Key Takeaways
- There is one home-care workforce in Australia. Providers don't own their workers, they coordinate them.
- The price difference between self-managed Support at Home and full-service is the coordination markup, not the worker's wage.
- Full-service everyday rates typically sit 50% to 100% above the matching self-managed rate, yet the same worker can earn the same wage either way. The gap is the layer between you and them.
- Coordination layers include rostering, invoicing, care management, and admin. Each adds a percentage on top of the worker's rate.
- You can verify this for yourself: ask any provider for the worker's hourly wage separately from the coordination or admin fee.
The Same Worker, Two Different Invoices
Picture a Tuesday morning in suburban Brisbane. A cleaner arrives at a home in postcode 4000 and spends 90 minutes vacuuming, dusting, and changing linen. She is an experienced cleaner with an aged-care induction certificate. She is paid the standard award rate for her work plus superannuation.
Across town, the same cleaner arrives at a different home for an identical 90-minute job. Same skills, same supplies, same standard award wage. The two homes pay very different invoices for the work, one far lower than the other. The cleaner doesn't see the difference. She is paid the same.
Where the gap lives
The price difference isn't going to the cleaner. It's going to the layer between you and the cleaner: the company that found her, rostered her, sent the invoice, and bills you for managing your care.
Australia Has One Home-Care Workforce
There is a common misconception that full-service providers employ "their" workers and self-managed providers send strangers. In most Australian postcodes, particularly metro and large regional ones, that's not how it works.
The home-care workforce in Australia is a single labour pool. Cleaners, personal-care workers, and nurses move fluidly between providers, agencies, and staffing platforms. Many work for several providers simultaneously. The roster you receive from any provider is drawn from a shared talent pool, not an exclusive in-house workforce.
There are exceptions:
- Some not-for-profit providers do employ a stable internal team, especially in regional or remote areas where staffing is harder
- Specialist clinical care (palliative, dementia-specific) may run through provider-employed Registered Nurses
- Some providers offer enhanced training that creates a measurable quality difference for specific care types
Worth asking the provider directly: "Is the worker you'd assign to me your direct employee, or are they contracted in?" Most will answer honestly. The answer doesn't have to be "direct employee" for the provider to be a good choice. It just gives you the full picture for comparing pricing.
What the Markup Actually Pays For
Full-service providers do real work, and there's a reason they exist. The markup pays for genuine services on top of the worker's hour. Whether you value those services enough to pay well above the self-managed rate is the question.
Common items in a full-service markup:
- Rostering and scheduling: finding workers, matching them to your shifts, managing cancellations
- Care management: care planning, periodic reviews, coordination with allied health and medical
- Compliance and reporting: quarterly reports, audit readiness, Support at Home paperwork on your behalf
- Admin and invoicing: single monthly statement, single point of contact, payroll handling
- Risk management: vetting workers, insurance, incident handling, complaints intake
- Marketing and customer acquisition costs (this one is rarely disclosed)
- Profit margin
The honest question
Which of those services are valuable to YOU? If you have a family member or care navigator who can handle rostering and admin, you're paying for someone to do work that you don't need done. That's where the Support at Home self-managed approach saves money: it removes the layers you don't use.
How to Check the Numbers Yourself
If you're currently with a full-service provider and want to know exactly how much of your funding goes to coordination versus the worker, you can ask. The two numbers you need:
- The worker's hourly wage (what the cleaner, nurse or personal care worker is actually paid for the hour). The provider knows this, because they pay it.
- The hourly invoice rate (what you pay the provider for that hour). This is on your invoice.
The gap between those two numbers, expressed as a percentage, is the coordination markup on that service. For everyday services, full-service invoice rates commonly sit 50% to 100% above the matching self-managed rate, while the worker behind them is paid much the same either way. Exact figures vary by service and postcode, so use your own invoice rather than a published average.
Markups aren't inherently bad, because they fund the coordination services listed above. But knowing the size of the markup is the prerequisite to deciding whether the coordination is worth it.
What to Do With This Information
Three concrete next steps if this resonates:
- Pull out your most recent home-care invoice. Find the hourly rate for the most-used service. Multiply by 4.33 weeks/month × monthly hours to get the monthly spend on that service.
- Look up the same service's rate under a self-managed Support at Home arrangement in your postcode. Use the comparison tool on this site or call a self-managed provider directly.
- Calculate the gap. If switching keeps the same workers but reduces the per-hour cost, the gap is your potential saving. Decide whether the coordination services you'd give up are worth the difference.
The asymmetric switch
Most home-care clients can switch from full-service to self-managed without losing anything except the coordination layer. The funding belongs to you, not your provider. Notice periods are typically 14 to 28 days. If you're paying for coordination you don't need, the saving compounds every month.
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