Support at Home (SAH) replaced Home Care Packages on 1 November 2025. If you're new to the scheme or wondering what your package actually pays for, it helps to know the difference between what SAH covers and what sits outside it.
Personal care and daily living support
Your SAH package pays for help with activities of daily living. This includes showering and hygiene, dressing, toileting, and continence support. It covers meal preparation and eating assistance, mobility support, and help getting in and out of bed. These are the core personal care services most people think of when they imagine aged care at home.
Domestic and household help
SAH can fund domestic assistance like cleaning, laundry, and shopping. You can use package funds for yard maintenance and home maintenance tasks that support your safety and independence. Some people use their allocation for meal delivery services or help with bill payment and financial management. The flexibility is yours, within reason, it's about what helps you stay safely at home.
Social support and community participation
Your package can pay for support to attend social groups, clubs, or community activities. This might include transport assistance to get you there and someone to accompany you. Staying socially connected is recognised as essential to wellbeing, and SAH funding acknowledges this.
What SAH does NOT cover
Clinical care, nursing, allied health, and therapy services, is 100% government-funded separately and does not come out of your SAH budget. This includes wound care, medication management by a nurse, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, and dietetics. If you need these services, they're arranged through your provider at no cost to your package.
Accommodation is not covered. If you live in residential aged care, you pay accommodation costs directly. SAH is designed for people living at home in their own property.
How much you pay
Your SAH package comes with a government-funded amount based on your assessed care needs. You contribute based on your income and assets, there's a means test. The amount you receive is yours to direct toward the care and support that matters most to you. Different providers structure their services differently, so comparing what you actually get for your money across self-managed and fully coordinated models is important.
Choosing how to use your allocation
The beauty of SAH is flexibility. You decide how to spend your allocation across personal care, domestic help, and social support. If you manage your own package (self-managed), you have maximum control over how funds are used and can often stretch them further. If you use a fully coordinated provider, they manage the spending but you may have less flexibility.
Compare providers to understand real value
What SAH covers is standardised, but how much care you actually receive for your funding varies significantly between providers. A self-managed package can deliver close to twice the care hours of a high-fee fully coordinated service for the same government allocation. Before committing to a provider, compare what you'd actually get, the hours, the services, and the cost structure. Home Care Prices makes this comparison straightforward.