Guide

Moving into an aged care home

Organising care for a parent or a partner is a lot to carry, and it usually has to be done sooner than anyone feels ready for. It becomes much more manageable once you can see the whole path at once. There are five steps. Two of them take weeks, so knowing which one to start first is what saves you the most time — and the most worry.

The five steps

1. Apply for an aged care assessment Through My Aged Care, online or on 1800 200 422. A GP, hospital social worker or family member can start it. You are checking eligibility for government-funded care — nobody is committing to anything at this point.
2. Have the assessment An assessor visits, usually at home or on the hospital ward, and works through what the person can manage and what they can't. This is the hardest conversation in the process, because it means describing someone you love at their worst rather than their best. Do it anyway, and include the nights and the bad days — an assessment based on a good morning produces an approval that doesn't match the real need.
3. Do the income and assets assessment Separate, and done by Services Australia rather than the assessor. It decides what the person will be asked to contribute. Start it as soon as the first application goes in.
4. Shortlist homes and visit them Approval is not a placement. You approach homes yourself, and the good ones in popular areas have waiting lists. Visiting is the part nobody should skip.
5. Accept a place and sign You will be given a resident agreement and an accommodation agreement. The accommodation agreement now has to be signed before entry, so read it before the day of the move rather than at the kitchen table with the removalists waiting.

Where the time goes

The two slow steps are the assessment and finding a place, and neither is fully in your control. That is the frustrating part, and it is worth naming: you can do everything right and still be waiting. What you can control is starting early. Families who find this easiest tend to have applied for the assessment before anyone was certain it would be needed.

If someone is in hospital and cannot go home, the hospital's social work team does this every day and will usually drive it. Ask for them by name early — they are the most useful people in the building for this.

Shortlisting without wasting visits

There are 2,600 residential aged care homes in Australia, and you can realistically visit three or four. The published data is good at cutting a long list down to a short one, and poor at telling you which of the final three to choose. Use it for the first job and your own eyes for the second.

Three things worth filtering on before you visit:

• What residents said. The government interviews residents face to face and publishes the results. It is the only measure that comes from the people living there.
• Staffing against target. Every home has a care minutes target set for its own residents. 27% of homes delivered fewer minutes than their target in the August 2026 data. That is a fair question to ask on a visit.
• Distance from whoever will visit most. A shorter drive turns visiting into something that happens on the way home from work rather than something that has to be planned. Families tend to weigh this too lightly at the start and too heavily a year in.

Browse homes by area to see all of this for the homes near you, or compare two homes side by side.

Respite first, if you can

An approval can include respite care — a short stay, typically a couple of weeks. Families who use it get to see a home from the inside before committing, and the person moving gets to try it while knowing they are going home afterwards. Where there is time, it is the most useful thing available.

Before you start

• Approval doesn't expire the moment it is issued, but circumstances change and a reassessment can be requested if the person's needs shift.
• You can be on more than one home's waiting list.
• Nobody has to sell a house to enter care — see what an aged care home costs.
• A home cannot charge more than the room price it publishes on My Aged Care.