Later
This is the bit nobody mentions, and it’s also the bit that catches people out.
Once your funding is allocated (we’ll get to that in step 4), you’ll have only 56 days to choose a provider and start services. Sounds like ages – until you realise that one of the things you have to do in that window is have an income and assets assessment with Services Australia, which decides what you’ll personally contribute to your care.
If you wait until your funding allocation letter arrives to start that paperwork, you’ll burn through a chunk of your 56 days waiting for Services Australia. Better to start it now (straight after your Notice of Decision), so when the next letter lands, you’re ready to go.
You can start the income and assets assessment process here.
While you’re at it, this is a good time to read up on what Support at Home fees and contributions actually look like – so when the numbers turn up, they’re not a shock.
Step 3: The Waiting Bit Nobody Talks About
Here’s the part of the journey most people aren’t warned about. After your Notice of Decision, your name goes into the Support at Home Priority System – a queue of approved-but-not-yet-funded participants.
How long you’ll wait depends on:
- Your priority category (urgent moves fastest, standard waits longest)
- Demand in your region
- The funding the government has allocated to your classification
The federal government has set a target of an average three-month wait by July 2027 – but right now, waits vary wildly. Some people get their allocation within weeks, while others may wait several months – possibly even up to 11 months.
If your wait is long, you might be offered interim funding, which is essentially 60% of your classification budget while you wait for the rest. The other 40% isn’t backdated when it eventually comes through, so it’s best to accept the interim if it’s offered.
This is also the time to start thinking about what you actually want help with, and what kind of provider would suit you. We won’t pretend the wait is comfortable – it can feel limbo-ish and uncertain. But you’re not stuck. There are still things you can be doing to be ready, and we’d love to help you with that bit.
Step 4: Your Funding Allocation Letter Arrives – The 56-Day Clock Starts
This is letter number two: Your funding allocation letter. It tells you the funding is now available in your name. From the date of this letter (not the Notice of Decision), you have 56 days to choose a provider, sign a service agreement, and start receiving services.
If you don’t make it in time, you can ask for a 28-day extension (as a one-off) by calling My Aged Care on 1800 200 422. If you still don’t get there, the funding is reallocated to the next person in the queue – and you re-join the back of it.
This is where the heavy-lifting work starts. You’ll need to find a provider, compare what they charge for each service (every provider must publish a ‘common price’ on My Aged Care and on their own website), review and enquire into how frequent communication is, if staff are consistent and of course, whether or not you feel truly seen and heard. After you’re settled on all of these crucial factors, which our CareAbout Care Advisers can walk you through, you’ll be ready to sign a service agreement before your first day of care.
We’ve written a much more detailed walk-through of this 56-day window – what the letter looks like, how to choose a provider, and what to expect once you sign (in our companion guide on what to do once your Support at Home funding has been allocated) – when you reach this stage, this guide’s worth reading next.
You’ll also need to decide whether you want a self-managed or fully-managed approach to your care – both are still allowed under Support at Home, with some important rules around what your care partner has to do regardless.
Step 5: If Something Doesn’t Feel Right: You Have the Right to Review
This last one isn’t really a ‘step’. It’s more a quiet permission slip you should keep in your back pocket the whole way through.
If your classification feels wrong, whether you’ve been allocated a Level 2 Classification but your daily reality requires funding support closer to a Level 5 Classification – you have the right to ask for a Support Plan Review. Your Notice of Decision letter explains how, and you can call My Aged Care directly to start one.
Reviews aren’t a guaranteed reclassification. But they are how the system corrects itself when it gets things wrong. And given some of the valid concerns about the algorithm used to set classifications, asking for a review when something feels off isn’t being difficult – it’s being your own advocate.
If your circumstances change later – a fall, a new diagnosis, a hospital stay, whatever it might be, you can also ask for a full reassessment. The classification you start on isn’t your forever level. And here’s your guide for How to Navigate Your Reassessment.
A Gentle Word Before You Go
If all of this feels like a lot – that’s because it definitely is. The system has more steps and more letters and more clocks than it really should, and you’re allowed to be tired of it before you’ve even started.
You don’t have to figure out the next bit on your own. Our team can help you think through what providers might suit you, what to ask, and what to watch for – no pressure, no fee, no sales pitch. Just a friendly conversation with someone who knows the maze; someone whose only job is to CareAbout you.
