A3 — Aged Care Workforce Cost Researcher

AI Project Governance Standard v3.7 · class STANDARD · REQ-SYS-05, REQ-CON-01, REQ-CON-02 Run date: 2026-09-07 · Question: fully-loaded hourly cost of a worker delivering in-home personal care/domestic assistance in Victoria under Support at Home, today, compared to the NDIS disability support worker cost of $52.28/hr.

1. ANSWER TO Q1 — WHICH AWARD

The Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award 2010 (MA000100) applies — specifically the Home Care Employee stream, Schedule F ("Home Care Employees — Aged Care"), NOT the Social and Community Services Employee stream (Schedule B) and NOT the Aged Care Award 2010 (MA000018).

• MA000100 clause 3.1 defines the home care sector as "the provision of personal care, domestic assistance or home maintenance to an aged person or a person with a disability in a private residence." This is a verbatim match to the Support at Home service description (personal care/domestic assistance delivered in the client's own home). Source: library.fairwork.gov.au/award/?krn=MA000100.

• MA000100 has two separate home-care classification schedules, confirmed from the same source: Schedule E — Home Care Employees, Disability Care and Schedule F — Home Care Employees, Aged Care. These are distinct pay scales from Schedule B (Social and Community Services Employees, levels 1–8) — the stream the parallel NDIS study used. A worker doing in-home personal care for an older person under Support at Home sits in Schedule F, not Schedule B.

• The Aged Care Award 2010 (MA000018) covers residential aged care facilities (nursing-home-type settings) — it is not the applicable award for a worker who goes to a client's private home. This is confirmed indirectly by the Portable Long Service Authority's explicit carve-out of "residential aged care" from community-services (home-based) coverage (§6 below) and by the Fair Work Ombudsman's Aged Care Work Value Case page, which treats "Aged Care Award" (residential) and "SCHADS home care employees — Aged care" (in-home) as two separate, named cohorts.

• The Nurses Award covers registered/enrolled nurses, not personal care/domestic assistance workers, and is not applicable to this role.

Confidence: High. The coverage clause and the Schedule E/F split were read directly from the Fair Work Ombudsman's own award library (primary source), and cross-confirmed by the FWO's Aged Care Work Value Case page explicitly naming "home care employees – Aged care" under MA000100 as a distinct cohort from residential Aged Care Award workers.

Sources: A3-04, A3-01.

2. THE RATES (effective 1 September 2026)

Primary source for this table: the Fair Work Ombudsman's official Pay and Conditions Tool (PACT) Award Summary for MA000100, machine-generated document metadata reads "Award Code: MA000100 Effective: 01/09/2026 Published: 31/08/2026" — i.e. this is the current, in-force rate sheet as at today's run date (7 September 2026). URL: https://calculate.fairwork.gov.au/Download/AwardSummary?awardCode=ma000100&fileType=pdf (A3-06).

Cross-check performed: the 1 October 2025 Home Care–Aged Care rates published by the Department of Health (A3-02) were multiplied by the confirmed 4.75% Annual Wage Review 2026 uplift (A3-03, effective 1 July 2026) and reproduce the 1 September 2026 PACT figures to the cent (e.g. Level 1: $31.13 × 1.0475 = $32.61; Level 2: $32.86 × 1.0475 = $34.42; Level 3: $34.59 × 1.0475 = $36.23; Level 5: $37.35 × 1.0475 = $39.13). This is independent arithmetic triangulation across two primary/quasi-primary sources, not a single-source claim.

Casual loading: 25%, confirmed at MA000100 clause 10.4 ("a loading of 25% of that rate") — the same loading percentage used in the NDIS study, and it applies identically to the Schedule F home-care rates. Source: A3-04.

Classification note (material to the cost comparison): the aged-care Home Care Employee Level 2 base rate ($34.42) is lower than the disability-stream Social and Community Services Level 2 base rate the NDIS study used ($36.22, back-calculated from its stated $45.28 casual figure). The two "Level 2" labels sit on different pay scales under different schedules of the same award — this is not a typo, it is the structural point the charter flagged.

3. THE AGED CARE WORK VALUE CASE (Q3)

Source: Fair Work Ombudsman, "Aged Care Work Value Case: Changes to awards" (A3-01), and Department of Health guidance for providers, September 2025 (A3-02), and Aged Care Guide news article (A3-09).

• The Fair Work Commission's Aged Care Work Value Case modified three awards: the Aged Care Award 2010 (MA000018, residential), MA000100/SCHADS (home care employees — aged care, Schedule F), and the Nurses Award. Home care employees under MA000100 did receive work-value increases, not just residential workers.

• Staged increases (as reported across sources, not all independently re-verified this pass — see confidence notes): a 15% increase in 2023, a further 3.5% increase around March 2025 for direct care classifications generally, a 3% increase to Aged Care Award general care workers effective 1 January 2025, and — the stage most relevant here — an additional increase effective from the first full pay period on or after 1 October 2025 that explicitly applied to "direct care employees in residential aged care, some home care employees working in aged care, and registered and enrolled nurses employed in aged care" (quoted from A3-02). Not all classifications received an increase at this stage — some (Levels 4 and 6 in the table above) had already received their full increase on 1 January 2025 and got nothing further on 1 October 2025.

• A final, separate increase for registered and enrolled nurses in aged care is scheduled for 1 August 2026 (A3-09) — this affects the Nurses Award cohort, not the Home Care Employee (Schedule F) personal-care classification costed here, and is noted for completeness only.

• This is confirmed to be a genuinely separate process from the 2026 Annual Wage Review — A3-09 quotes the FWC's own framing: "Today's decision is separate from the Aged Care Work Value Case."

Confidence: Medium-High. The core fact — that home care (Schedule F) employees are within scope of the work value case and received an increase effective 1 October 2025 — is confirmed on a primary Department of Health guidance document quoting the Fair Work Ombudsman. The full staged history (15% in 2023, 3.5% in March 2025) is corroborated by a secondary aged-care-industry news source and was not independently re-verified against the underlying FWC determinations this pass; treat those two historical figures as Medium confidence only.

4. THE 2026 ANNUAL WAGE REVIEW (Q4)

• Confirmed on a Fair Work Commission primary document (fwc.gov.au/documents/resources/annual-wage-review-2026-decision-announcement.pdf, A3-03): modern award minimum wages and the National Minimum Wage increased by 4.75%, effective 1 July 2026, with an additional structural adjustment for the lowest classifications (C13/C14).

• This 4.75% flowed through to the SCHADS home-care (Schedule F) rates: confirmed by the arithmetic cross-check in §2 above (Oct-2025 DoH rates × 1.0475 = 1 Sept 2026 PACT rates, to the cent, for every level checked).

• No aged-care-specific exception or different percentage for aged-care classifications was found in the FWC decision announcement document itself; the document is silent on aged care specifically (it does not carve aged care out or in by name) — the arithmetic match is the evidence that it applied in full.

Confidence: High for the 4.75%/1 July 2026 figure (primary FWC document). Medium-High for "it flowed through unmodified to aged-care home-care classifications," which rests on the arithmetic cross-check rather than an explicit FWC statement naming MA000100 Schedule F.

5. WEEKEND, EVENING, PUBLIC HOLIDAY AND SLEEPOVER (Q5)

Source: calculate.fairwork.gov.au Award Summary MA000100, effective 1 September 2026 (A3-06) — the Fair Work Ombudsman's own current Pay and Conditions Tool output.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT — WITHHELD FROM THE COST CALCULATION. The charter is explicit that a prior verification pass could not source arithmetically-consistent SCHADS casual penalty rates and withdrew them rather than publish a guess. I obtained the percentages/dollar figures above from the Fair Work Ombudsman's own official calculator tool (a materially better source than the payroll-calculator sites the prior pass rejected), but the fetch was processed through a summarising step rather than a verbatim clause quote, and — critically — I could not confirm from primary text whether these penalty percentages apply on top of the already-loaded casual rate, or replace the casual loading, or are quoted against the permanent base rate only. This is exactly the ambiguity that caused the earlier withdrawal. Because of that unresolved mechanics question, I have not computed a specific casual weekend/public-holiday/sleepover dollar figure, and none of these penalty items are included in the fully-loaded $/hour figure in §7 — the fully-loaded figure below is an ordinary-hours rate only, exactly mirroring how the NDIS study's $52.28 figure was built (ordinary casual rate + on-costs, no penalty loadings). This keeps the two figures genuinely comparable and avoids extrapolating a number the charter told me to withdraw rather than guess.

6. ON-COSTS (Q6)

Combined on-cost rate applied in §7: 12.00% + 1.8% + 1.65% = 15.45% — identical combined structure to the NDIS study, which used the same three components at the same percentages.

7. TRAVEL (Q7)

Source: Fair Work Ombudsman, "Pay and allowances in the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award" (A3-05).

• Travel time between clients must be paid: the page confirms "Time spent travelling does not break a shift" and home-care/disability-support employees "may be entitled to be paid for this time" when travelling between clients during a shift (as distinct from the unpaid commute to/from the first and last client of the day).

• Vehicle allowance: an employee who is required and authorised to use their own vehicle for work is paid a per-kilometre allowance. The Fair Work Ombudsman overview page did not itself state the dollar rate; the rate was instead read from the official PACT Award Summary (A3-06): $1.05 per km from 1 September 2026 to 28 February 2027, stepping down to $1.01 per km from 1 March 2027 (this stepped-rate detail is itself relevant to Q8 below).

• I have not been able to source and therefore have not costed a specific travel-time dollar figure per hour (e.g., "X minutes of paid travel per shift"), because this depends on rostered geography/client density which is a provider-specific operational variable, not a fixed award rate — flagging this as a real, provider-specific cost that sits on top of the fully-loaded $/hour figure below and is not captured in it. This is a genuine structural cost the NDIS comparison did not carry in the same way (NDIS support work is more often single-client, longer-duration sessions with less inter-client travel).

Confidence: Medium. The obligation to pay travel time is confirmed on a primary FWO page; the existence of a per-km vehicle allowance is confirmed on the same primary page; the specific $1.05/$1.01 dollar figures come from the PACT Award Summary (A3-06), same sourcing caveat as §5 above.

8. SCHEDULED CHANGES BEFORE JULY 2028 (Q8)

• Nurses Award, aged care nurses: a further increase is scheduled for 1 August 2026 (A3-09) — does not affect the Schedule F personal-care classification costed here.

• Vehicle allowance step-down: the PACT Award Summary (A3-06) itself shows a scheduled change already legislated into the award — the per-km vehicle allowance decreases from $1.05/km to $1.01/km on 1 March 2027.

• Annual Wage Review recurs every 1 July by statute, so a further (unknown-percentage) increase to all MA000100 rates on 1 July 2027 and 1 July 2028 should be expected as a matter of course, but no percentage has been determined yet and none should be assumed.

• No further Aged Care Work Value Case stage (beyond the 1 August 2026 nurses increase) was found scheduled between now and 2028 in any source reviewed. A3-09 states this explicitly is the "final" scheduled nurses increase and does not reference any further stage for home care/personal care classifications. This is an absence-of-evidence finding, not a confirmed "nothing more is coming" — it should be treated as Medium confidence given the sourcing relies on one secondary news article's characterisation of FWC intentions.

9. FULLY-LOADED COST CALCULATION

Built identically to the NDIS calculation described in the charter (ordinary casual hourly rate × (1 + super% + WorkCover% + portable-LSL%); no penalty loadings, no travel time — see §5 and §7 caveats), for direct comparability.

Primary figure — Level 2 "Home Carer" (closest classification match to an NDIS personal-care worker):

Casual base rate (Schedule F, Level 2, 1 Sept 2026)      $43.03/hr
On-cost multiplier: 1 + 0.1200 (super) + 0.018 (WorkCover, assumed)
                       + 0.0165 (portable LSL) = 1.1545
Fully-loaded cost = $43.03 × 1.1545                     = $49.68/hr

Upper-bound figure — Level 3 "Qualified" (the level above; common where providers classify a Certificate III-holding worker higher):

Casual base rate (Schedule F, Level 3, 1 Sept 2026)      $45.29/hr
Fully-loaded cost = $45.29 × 1.1545                     = $52.29/hr

Line-by-line, Level 2 basis:

Not included (flagged, not zeroed): weekend/evening/public-holiday penalty loadings (§5 — withheld, mechanics unconfirmed), sleepover allowance (§5 — same caveat), travel time between clients (§7 — provider-specific, not a fixed rate), payroll tax (out of scope of this charter; the parallel NDIS study also excluded it as not confirmed).

10. DIRECT COMPARISON

The core finding: aged care in-home labour does NOT cost materially more than NDIS labour — if anything it costs slightly less at the equivalent entry classification, and is essentially identical even when the provider classifies the worker one level higher. The Aged Care Work Value Case did deliver real increases to home care (Schedule F) workers (§3), but those increases have not pushed the Schedule F pay scale above the disability-stream (Schedule B) scale the NDIS study costed — Schedule F Level 2 ($34.42 base) actually sits below the NDIS study's Schedule B Level 2 figure ($36.22 base, back-calculated). Because the worker-cost side is close to flat between the two programs, and the aged-care reference price ($103.11) is 40% higher than the NDIS price limit ($73.58), the per-hour margin on aged care personal care is roughly 2.4–2.5× the NDIS per-hour margin in dollar terms, exactly as the charter's hypothesis anticipated for the "workers cost about the same" branch.

Necessary caveat on realisability of the margin: the $73.58 NDIS figure is a regulated price limit — a hard ceiling a provider is legally permitted to charge and, in a supply-constrained market, commonly does charge. The $103.11 aged-care figure is described in the charter as an "advisory reference price" — by its nature this is indicative/non-binding, and actual Support at Home provider revenue per hour could sit below it depending on how the scheme's unit pricing and quarterly budgets are actually administered. This asymmetry was not independently re-investigated in this pass (it is out of scope of the workforce-cost question this charter serves) but is flagged because it materially affects whether the larger aged-care margin shown above is a realisable margin or a ceiling-case margin. Recommend this be tested explicitly against whatever pricing research established the $103.11 figure before the capital decision is made on the strength of this comparison alone.

SOURCES TABLE

UNVERIFIED / GAPS

1. WorkCover industry rate for Victorian home-care/aged-care employers. No aged-care- or home-care-specific WorkSafe Victoria premium rate could be located (the underlying instrument is a Special Gazette that was not fetchable, and WorkSafe Victoria does not publish a simple flat industry-rate table the way this tool could reach). The 1.8% figure used in §9 is carried across unverified from the parallel NDIS study on the assumption the same broad community-services/home-care industry classification applies to both programs. This should be independently sourced before the capital decision relies on the precise $/hour figure — a materially different aged-care WorkCover rate would move the $49.68 figure by a few cents per percentage point of difference, not enough to change the qualitative conclusion but enough to matter at the margin.

1. Casual weekend/evening/public-holiday penalty dollar figures, and sleepover allowance's precise interaction with the casual loading. Percentages and dollar figures were obtained from the Fair Work Ombudsman's own official calculator (A3-06), which is a materially better source than the payroll-calculator sites a prior verification pass rejected — but I could not confirm from directly-quoted clause text whether these penalties compound on top of the casual-loaded rate or are calculated some other way. Per the charter's explicit instruction, these were withheld from the fully-loaded cost calculation rather than extrapolated. A shift-working aged-care worker's real all-in cost, including weekend and evening penalties actually rostered, will be higher than the $49.68–$52.29/hr ordinary-hours figure in §9 — potentially materially higher, depending on roster mix.

1. Travel time paid per shift. Confirmed as a real, must-pay cost (§7), but not quantified — it is provider/roster-specific (client density, geography) rather than a fixed award rate, and was not costed into §9.

1. Historical Aged Care Work Value Case stages (15% in 2023, 3.5% in March 2025). Sourced from one secondary industry-news article (A3-09) only; not independently cross-checked against the underlying FWC determinations this pass. Does not affect the current (1 September 2026) rate figures used in the cost calculation, which come from the current PACT export and are cross-checked by independent arithmetic (§2).

1. Whether "some home care employees" (A3-02's own qualifying language) means all Schedule F workers received the 1 October 2025 increase, or only a subset by pre-existing pay point. The guidance document itself uses the qualifier "some," and separately notes some classifications received their full increase already on 1 January 2025 with no further increase on 1 October 2025 (reflected in the Level 4 and Level 6 "no increase" rows sourced in §3). Not fully resolved which specific pay points/levels were "some" vs "all" — the point is moot for the Level 2 and Level 3 figures actually used in §9, both of which show a clear increase in the source table, but flagged for completeness.

1. Realisability of the $103.11 aged-care reference price as actual provider revenue (vs. the NDIS $73.58 hard price limit) — see caveat at the end of §10. This was outside the scope of this charter (a workforce-cost researcher) but materially affects how the margin comparison in §10 should be read, and is flagged for the parallel pricing research to confirm.