About this site

How we rank homes

The ratings on this site are the government's, reproduced exactly as published. The order homes appear in is ours. This page explains how that order is worked out, so you can decide how much weight to give it.

Why the star rating alone can't order a list

Every home carries an Overall Star Rating out of five. It is a good, honest summary, and it does the job it was designed for. What it can't do is separate one home from the next, because most homes land in the same place.

Put the 1,659 four-star homes side by side and they are not the same. Their residents' survey scores run from 62% to 100%. Their staffing runs from 30 minutes a day below target to 347 minutes above it. Same star, and a long way apart.

So we use the star as the first sort and then keep going, rather than stopping there and listing 1,659 homes in alphabetical order.

The three things we sort on

In order. Each one only breaks ties left by the one above it.

1. The Overall Star Rating The government's number, unchanged. In practice this sorts homes into three groups: three, four or five stars.
2. What residents said The average of the twelve questions residents are asked face to face — the share who answered "always" or "most of the time". This is the one number on the site we calculate ourselves, and it is always labelled as ours and shown as a percentage, never as stars. Within the four-star group alone it takes 36 different values, which is what makes it useful for ordering.
3. The staffing gap Care minutes delivered per resident per day, minus the target set for that home. We use the gap rather than the raw minutes because targets differ from home to home — care minutes explained covers why.

Where all three tie, homes are listed alphabetically. Homes with no published rating sort last, and are never presented as low-scoring — they have no rating yet, which is not the same as a poor one.

What we don't do

• No home can pay to move up. There is no paid placement on this site at any price, and no advertiser can change a ranking. If that ever changes it will be stated on this page before anything else changes.
• We don't adjust the government's numbers. Every rating, minute and percentage is reproduced as published, and every page shows the date of the extract it was built from.
• We don't invent a star rating. The survey score is ours and is labelled as ours. It is never shown as stars.
• The words on the scale are the government's; the colours are ours. "Significant improvement needed", "Improvement needed", "Acceptable", "Good" and "Excellent" are the Department's own labels for one to five stars, reproduced unchanged. We assign a colour to each level so the scale can be read at a glance. The colour carries no judgement of ours — it is the government's own word, shown as a colour — and the word is always printed beside it.
• We don't rank on things nobody measures. Kindness, atmosphere, and whether a place suits one particular person are in no dataset. Use a ranking to decide where to visit. Decide the rest in person — what to ask when you visit.

Why we're allowed to publish this

The Australian Government publishes the Star Ratings quarterly data extract under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. That licence lets anyone copy, redistribute, adapt and build on the material, including commercially, on three conditions: credit the source, say that changes were made, and don't imply government endorsement. We do all three, on every page.

To be unambiguous: this site is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Australian Government, the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, or My Aged Care. The ratings are theirs. The ordering is ours.

If you think something is wrong

Tell us and we will check it against the source. Providers are welcome to write to us directly. Our corrections policy sets out what we can change, what we can't, and how quickly.