The transition to Australia’s Support at Home program has fundamentally changed the economics of home care.
The latest financial data shows just how significant that change has been. StewartBrown’s FY26 results, presented at its Aged Care Finance Forum in October 2026, show Support at Home recorded an operating deficit of $0.78 per client day in the June quarter, against a surplus of $3.77 per client day across FY25. For the full year, the operating result was just $0.26 per client day.
This is more than a funding transition. It represents a fundamental change in how home care providers must think about revenue, service delivery, utilisation, workforce productivity and overhead.
It also raises a difficult question for the sector: have home care providers developed the commercial discipline required to operate sustainably under the new model?
For some providers, the answer appears to be no.
That does not mean every organisation is poorly managed. It does mean that the previous funding environment could allow inefficiencies, duplicated structures and weak cost discipline to remain hidden for longer than they can under Support at Home.
The new model is exposing those weaknesses and that requires more than cost cutting – it requires good stewardship of every dollar available to deliver care.
1. The reality check: the numbers are moving
StewartBrown’s data now covers the first full year of the transition. Its March 2026 survey, drawing on 89,777 packages (around 26% of the sector), provided the first complete picture of providers operating solely under Support at Home. The FY26 results presented in October confirm the direction.
| Financial Metric | FY2025 Baseline | Nine Months to Mar 2026 | Mar 2026 Quarter |
| Operating result per client/day | $3.77 | $0.58 | $(0.46) |
| Overall operating margin | 4.4% | 0.7% | (0.6%) |
| Operating EBITDA per client/year | $1,620 | $425 | $23 |
| Average package utilisation | 88.2% | 76.2% | 62.2% |
These figures still need to be interpreted carefully. The Support at Home dataset is new, the nine-month result blends four months of Home Care Packages with five months under the new program, and StewartBrown noted that system and claiming issues may have delayed some revenue. But the June quarter did not recover the position. It was weaker again.
Nevertheless, the direction is now unmistakable.
Margins have turned negative. The March quarter was the lowest result StewartBrown has recorded for home care since it began benchmarking the sector in 2016, and the June quarter deficit was deeper still.
Service volumes have fallen. Average package utilisation dropped from 88.2% in FY25 to 76.0% in FY26, with the June quarter at 72.2% after a March quarter low of 62.2%. Hours of care delivered fell from 5.35 to 5.14 per client per week.
And overhead has not shrunk to match. Net administration costs, the gap between package management revenue and administration and support costs, rose by around 60% between FY25 and FY26, from $10.52 to $16.85 per client day. In the June quarter they reached $19.10.
The March quarter detail shows the mechanics. Total revenue fell by $14.19 to $74.66 per client day, care management revenue fell by $6.00 to $9.98, and package management revenue was just 56 cents. Over the same period, direct service expenses rose by $1.98 per client day compared with March 2025, while administration costs barely moved ($20.96 against $21.54) and care management costs eased only slightly ($7.56 against $7.87).
Revenue fell. The cost base did not.
Why direct service revenue is not automatically solving the problem
Under Support at Home, providers are responsible for setting their own prices. Those prices must be all-inclusive, reasonable and transparent, with providers expected to understand and demonstrate the costs incorporated into their pricing.
Higher prices have not been enough to close the gap on their own. StewartBrown’s earlier pricing analysis estimated that providers would need to lift service prices by 35% to 40% to maintain revenue. Yet although direct service revenue rose, total recurrent revenue still fell from $83.08 to $81.56 per client day across the nine months to March.
This creates an important commercial distinction.
A provider can charge a reasonable price and still lose money if:
- utilisation is too low
- travel time is excessive
- rostering is inefficient
- staff downtime is high
- services are under-costed
- documentation consumes excessive labour
- cancellations are poorly managed
- indirect labour is not properly accounted for
- corporate overhead is disproportionate to the volume of services being delivered.
- The issue is therefore not simply the price charged.
- It is the relationship between price, volume and true cost to serve.
2. The cost-recovery challenge
Support at Home has changed where providers recover their costs.
The separate package-management fee structure of the former HCP model no longer operates in the same way. Providers now need to incorporate relevant costs into their service prices, while care management operates within its own funding framework.
This creates a different operating discipline:
- Office leases still need to be paid.
- Technology platforms still need to be maintained.
- Compliance functions still need to operate.
- Leadership and governance costs remain.
- Payroll still needs to be processed.
- Employees still need to be supported, trained and managed.
- But service volumes can fluctuate.
When utilisation falls, there are fewer billable service units across which to recover those fixed costs.
This is the fundamental economic challenge: fixed costs are relatively stable. Service revenue is increasingly dependent on efficient delivery and utilisation.
That makes unit economics more important than ever – and scale, too. StewartBrown’s analysis suggests the benefits of scale now start at around 1,000 packages, compared with roughly 500 under the former model. A provider below that threshold is carrying overhead that its volume cannot yet absorb.
3. Stewardship of overhead is now a strategic responsibility
This is where I believe the sector needs a much more honest conversation. Because for many years, home care providers operated in an environment where the true cost of corporate overhead could be less visible to the consumer and less immediately connected to the delivery of individual services.
That environment has changed.
StewartBrown’s preliminary Corporate Administration Survey, covering around 40 organisations, found corporate expenditure had reached 18.04% of operating revenue in FY26, roughly three percentage points higher than a year earlier.
Under Support at Home, every provider needs to ask: What proportion of every dollar available is being consumed by the infrastructure required to operate the organisation, and what value is that infrastructure actually creating?
Good stewardship does not mean eliminating necessary overhead, but means making sure that overhead is:
- necessary
- proportionate
- productive
- transparent
- measurable
- aligned with participant outcomes and service delivery.
An organisation cannot claim to be sustainable simply because it has a large corporate infrastructure. Nor should scale automatically justify additional management layers.
The real question is: What does each dollar of overhead contribute to the participant, the frontline workforce, compliance, quality or the long-term sustainability of the organisation?
If that question cannot be answered, the cost deserves scrutiny. Yet, this is not an argument for indiscriminate cost cutting. It is an argument for commercial stewardship. Providers are custodians of resources intended to support older people. And those resources should be managed with the same discipline expected of any organisation operating in a financially constrained environment.
4. Utilisation has become a strategic metric
The new model requires providers to understand utilisation at a much deeper level.
Not simply: “We have 1,000 participants.”
But: “How many service hours are we delivering, at what price, at what labour cost, across what geographic footprint, and with what level of indirect time?“
Participant numbers alone are no longer a reliable proxy for business scale: service utilisation, service mix and cost-to-serve matter far more.
The StewartBrown data shows why this matters. It had been hoped that limited carry-over of unspent funds would lift utilisation under Support at Home. Instead, the results point to clients using fewer services, with system and claiming issues, co-contributions, changes to funded services and the separation of assistive technology funding all cited as possible factors.
Interim funding adds another layer of complexity, with some participants entering the program through arrangements funded at 60% of their approved ongoing classification until their ongoing classification is established.
The result is that providers need much greater visibility over:
- funded capacity
- actual utilisation
- service hours
- unproductive time
- cancellations
- travel
- workforce availability
- participant budget utilisation
- service-level profitability.
Without that visibility, management is effectively operating the business without a dashboard.
Density is a cost-to-serve advantage
StewartBrown’s FY25 Retirement Living Performance Report, drawing on 85 operators and 617 villages, offers a useful lens on this. It found that 68% of operators are registered to provide in-home support and 50% of villages actively deliver it. StewartBrown considers the 50% figure likely understated, because many operators do not track in-home support within their villages. Where it is tracked, the average penetration rate is 27%.
The report’s commercial argument is the same one this article makes. Residents who live in one place, share similar care trajectories and often prefer a familiar provider are cheaper to serve than dispersed private homes: less staff travel time and cost, better workforce utilisation and scheduling efficiency, greater continuity of care and lower marginal cost per service.
The lesson is not confined to villages. Whether a provider serves a retirement community, a co-located aged care campus or a tight geographic cluster, concentrating delivery is one of the most direct ways to lift utilisation and cut unproductive travel. It also reflects a growing overlap between sectors: 56% of villages in the report are co-located with residential aged care, and 19% of villages built in the last five years meet the 9C building standard needed to deliver funded residential aged care.
5. The commercial discipline gap
The answer is not that care-oriented organisations care too much. The challenge is that many organisations have historically separated care decisions from detailed commercial costing. And that separation becomes much harder to sustain under Support at Home.
Care managers need to remain focused on the participant’s needs, goals and wellbeing.
But organisations also need systems that translate care decisions into commercially sustainable service delivery.
That means understanding:
- the true cost of each service unit
- workforce costs
- travel and travel time
- documentation requirements
- rostering efficiency
- cancellations
- subcontractor costs
- indirect labour
- utilisation
- budget variance
- service-level margins.
The commercial discipline should not sit on the shoulders of individual care managers alone. It needs to be built into the operating system. Because a care manager should not have to become a financial analyst to understand whether a service plan is sustainable.
The StewartBrown data suggests that pressure is already landing on care managers. The average care manager is now responsible for 53 clients, up from 38 before Support at Home. That has helped contain care management costs, but it raises a real question about workload and service quality if the trend continues.
The organisation should provide the information, systems and decision-making framework that make the economics visible.
6. The corporate cost question
The sector also needs to confront the structure of corporate overhead: not every management position is unnecessary, not every support function is inefficient, and not every corporate cost can be measured by whether it directly interacts with a participant.
Governance, compliance, quality, technology, finance, workforce management and risk functions all have legitimate roles. But legitimate does not mean automatically efficient.
Every provider should be asking: Are we getting an appropriate return in capability, productivity, quality or risk reduction from the overhead we carry?
That means examining:
- management layers
- duplicated support functions
- manual administration
- fragmented technology
- inefficient rostering
- claims and billing processes
- excessive internal hand-offs
- reporting duplication
- unnecessary data entry
- centralised functions that could be automated
- support roles whose workloads no longer justify their structure.
The objective should be cost-to-value optimisation. A $150,000 role that materially improves compliance, workforce productivity or participant outcomes may be highly valuable. But a $150,000 role that exists primarily because three other systems cannot communicate with each other may represent an opportunity for redesign.
Commercial maturity means knowing the difference.
StewartBrown’s corporate cost analysis suggests technology is where this question is sharpest. In earlier periods staffing typically drove corporate cost increases. In FY26, non-staff expenditure, particularly technology, had the greatest impact. Providers are paying not just for systems, but for implementation, integration, data cleansing and reconciliation.
Of 52 providers delivering both residential aged care and Support at Home, more than half used different finance systems across the two services. Software that was not fully ready for Support at Home forced manual workarounds, failed integrations and duplicated data entry. StewartBrown’s recommended response is “active simplification”: mapping systems, spreadsheets, interfaces and workarounds, then consolidating, automating or retiring what can be removed before buying anything new.
7. A new operating model: leaner, smarter and more integrated
The emerging Support at Home environment requires a different operating model. Organisations should review management structures and identify roles whose primary function is information transfer between other management layers.
Where technology, clearer accountability and better processes can remove unnecessary hand-offs, structures should be simplified.
The objective is not simply fewer employees – it is fewer unnecessary processes and better use of every dollar of overhead.
Separate care quality from commercial administration
Care professionals should not be expected to become commercial operators. Instead, organisations should create systems that connect care planning with:
- service costing
- pricing
- utilisation
- workforce availability
- participant budgets
- travel
- margin analysis.
A centralised service optimisation function—supported by technology—could provide this visibility while allowing frontline staff to remain focused on participants.
Automate high-volume administrative processes
There is considerable opportunity to automate repetitive work across:
- scheduling
- rostering
- travel optimisation
- claims validation
- invoice reconciliation
- budget monitoring
- participant statements
- reporting
- timesheet reconciliation
- documentation workflows
- utilisation alerts.
It’s not about technology for technology’s sake, but about how to reduce the amount of human labour required to move information from one system or person to another.
Measure the true cost of service delivery
Every provider should be able to answer: What does it really cost us to deliver one hour of each service?
That calculation needs to go beyond the employee’s hourly wage and should consider:
- employment on-costs
- leave
- supervision
- travel
- administration
- documentation
- scheduling
- training
- cancellations
- technology
- insurance
- compliance
- corporate overhead.
Only then can a provider understand whether its published price represents a sustainable commercial proposition.
8. Pricing flexibility is not the same as pricing freedom
There is an important development that changes the immediate outlook.
The Australian Government announced in May 2026 that implementation of Support at Home price caps would be paused. Providers can continue setting their own prices, but those prices must be reasonable, transparent and based on the costs incurred to deliver the service.
This creates an important opportunity to not simply increase prices, but to understand them. Providers should use this period to develop accurate service-level costing, improve utilisation and build transparent pricing models.
The commercial question is therefore not: how much can we charge?
It is: what price is defensible, sustainable and supported by a clear understanding of the cost of delivery?
9. October 2026 Changes Add Another Layer
The operating environment continues to evolve. From 1 October 2026, eligible personal care services will move into the Clinical Supports contribution category, meaning participants will no longer pay an out-of-pocket contribution for approved personal care services where they have available Support at Home funding.
For providers, this is another reminder that the commercial model cannot be built around one static set of assumptions. Participant behaviour, service demand, pricing and utilisation can all change when policy settings change. A sustainable provider therefore needs a business model that can adapt.
10. The new unit of management: cost-to-serve
Perhaps the most important shift is conceptual.
The traditional home-care business was often managed around:
Participants → Packages → Budgets.
The emerging model needs to be managed around:
Participants → Services → Utilisation → Cost-to-Serve → Sustainable Margin.
That does not make aged care less human – it makes the business model more transparent. Because a provider cannot sustainably deliver high-quality care if it does not understand what that care actually costs. Nor can it protect participant outcomes if financial instability eventually forces reductions in workforce capacity, service availability or organisational capability.
Commercial discipline and quality care are not opposing concepts, but interdependent.
Good stewardship is part of sustainability
StewartBrown’s data across FY26 provides a clear warning: the economics of home care have changed.
The June 2026 quarter recorded an operating deficit of $0.78 per client day, and the full-year result was a surplus of just $0.26 per client day, down from $3.77 in FY25. The March quarter had already recorded a loss of $0.46 per client day and operating EBITDA of just $23 per client per annum, a level StewartBrown regards as not investable. Over the same period, net administration costs rose by around 60% and package utilisation fell to 76.0%.
But the lesson isn’t that providers need to cut costs: they need to redesign the business.
Support at Home has exposed a reality that the sector can no longer avoid: good intentions do not create sustainable businesses.
Providers need commercial capability to understand their cost base, utilisation, every service they deliver and, critically, to exercise good stewardship over their overhead.
This isn’t a call to minimise expenditure at all costs, but to make sure that every dollar spent on administration, management, technology, compliance and infrastructure has a clear purpose. That an appropriate return in participant outcomes, workforce capability, quality, compliance, risk management or organisational sustainability is delivered.
That is not corporate greed, it’s responsible stewardship.
The organisations that continue to carry unnecessary layers, poorly utilised resources, duplicated processes and uncosted service delivery will find the new environment increasingly difficult.
The organisations that understand their cost-to-serve, know where their capacity is being lost, automate what does not require human intervention, and align overhead with genuine organisational value will be better positioned to build sustainable businesses.
The future home-care provider cannot simply manage packages more efficiently. StewartBrown’s latest results suggest it must also manage service volume, utilisation and revenue leakage more actively.
It must operate as a disciplined, data-driven service business while maintaining the person-centred care obligations at the heart of the system. The era of managing the package is giving way to the era of managing the service. And good stewardship of the resources entrusted to providers needs to be at the centre of that transition.
Sources:
- StewartBrown Support at Home Financial Performance Survey, nine months to 31 March 2026 (released 5 August 2026)
- StewartBrown Aged Care Finance Forum FY26 (October 2026), including preliminary Corporate Administration Survey results
- StewartBrown Retirement Living Performance Report FY25
