Methodology

Where the providers come from

The list of providers is the Aged Care Service List published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare through GEN Aged Care Data, used under CC BY 4.0. It gives us 923 home care providers and 2,363 outlets, each with an address, an SA3 statistical area and an Aged Care Planning Region.

We use it as the universe. A provider that is not on that list is not in our figures.

Where the prices come from

Prices are read from each provider’s own website — the price list, schedule of fees or pricing PDF they are required to publish. We do not take prices from My Aged Care, whose terms of use do not permit automated collection, and we do not buy price data from third parties.

For each provider we find the pages most likely to carry a price list, fetch them, and keep the response exactly as received so that any figure can be traced back to the page it came from. Our crawler identifies itself and respects robots.txt; see the crawler page.

Turning a label into a service

Providers name the same service differently. One writes “Personal care”, another “Assistance with daily living”, a third “Personal care — weekday”. We map each published label to a common service list so that like is compared with like.

Where a label cannot be mapped with confidence, it is set aside for a human to look at rather than guessed. Around one observation in ten ends up there, most of them category headings and notes rather than real prices.

What we exclude

• Other programs. Home Care Package and CHSP prices are excluded. Many providers still have older schedules on their sites, and mixing them in makes the market look cheaper than it is.
• Superseded prices. Anything dated before 1 November 2025, when Support at Home commenced. Where a provider has several dated lists, the most recent wins. Many price lists carry no date at all: those are used as published, because discarding them would leave the benchmark built only on the minority of providers who date their pages. About a third of the prices we hold are undated.
• Prices that are not hourly rates. Quarterly budgets, daily caps and travel charged per kilometre are collected but kept out of the hourly comparisons.
• Implausible figures. An hourly rate outside a sane range is treated as a parsing error, not a price.

These exclusions matter more than they sound. Applying them moved the national median for personal care from $93 to $110 an hour. The lower figure was more striking and would have been wrong.

How a benchmark is calculated

One value each

A provider contributes a single value to each service and time band — the median of its own published rates where it lists several — so a provider with a long price list cannot outweigh the rest.

Suppression

A figure is published only where at least five distinct providers are behind it. Below that we show nothing.

What is published

The 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles, the range, and the number of providers. Never an individual provider's price.

Regions

Aged Care Planning Regions, the sector's own regional unit. State and national figures are also produced; where a region has too few providers, a report falls back to the state or national figure and says so on the row.

Your percentile

Interpolated between the published quartiles, so it is approximate by design. We publish quartiles, not every provider's price.

Known limitations

We would rather state these than have a customer discover them.

• Coverage is partial. 204 of 923 providers publish prices in a form we can currently read. Some publish only inside images, some bury the list, and some do not comply with the requirement at all. The sample is not evenly spread: metropolitan Sydney, Melbourne and the New South Wales coast are better represented than remote areas.
• Multi-region groups. Providers that publish different schedules for different regions are currently attributed to the parent organisation, which widens their apparent spread. We exclude them from regional comparisons where it would mislead.
• A published price is not a paid price. We measure what providers advertise. Discounts, packages and negotiated rates are invisible to us.
• Collection is periodic. Figures carry the date they were collected. A provider that changed its prices yesterday will not be reflected until the next run.

Corrections

If a figure attributed to your organisation is wrong, tell us and we will check it against the archived copy of your page and correct it. We keep the source URL for every price precisely so that this conversation is short.

Email hello@clearprice.com.au