The letter arrived three weeks ago and you have read it about forty times. It says your mum has been approved for Support at Home. It gives her a classification level. It does not say when anything actually starts, and the one question you need answered is the one the letter does not touch. She is managing, sort of, but the showers are getting harder and you are driving over four nights a week.
You are not being impatient. It is a fair question and nobody has answered it.
Here is the honest answer up front, including the part that is less comfortable. There are published Support at Home wait times, they are broken down by priority category, and for someone with urgent needs the wait is genuinely short. But for most people it is not. The official estimate for standard priority is 7 to 8 months, and when the government measured what actually happened from application to the first service being delivered, the median was 297 days. That is close to ten months. Both numbers are true, and the gap between them is the thing nobody explains.
The good news is that all of this is published, your category is knowable before you are told it, and there are parts of Support at Home that move considerably faster than the main queue. Let's go through it plainly.
Support at Home wait times, by priority category
Everyone approved for ongoing Support at Home services is placed in one of four priority categories. My Aged Care publishes an estimated wait for each, last updated 30 June 2026:
- Urgent priority: within 1 month.
- High priority: 1 month.
- Medium priority: 5 to 6 months.
- Standard priority: 7 to 8 months.
The clock starts at the access approval start date on the outcome letter, not the day of the assessment and not the day you first rang My Aged Care. If you are working out where your mum sits, that date on the letter is the one that counts.
Notice how steep the drop is between high and medium. That is deliberate. The Aged Care Rules set the target wait for high priority at six times shorter than medium and eight times shorter than standard, so a single point in the scoring can be the difference between waiting one month and waiting most of a year.
What actually decides your priority category
This is the step most explanations skip, and it is the one that catches families out. Your category is not a judgement call by the assessor. It is a points score, calculated by the Integrated Assessment Tool from the answers given at the assessment. The Department of Health publishes the scoring.
One point each if the person lives alone, identifies as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, has an assessed cognitive impairment, is experiencing homelessness or is at risk of homelessness, or has waited more than 6 months from initial assessment referral while living in a regional or remote area categorised MMM5-7. Then 2 points if they require urgent service provision, and 5 points if they have Motor Neurone Disease.
The total sets the category: 0 to 1 points is standard, 2 to 3 is medium, 4 is high, and 5 or more is urgent. There is a fuller walk through the scoring, and what happens once funding is allocated, on our Support at Home priority system page.
Run the arithmetic on your own situation before the assessment, not after. Someone who lives alone and has an assessed cognitive impairment scores 2, which is medium. If the assessor also records that they require urgent service provision, that is 4, which is high. Same person, same week, and the difference between those two outcomes is roughly six months of waiting.
Which is why how you describe the situation matters so much. Compare these two.
Weak: “She's managing at home but it's getting harder and we worry about her.”
Strong: “She lives alone. She has had two falls since June, the second one in the shower. She was on the floor for about forty minutes before I found her. She has been assessed as having cognitive impairment and she has twice left the stove on overnight.”
You are not exaggerating when you say the second one. You are giving the tool the facts it scores on. Nobody is doing you a favour by writing them down, and an assessor cannot score what they were not told. Our guide to the assessment covers what gets recorded and how.
Why the real wait is longer than the published estimate
The published estimates describe the queue for funding. They do not describe the whole journey.
The Department measured that separately. In the Aged Care Act 2024 Wait Times Report covering 1 April to 30 June 2026, the median elapsed time from application to services actually commencing, for ongoing Support at Home, was 297 days. The average was 306 days. Both round to ten months.
That figure is larger because it measures a longer stretch of road. It starts when the person first applies, so it takes in the wait for an assessment, the assessment itself, the wait for the outcome letter, the funding queue, and then the time taken to choose a provider and get a first visit booked. The published estimate covers only the funding queue in the middle.
Plan on the longer number and be pleasantly surprised. If you are standing at the very beginning of this, ten months from application is a more useful planning assumption than 7 to 8 months from a letter you have not received yet.
One thing to be clear on. A long wait for ongoing funding does not mean nothing happens for ten months. Several parts of Support at Home run on separate queues entirely, and they are much faster.
The parts of Support at Home that move faster
From the same report, same quarter, same measure of application to commencement:
- The End-of-Life Pathway: median 14 days. Under a month, reflecting the urgency of that pathway.
- The Restorative Care Pathway: median 64 days. Around two months. Short-term, goal-focused support after a fall, a hospital stay or a decline in function.
- Assistive technology and home modifications: median 193 days each. About six months, which is still a hundred days sooner than ongoing services.
Assistive technology and home modifications sit on their own priority systems. There is an Assistive Technology Priority System and a Home Modifications Priority System, separate from the one queuing ongoing services. Funding from those can arrive first, and you can start using it before your ongoing funding is allocated. If the shower is the problem, grab rails and a shower chair may be months closer than the care worker. We have written about what it means when only your AT-HM funding comes through first.
And if the wait for ongoing funding runs longer than expected, interim funding exists. It is assigned rather than applied for, and it is deliberately not offered to people approved for services with shorter expected waits, so being offered it tells you something about where you sit. Our guide to interim funding covers what it pays for and the 56 day rule for choosing a provider.
What to do while you are waiting
- Check the date on the letter, then count from it. That access approval start date is the beginning of the estimate, and knowing it turns a vague dread into a rough month.
- Ring My Aged Care on 1800 200 422 and ask for the priority category by name. Not “how long will it be”, which gets you the published estimate you already have. Ask which of the four categories the person was placed in.
- If circumstances have genuinely changed since the assessment, say so. A fall, a hospital admission, a diagnosis or a carer who can no longer cope are all material, and the scoring is built from exactly those facts.
- Use the waiting time to shortlist providers rather than to worry. Choosing takes longer than people expect, and doing it now means the first visit is booked the week the funding lands instead of a month later.
- Work out what covers the gap. If the need is real now, something has to carry the months in between, whether that is privately paid help, family rearranging, or a short-term pathway. Paying for support while you wait walks through the options.
You don't have to work this out alone
Waiting is its own kind of work. You are holding a situation together with no end date, doing the drives and the phone calls and the quiet arithmetic about how much longer this is sustainable, and the system is not built to tell you when it ends. Finding that wearing is not impatience. It is a reasonable response to being asked to wait without being told how long.
Having a chat with our team is free to you. It is one-on-one, a real conversation rather than a script, and there is no pressure to decide anything on the spot. We can help you make sense of where you sit and what the waiting period could look like, and when the funding does land, we match you with vetted providers that fit your situation and your area, based on what is actually needed, and never a ranking of who is “best”.
What matters at the end of the wait is that the right help starts quickly, and that you get to go back to being her daughter rather than her case manager.
Whenever you are ready, today, next week or three months from now, we are here.