You've probably landed here because you've been circling the same few questions. What home care services are actually available? What do they cost? Do you have to pay for someone to help with the cleaning, or the drive to the clinic? And who exactly is this CareAbout, a provider, or just people helping you make sense of it all?
Fair questions. Every one of them.
So let's slow it all down. No pressure to decide anything today. Just the lay of the land.
1. First, what is CareAbout — a provider, or not?
Let's clear this one up straight away, because it trips a lot of people up.
We're not a provider. We don't come to your home and do the cleaning or the nursing ourselves.
What we do is help you understand the system, work out what you might be eligible for, and then match you, one to one, based on what you actually need, with a provider who does the hands-on care. We look at your situation and connect you with providers suited to it, rather than handing you a directory to sort through yourself.
And yes, it's free to you.
2. What home care services are available?
This is the big one, so let's actually answer it.
Most government-funded home care now sits under Support at Home, which replaced Home Care Packages from 1 November 2025. There's also the Commonwealth Home Support Program (CHSP), the entry-level program, which is where a lot of people start if what they need is some help around the house rather than ongoing care.
Under Support at Home, every service falls into one of three categories. This matters more than it sounds, because the category decides what you pay, which we'll come to in section 3.
Clinical supports
Care that needs a trained clinician:
- Nursing visits — wound care, health monitoring, medication support
- Nutrition and dietetics
- Allied health and therapy to help you stay mobile and independent
Independence services
Support that helps you keep doing things for yourself:
- Personal care — showering, dressing, grooming, help getting in and out of bed, continence support. Note: from 1 October 2026 personal care moves into clinical supports and becomes fully government funded — more on that in section 3.
- Transport to appointments, shopping and social outings
- Respite care, to give a carer a break
- Social support and help getting to community activities
Everyday living services
The practical business of running a household:
- Domestic assistance — cleaning and general household help
- Laundry
- Meal preparation and help with shopping
- Home maintenance, repairs and gardening
Equipment and home modifications sit somewhere different
Grab rails, a shower stool, ramps, walkers, wheelchairs and assistive technology don't come out of your ongoing budget at all. They're funded through a separate short-term pathway called the Assistive Technology and Home Modifications (AT-HM) scheme, which has its own funding.
That's worth knowing, because people often assume a grab rail will eat into their cleaning hours. It shouldn't.
Two details worth having straight:
- Contributions still apply to the items themselves. AT-HM equipment and modifications are charged at a contribution rate equivalent to the independence category. Prescription items are the exception — they sit under clinical supports, so no contribution applies to those.
- Leftover Home Care Package funds get used first. If you're moving across from a Home Care Package and you have unspent funds sitting there, you'll need to use that money before you can apply for AT-HM funding.
There are also two other short-term pathways — a Restorative Care Pathway for a focused period of therapy to get you back on your feet after a setback, and an End-of-Life Pathway.
Not every person receives every service. What you get is matched to what an assessor agrees you need. But this is the menu the system draws from.
3. Do you have to pay for domestic help and transport?
The honest answer here is more precise than most people are told: it depends which category the service is in, and the two you're asking about are in different ones.
Here's how contributions work. The government sets a percentage for each service type. You pay that percentage of the price; the government pays the rest directly to your provider.
- Clinical supports — you contribute nothing. Nursing and clinical care are fully government funded, for everyone, regardless of your income or assets.
- Independence services — moderate contribution. This is where transport sits.
- Everyday living services — the highest contribution. This is where domestic assistance sits.
So to answer the question directly: yes, there's a contribution for both the cleaning and the transport, but you'll pay a smaller share for the transport than for the cleaning, and nothing at all for any nursing care you receive.
One big change coming. From 1 October 2026, the government will fully fund personal care help with showering, dressing and getting up in the morning. It moves out of the independence category and into clinical supports, meaning no out-of-pocket cost at all. If personal care is part of what you're looking into, that's a meaningful shift and it's almost here.
How much you contribute depends on your circumstances. Services Australia does an income and assets assessment, similar to the Age Pension means test. Full pensioners pay the lowest contributions. Part pensioners and Commonwealth Seniors Health Card holders pay based on their assessment. Self-funded retirees without a Seniors Health Card pay the highest.
One thing many people miss: if you don't receive any government payment, you may still qualify for lower rates — but only if you give Services Australia your financial information. If your income and assets look like a full pensioner's, you'll pay a full pensioner's rates. Not submitting anything is what lands people on the top rate by default.
Three protections worth knowing about:
- A lifetime cap. There's a cap on what you can be asked to contribute to non-clinical care across your lifetime — $135,318.69 as at 1 November 2025, indexed each March and September. Services Australia tells you when you reach it.
- The "no worse off" principle. If you were receiving or approved for a Home Care Package on or before 12 September 2024, you won't pay more under Support at Home than you would have before. If you weren't assessed as paying an income-tested care fee then, you will never be asked to contribute now.
- Financial hardship assistance. If you genuinely can't meet your contributions and you meet the criteria, Services Australia can pay some or all of them for you through a fee reduction supplement. It's applied for through Services Australia, and it's for special circumstances rather than a general safety net.
4. What are the prices?
The question everyone gets to eventually. And there's a reason nobody hands you one clean price list.
- Different services cost different amounts. An hour of cleaning and an hour of nursing aren't priced the same.
- Providers set their own rates. Even for the same service, one provider charges differently to another.
- Your contribution depends on your circumstances. Two people receiving identical services can pay different amounts.
So when someone offers you a single tidy number before knowing any of that, be a little cautious.
What you can do is get real figures rather than guesses:
- Use the Support at Home fee estimator on the My Aged Care website. It's built for exactly this question and gives you an estimate based on your own situation.
- Compare published prices. Providers are legally required to publish the price they most frequently charge for each service, both on their own website and on My Aged Care. If a provider hasn't done that, that itself tells you something.
- Know what can't be added on. Providers cannot charge you separate administration or travel fees. Those costs have to be built into the service price, not billed on top.
One more thing that surprises people: 10% of each quarterly budget is set aside for care management — the coordination work behind your services. That's normal and it's how the program is designed, but it explains why the full headline budget doesn't all land as direct service hours.
The information is out there. It's just spread across a lot of pages, which is exactly the legwork we can take off your plate.
5. How transport help works, including taxi cards
This one causes real confusion, because two different things get called "transport support".
Transport through your home care. Your provider can arrange someone to drive you to a medical appointment, the shops or a social outing. It's an independence service, so a contribution applies, and it's organised through your provider as part of your services.
State and territory taxi subsidy schemes. Separately, most states and territories run subsidised taxi schemes for people with a permanent and severe disability that affects their ability to use public transport. These are run by state governments and have nothing to do with the aged care system. They typically give you a card covering a portion of your fare. Eligibility, the subsidy amount and any per-trip cap vary by state.
Two things follow from that. First, eligibility for a taxi card is based on disability, not age — being in home care doesn't automatically qualify you. Second, they're separate pots and you can use both. Having one doesn't reduce the other.
If transport is a big part of why you're looking into all this, say so early. It's one of the fiddlier areas to navigate and it's worth getting the setup right from the start.
6. How do you actually access these services?
You know what's on the menu. Here's how you get to order from it.
- Contact My Aged Care on 1800 200 422 to register — or let us walk through that step with you.
- Have an assessment. An aged care assessor visits you at home and has a conversation about how you're managing. (You may hear people call this an ACAT assessment — that was the old name. ACAT and RAS were replaced by the Single Assessment System in December 2024.) They're not testing anyone. They're listening, so the right level of support can be matched to what's actually going on.
- Get your approval. You'll receive a letter setting out what you've been assessed as needing and, for ongoing services, which of the eight funding classifications you've been assigned.
- Choose a provider. You're not assigned one — you pick. You can also use different providers for different services if that suits you.
- Sign a service agreement and services begin.
Step five is where most people stall. There are a lot of providers — over 900 across the country — they all describe themselves warmly, and it's hard to tell from a website who'll actually suit you. That's the bit we help with: matching you to a provider based on your needs, your location and what matters to you.
Worth knowing: that wait at step four is useful time. You can spend it comparing providers rather than sitting still, so you're ready to move the day your funding lands. And once it does land, the clock starts — you have 56 days from your funding allocation letter to sign a service agreement and begin services, with a 28-day extension available if you call My Aged Care.
7. Still not sure what applies to you? You're not alone
If you've read this far and part of you is still thinking "but which of these applies to me?" — that's completely normal.
That's not a you problem. The system is genuinely confusing, the language is dense, and none of us were taught any of it. There's no exam you failed.
The reason a real conversation helps more than a webpage is simple: your situation is specific. What your mum needs, or what you need, or what your partner needs isn't a category on a list, it's a real life with real particulars. A five-minute chat sorts more than an hour of reading, because we can point straight at the part that applies to you and skip the ninety percent that doesn't.
And there's no pressure in that chat. Being "just at the looking stage" is a perfectly good reason to talk to us.
