Support at Home Cost Collection 2025 Final Report

The cost collection captured and analysed cost data from 135 service branches covering 35,636 clients to produce a comprehensive costed dataset.

SAHCC25 prioritised participation from providers who had not previously been involved in IHACPA’s annual cost collections as well as those delivering services to underrepresented groups. This includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and rural and remote populations.

Key cost insights:

Analysis of the data from 135 branches revealed: 

• Personal care, care management and domestic assistance made up more than 70% of reported costs and activity units.
• The majority of costs related to direct labour costs, with the remaining being consumables or indirect costs.
• Approximately 51% of all costs were internal costs (staff plus associated overheads) while 49% of all costs were external third-party costs. This varied by service subcategory with allied health, meal delivery, and home repairs and maintenance service types having the highest proportion of costs that were externally brokered.

Where branch level Modified Monash Model (MMM) data was available, the unit costs for MMM6-7 areas were higher than MMM1-2 and MMM3-5 for all service types except nursing, physiotherapy and direct transport. 

Insights from underrepresented groups

SAHCC25 aimed to increase the participation of underrepresented groups to explore whether there was any variance in the cost of service delivery. Of the 135 participating branches, 57 were providing services to underrepresented groups. 

Despite the more granular data collection to the service branch level, inconsistent variation was observed across the SAHCC25 target cohorts compared to the broader sector. While there was some evidence of higher unit costs in more rural areas for certain service categories, this evidence was not consistent. 

Recommendations

This report includes recommendations across 7 key focus areas, including:

• Collecting data at the most granular level possible to identify cost variations throughout the sector
• Continue offering a flexible data collection approach and focus on underrepresented groups to remove participation barriers 
• Engaging a diverse cohort of third-part allied health and meal delivery providers to understand pricing, volume and duration of services provided
• Working closely with the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing and the Support at Home sector to understand the availability of various data sources and the impact of Support at Home changes to future cost collections.