Becoming an Approved Aged Care Provider: What You Need in Place

Start with the overview of how to become a registered aged care provider in Australia, then use this guide for the application detail and the systems checklist.

Who needs to be an approved provider

Not every organisation delivering services to older Australians needs to be an approved aged care provider. The requirement applies to providers delivering services funded under the Aged Care Act 1997, which includes the Support at Home program (formerly Home Care Packages) and residential aged care.

If your organisation delivers only NDIS-funded services, you do not need aged care provider approval. You need NDIS registration instead. The two schemes have separate regulators, separate quality frameworks, and separate registration processes. An organisation can hold both.

If you plan to deliver services to clients who receive both NDIS funding and aged care funding, you need both registrations. The compliance obligations run in parallel.

The ACQSC application process

The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (ACQSC) is the body that approves aged care providers. Applications go through the My Aged Care provider portal.

The Commission assesses four areas:

Governance. The Commission looks at your board or management structure, your organisational policies, and whether your governance arrangements can support safe, high-quality service delivery. For new providers, this means having documented governance policies before you apply, not as a condition of approval.

Financial viability. You need to demonstrate that your organisation can sustain service delivery financially. This typically involves providing recent financial statements, a business plan, and evidence of sufficient capital or funding to operate.

Workforce capability. The Commission assesses whether you have, or have plans to recruit, a workforce with the skills and qualifications to deliver the services you are applying to provide. This includes management capability, not just frontline care staff.

Systems. You need to show that you have systems in place to manage care delivery, maintain records, handle incidents, and meet your reporting obligations. A spreadsheet is not a sufficient answer to this question for most applicants.

The application process involves a formal assessment, which may include a site visit. Allow at minimum three to six months from application to approval, and often longer. Do not set a service start date before you have approval.

The 7 Strengthened Quality Standards

The Aged Care Quality Standards were strengthened and expanded as part of the aged care reforms. There are now seven standards:

1. 1.The individual
2. 2.The organisation
3. 3.The care and services
4. 4.The environment
5. 5.Clinical care
6. 6.Food and nutrition
7. 7.The residential community

Workforce is not a standalone standard. Workforce planning and human resource management sit under Standard 2, Outcomes 2.8 and 2.9 -- that is where the "skilled and competent, appropriately qualified" obligations live. Outcome 2.9 explicitly covers contractors and agency staff, not just employees: providers must keep training records for every worker delivering care, including contractors, and Outcome 2.8 requires using direct employment wherever possible while minimising reliance on independent contractors and agencies. Outcome 2.9 also requires that rostering be informed by the workforce strategy set out in 2.8, and that providers assign an appropriate number and mix of workers to specific shifts and tasks based on workers' skills, qualifications and competencies -- language that reads almost like a product spec for a scheduling system.

The Quality Standards apply to providers registered in categories 4, 5 and 6. Standards 1, 2, 3 and 4 apply to all three of those categories. Standard 6 and Standard 7 apply only to residential care homes. Providers registered only in categories 1 to 3 -- home and community services such as domestic assistance, meals, transport and home maintenance -- are not assessed against the Quality Standards at all, though they are still bound by the Aged Care Act 2024, the Statement of Rights and the Aged Care Code of Conduct.

Standard 5 (clinical care) applies to categories 5 and 6, and category 4 providers must also meet Outcome 5.1 (clinical governance) if they deliver care management or restorative care management. Since every Support at Home provider delivers care management, a category 4 personal care provider that assumes clinical care does not apply to it is still on the hook for Outcome 5.1. If you are planning to deliver home care only and your services do not include clinical interventions or care management, confirm the scope with the ACQSC before assuming Standard 5 does not apply.

For a detailed breakdown of Standard 5 and the quality indicator framework, refer to the ACQSC's published guidance.

Worker screening requirements

Aged care worker screening is separate from NDIS Worker Screening. The requirement for residential aged care workers is a National Police Check, not the state-based NDIS Worker Screening Check.

The key points:

Your provider registration does not automatically alert you when a worker's check expires. You need a system that tracks expiry dates and alerts you before the check lapses.

SIRS obligations from day one

The Serious Incident Response Scheme (SIRS) applies to approved aged care providers from the date they begin delivering services. There is no grace period.

Under SIRS, providers must:

Priority 1 incidents include unexpected deaths, serious injuries, sexual or physical assault, unexplained absences, and inappropriate use of restraint. Priority 2 incidents cover a broader range of adverse events including falls with injury, medication errors with harm, and financial abuse.

SIRS applies only to aged care funded services. If you are also an NDIS provider, NDIS incidents are reported to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, not the ACQSC. The two schemes are separate.

Support at Home billing requirements

Under the Support at Home program (which replaced Home Care Packages on 1 November 2025), claims are made to Services Australia rather than managing an annual package budget.

Billing operates by service category. There are three:

Alongside these, not within them, sit three further programs funded and claimed separately: the Assistive Technology and Home Modifications (AT-HM) scheme, the Restorative Care Pathway, and the End-of-Life Pathway. AT-HM is funded outside the quarterly budget, but on the service list it sits within the independence contribution category.

Care management is funded differently to everything else. Ten per cent of each client's quarterly budget is set aside for it, and you claim care management against that pool as a service type in its own right, under the clinical supports category -- it is not additional money on top of the budget. You must deliver at least one direct care management activity every month, even where the client self-manages.

Each client has a single quarterly budget -- it is not split across the three service categories. What constrains you is the total quarterly amount and the list of service types the client has actually been approved for in their Notice of Decision. The size of that quarterly budget is set by one of eight funding classification levels for new participants (there are also four transitional classifications for people who moved across from Home Care Packages on 1 November 2025, preserving their previous funding level) -- a separate system from the service categories, and the source of the "eight" figure providers sometimes see attached to Support at Home. Unspent budget carries into the next quarter up to the greater of $1,000 or 10% of the quarterly budget (including any supplements); overspends cannot be carried forward, so you either absorb them or invoice the client, and only if that was agreed in advance.

For providers coming from a Home Care Package background: the service category model is more granular than the old package levels, but the budget itself is still one pool per client, not one pool per category. Your rostering and billing systems need to track which service category each shift draws from and how much of the client's total quarterly budget remains, and your coordinators need that visibility when assigning shifts.

The 6-point software checklist

Before delivering your first service as an approved aged care provider, confirm your systems can do the following:

1. 1.Record shifts per service category. Every visit or shift needs to be coded to the correct Support at Home service category at the time it is created or assigned. Retrospective coding at claim time creates errors.

1. 1.Track National Police Checks with expiry alerts. The system needs to store the check date for each worker and alert coordinators before the check's expiry (confirm the current renewal period, rather than assuming a fixed number of years). A worker with a lapsed check must not be rostered to direct care shifts.

1. 1.Link incidents to shifts. When a SIRS-reportable incident occurs on a shift, your system needs to connect the incident record to the specific shift, client, and worker. This is the data you need for ACQSC reporting and for your internal register.

1. 1.Continuity of care tracking. The Aged Care Quality Standards require providers to support continuity of care. Your system should show the care history for each client and flag when a new or infrequent worker is being assigned.

1. 1.Qualification tracking. If you deliver clinical services under Standard 5, the system needs to verify that the worker assigned to a clinical shift holds the required qualifications.

1. 1.Audit reporting. The ACQSC can conduct a quality review at any time after approval. Your system needs to produce an audit-ready report showing what services were delivered, by whom, when, and against which service category, for any requested period.

What good looks like on day one

An approved provider starting service delivery should have:

Starting service delivery before any of these items are in place puts your approval at risk and creates immediate compliance exposure.