Sunita Somvanshi
Australia’s officially reported aged-care waitlist shrank by more than 53,000 people this year, but the decline masks an accounting shift rather than genuine progress, according to a Four Corners investigation and records from the Department of Health and Disability and Ageing.
The federal government changed how it counts people waiting for in-home aged care funding, effective 1 November 2025. The new method excludes people receiving an interim payment of 60 per cent of their approved funding — a group that represents more than 90 per cent of people granted support under the “Support at Home” program. Most of these recipients remain on the interim payment for about 10 weeks before receiving their full allocation. As ABC News details, the counting change has taken more than 53,000 people who would previously have been counted off the official waitlist.
The official waitlist fell sharply under the new counting method. On 31 October 2025 — the last day of the old calculation — 107,281 people were counted as waiting. By 31 December 2025, that figure had dropped to 94,963. The department’s latest published figure, as of 31 March 2026, stood at 100,191.
However, the Four Corners investigation found the true number of Australians waiting for full aged care funding at home is almost 154,000. More than 150,000 Australians are waiting for some or all of their in-home care, the investigation revealed. Aged Care Minister Sam Rae denied there had been any change to how the waiting list is calculated.
The discrepancy matters because people waiting for care are vulnerable. More than 4,800 people died in 2024–25 while waiting for their approved home care funding, according to figures reported by the investigation.
Former acting inspector-general of aged care Ian Yates described the change in reporting as “unacceptable.” Natalie Siegel-Brown, who recently resigned as inspector-general, raised broader concerns about the consequences of restricted funding, saying that limiting it accelerates decline and costs more later. The commonwealth spends more than $117,000 a year on average to subsidise a person in residential care, compared with supporting them at home, according to her analysis.
If the old counting method had been consistently applied throughout this period, the waitlist would be the longest since before the 2018 aged-care royal commission, records show.
The reporting change comes amid mounting pressure on the aged-care system. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledged in May 2026 that “the state of aged care is not good.” The episode sits alongside other Australian policy shifts Karmactive has covered, from fair-work minimum standards for gig workers to the rollout of a gambling opt-out register — each a test of how federal reform reaches the people it is meant to protect. The government’s revised counting method has drawn scrutiny from aged-care advocates and former regulators who argue it obscures the true scale of demand for home-based care. The change allows the government to report a smaller official waitlist, but critics contend it leaves the underlying problem unaddressed.
