Key Takeaways
- Of every dollar of SAH budget, roughly 70-80 cents reaches actual service delivery, the rest is care management and package management.
- Each dollar buys you about 45-60 seconds of personal care, depending on hourly rate.
- Switching from a high-cost provider to a mid-range one can give you an extra 30-90 seconds of care per dollar.
- Clinical services aren't deducted from your budget, every dollar of clinical care is a 'free' dollar to you.
- Avoid providers whose admin overhead exceeds 20%; you're losing material time.
It's a slightly silly question, but the answer is genuinely useful. If you ever want to compare two SAH providers without getting lost in fee tables, ask: how much actual service does each dollar of my budget buy?
The maths is straightforward. The answers are sometimes surprising.
The deductions before the dollar reaches care
Before any service happens, your budget is reduced by two administrative charges, both capped under SAH:
- Care management fee, up to 10% of your quarterly budget. This pays for the coordinator who builds and reviews your care plan.
- Package management fee, up to 10% of your quarterly budget. This pays for back-office overhead: scheduling, payroll, compliance, billing.
The maximum combined deduction is 20%. The minimum, with a lean provider, is closer to 10%. So 80 to 90 cents of every dollar should reach service delivery.
If you're paying combined fees above 20%, that's now illegal under SAH; flag it. If you're paying below 12%, that's an unusually lean provider, worth asking how they manage scheduling and care planning at that cost.
What 80 cents actually buys
Once your dollar has been reduced to 80 cents of "service spend," the next question is the hourly rate of the worker delivering the care. Take a typical scenario:
| Service | Typical hourly rate | What 80 cents buys |
|---|---|---|
| Personal care | $80 | 36 seconds |
| Domestic cleaning | $70 | 41 seconds |
| Social support | $75 | 38 seconds |
| Allied health (clinical) | $0 (govt-funded) | "infinite", doesn't deduct from your budget |
| Registered nurse (clinical) | $0 (govt-funded) | "infinite" |
| Care management hour | $160 | 18 seconds |
The headline number isn't impressive on its own, about half a minute. But it lets you do useful comparisons.
The 30-second rule
If two providers charge different hourly rates for the same service, the difference at the dollar level adds up faster than people expect. A simple rule of thumb:
- Every $10 reduction in your provider's hourly rate gives you roughly 8-10% more service per dollar of budget.
- Across an annual Classification 5 budget of $40,000, that's hundreds of extra hours of care.
That's why hourly rate comparison matters. The fee structure tells you what's spent on overhead; the rate tells you what's spent on you.
Worked example: two providers
Two real-style providers, same Classification 4 participant ($30,180/year budget):
Provider A:
- Care management: 10%
- Package management: 9%
- Personal care: $90/hr
- Service spend: $24,580
- Hours of personal care purchasable: ~273 hours/year ≈ 5.25 hrs/week
Provider B:
- Care management: 8%
- Package management: 7%
- Personal care: $76/hr
- Service spend: $25,653
- Hours of personal care purchasable: ~337 hours/year ≈ 6.49 hrs/week
Provider B delivers an extra 64 hours of personal care a year, about 1 hour 15 minutes more per week, for the same Classification, the same budget, the same need profile. Just a different provider.
Where the dollar leaks
A few specific ways a SAH dollar gets eaten unnecessarily:
- Travel charges that shouldn't be there. Most providers absorb travel; some pass it on, eating $5-10 per visit.
- High after-hours surcharges. Some are legitimate (genuine penalty rates), some are markups on top of penalty rates. Ask explicitly.
- Setup fees, which were banned under SAH but occasionally reappear with creative naming.
- Equipment hire that should be against the AT (assistive technology) pool, not your operating budget.
- Cancellation fees for short-notice changes, not always unfair, but they should be documented.
If you suspect leakage, ask for an itemised statement for the last quarter. The line items reveal everything.
The clinical bonus
The single best dollar in SAH is the one you spend on clinical care, because it doesn't actually come out of your budget. Every nursing visit, every physiotherapy session, every podiatry appointment is fully government-funded.
If your care plan doesn't include any clinical services, you're leaving free dollars on the table. See our deep-dive on allied health under SAH for the full menu and how to access it.
Reading a fee schedule with this lens
Next time a provider sends you a fee schedule, do this calculation:
- Find the combined care + package management percentage.
- Calculate "$1 minus that percentage", that's your service spend per dollar.
- Find the personal-care hourly rate.
- Divide service spend by hourly rate. That's your seconds-per-dollar.
- Compare across providers.
It takes 90 seconds. It tells you more than a ten-page brochure.
Compare on the metric, not the marketing
Hourly rate, care management percentage, package management percentage, those three numbers determine how far each dollar of your budget stretches. The price comparison tool lets you filter providers in your suburb on exactly those numbers, not on glossy photos.
If you want to model your specific situation rather than abstract dollars, use the SAH budget calculator to see annual hours by Classification and provider rate.