V4 — Independent Verification: The Aged Care Margin Paradox

Role: Independent Verifier. Default verdict NOT CONFIRMED unless a primary source is read directly and quoted. Governance Standard v3.9/v4.0, class STANDARD. Date of verification: 2026-09-07. Scope: Resolve the apparent contradiction between Pass A3 (in-home aged care personal-care margin ≈ $50–53/hr) and Pass A4 (StewartBrown home-care sector reporting a negative March-2026-quarter operating result).

VERDICT SUMMARY (one line each)

1. Is $103.11 a price cap, an advisory reference price, a market median, or a cost benchmark?

Primary source fetched directly: IHACPA, Support at Home Pricing Advice 2026–27 (dated November 2025, published on ihacpa.gov.au ~28 May 2026). URL: https://www.ihacpa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2026-05/support_at_home_pricing_advice_2026-27.pdf

Quoted from the document (via direct fetch, two passes):

• Purpose: IHACPA's statutory function is to "provide advice to each relevant Commonwealth Minister in relation to … aged care pricing" and "the Pricing Authority provides the Australian Government with advice on: unit prices for each service."

• Status framing: "This Advice is an output of the performance of those functions by the Pricing Authority." The whole document consistently uses "advice"/"recommends" — it is a recommendation to government, not itself a legislative instrument, and it contains no language about price caps, maximum charges, or mandatory enforcement.

• Revenue framing: the document does separately state "This Advice represents the entirety of revenue that providers will receive for delivering the service" — i.e., IHACPA's own cost model assumes a provider pricing at this level receives no other revenue stream for that service (no separate package-management top-up). That is a statement about the model's internal completeness, not a statement that providers must or do charge exactly this.

• Personal care rate confirmed at $103.11/hour, weekday/normal hours, applying to "assistance with self-care and activities of daily living," "assistance with self-administration of medication," and "continence management (non-clinical)."

• Care management reference rates in the same document: clinical $126.83/hr, non-clinical $116.22/hr, team-based $118.40/hr.

Verdict: $103.11 is an advisory reference price recommended by an independent pricing authority to the Minister — CONFIRMED from the primary document's own words. It is not, on the document's own terms, a price cap.

Corroborating (not primary) point on current enforceability: A2 catalogued trade-press reporting (Australian Ageing Agenda, ClinicComply, Aged Care Insite, The Weekly Source — all dated ~19 May 2026) that mandatory price caps, originally slated for 1 July 2026, were deferred with no new start date set, replaced for now with expanded Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission powers over pricing behaviour (e.g. anti-gouging). I attempted to confirm this from a primary government page directly:

• health.gov.au/news/new-consumer-protections-for-support-at-home-services — BLOCKED (robots.txt disallowed), attempted twice.

• health.gov.au/ministers/the-hon-sam-rae-mp/media/strengthening-consumer-protections-for-older-australians — BLOCKED (robots.txt disallowed).

• agedcarequality.gov.au/news-publications/news/new-consumer-protections-support-home-services — BLOCKED (robots.txt disallowed).

• By contrast, myagedcare.gov.au/news-and-updates/support-home-pricing-changes (primary, fetched successfully) states: "For the first year of the program, providers will continue to set their own prices for services" and "From 1 July 2026, the Australian Government will apply price caps." This page does not mention a deferral and may simply predate the May-2026 deferral decision (I could not confirm its last-updated date).

This is a genuine, unresolved conflict between two classes of primary/near-primary evidence — flagged in Residual Uncertainty. However, one piece of indirect evidence favours "no binding cap currently in force": A2 recorded a secondary industry aggregator's reported market median personal-care price of $115/hour, i.e. above the $103.11 IHACPA figure. If $103.11 were currently a binding legal ceiling, a $115 median would be a mass compliance failure across the sector, which no source alleges. This is consistent with the "deferred, no cap yet" reading, but the $115 figure is itself secondary/Medium-confidence and NOT independently re-verified by me this pass, so I present it as corroboration, not proof.

2. Is –$0.46/client/day the real StewartBrown figure? What does it measure and what population?

Primary source fetched directly: StewartBrown, Aged Care Financial Performance Survey Report — March 2026 — Support at Home (Sector Report, nine months to March 2026, published as a PDF on stewartbrown.com.au, dated 07 August 2026 per the article/report index page). URL: https://stewartbrown.com.au/images/documents/StewartBrown_-_Aged_Care_Financial_Performance_Survey_Report_March_2026_-_Support_at_Home.pdf (Index/landing page: https://stewartbrown.com.au/aged-care-articles/aged-care-financial-performance-survey-analysis-report-march-2026-support-at-home-results)

Quoted/confirmed directly from the PDF:

• "Operating Result … calculated as the total recurrent revenue … less the total expenditure in dollar per client day." Revenue components: direct services, care management, package management fees, grants. Expense components: direct-service costs, care-management costs, administration costs.

• QTD (quarter to date) Mar-26 operating result = –$0.46 per client day. This is the quarter Jan–Mar 2026 in isolation, paired in the same document with "QTD Mar-26 EBITDA of $23 pcpa is a very low point and, at this level, it is not investable."

• YTD (nine months, Jul-25–Mar-26) figures are different and less severe: operating result +$0.58 pcd (down from +$3.13 prior corresponding period), YTD EBITDA $425 pcpa, with the document separately stating "YTD Mar-26 EBITDA of $425 per client per annum (pcpa) is a low point and, at this level, it is not sustainable or investable." (The A4 pass's table already correctly separated QTD vs YTD; that separation is CONFIRMED here against the primary PDF.)

• Coverage: 89,777 Support at Home packages, "representing 26% of the sector." (A4 had recorded a slightly different figure, 86,325/~29%, sourced from a different StewartBrown period — the Dec-2025 report — via a secondary summary; the Mar-2026 figure I pulled directly from the primary Mar-2026 PDF is 89,777/26%, and that is the number that governs the –$0.46 headline. This is a small but real correction to A4's cross-referencing.)

• Population mix: the nine-month YTD window blends "4 months data from the home care package program and 5 months data from the support at home program" (SAH started 1 Nov 2025, so Jul–Oct 2025 is legacy HCP, Nov 2025–Mar 2026 is SAH). Critically, the QTD Mar-26 quarter itself (Jan–Mar 2026) sits entirely inside the SAH period — it is not a legacy-transition artefact. Charter hypothesis (e) — "the StewartBrown figure covers legacy HCP clients transitioning, not steady-state SAH economics" — is NOT the explanation for the QTD figure, though it is a real qualifier for the YTD figures, which do blend both regimes.

• Cause, in the report's own words: "The increase in direct services revenue, which has largely been price driven, has not compensated fully for the loss of revenue from package management ($5.90 pcd reduction) and care management ($3.24 pcd reduction)." Separately: average published prices rose ~38% between HCP and SAH (comparing My Aged Care published median prices, effective 1 April 2026) while overall service volumes per client declined — the report attributes this to (i) services previously funded under HCP now excluded from SAH, (ii) some services shifted to a separate AT-HM (assistive technology/home modifications) budget, and (iii) new co-contribution requirements changing "how new participants have been allocating their packages to service types and possibly not using their full package value as a result."

• Direct-services line specifically: "Direct services revenue has grown consistently, reaching $63.85 pcd for the nine months to Mar-26. However, direct service costs fell in the last two standalone quarters to $47.75 pcd (Mar-26 QTD)." That is a positive ~$16.10 pcd gross contribution from direct services alone — the negative overall result is driven by the collapse of the fee lines that used to fund overhead (package management, care management), not by the direct-service delivery line going negative.

• No explicit figure for hours of service delivered per client per day/week was extractable in text (the report references a chart, "Staff hours per care recipient per week trend analysis," showing decline, but I could not pull the specific hour value from the fetched text).

• No explicit discrete breakdown of travel time / rostering / compliance overhead was found; the closest statement is: "Providers setting prices for individual services and having to build into those rates the costs that were previously recovered through package management, travel, and higher care management charges" — i.e., travel cost recovery has moved from a separate fee into the per-service price, which is suggestive of unbillable-time pressure (charter hypothesis (d)) but not quantified.

Verdict: –$0.46/client/day for the March 2026 quarter is CONFIRMED as StewartBrown's own reported figure, on their own definition, for a genuinely steady-state (not legacy-transition) SAH quarter, on a 26%-of-sector sample. The immediate cause, per the report itself, is the loss of two separate overhead-recovery fee lines (package management, care management) outpacing gains in direct-service revenue — i.e. this is much closer to charter hypothesis (b) (overhead recovery, not the hourly rate, is where the squeeze is) than to (a), (e) or (f).

3. Is the 10% care management deduction mandatory, a ceiling, or an allowance?

Primary sources, fetched directly:

• Department of Health, Disability and Ageing: Funding for Support at Home care management

URL: https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/support-at-home/funding-for-support-at-home/funding-for-support-at-home-care-management Quoted: "For ongoing services, 10% is deducted from each participant's quarterly budget to fund care management activities." No conditional language ("up to," "may charge") — this reads as a standing, automatic deduction, not a discretionary ceiling.

• IHACPA, Support at Home Pricing Advice 2026–27 (same PDF as §1): "Participants will have 10% of their ongoing quarterly budgets set aside for care management." Same fixed framing, independently corroborating.

What I could NOT verify: the Support at Home Program Manual (v4.2, Dec 2025) itself, which both A2 and I identified as the authoritative source, was not opened this pass — attempts to reach adjacent health.gov.au program pages (/our-work/support-at-home/support-at-home-ongoing-services, /our-work/support-at-home/charging-for-support-at-home-services/prices-for-support-at-home-participants) were blocked by robots.txt. So while two independent primary/near-primary pages both describe the 10% as a flat, non-discretionary deduction, I cannot rule out that the Program Manual carves out edge cases (e.g., lower actual care-management use). This is flagged, not assumed away.

Corroboration that 10% is thin relative to what it replaced: StewartBrown (§2 above) shows care-management revenue fell by $3.24 pcd under SAH versus the old HCP fee model, where — per A4's sourcing of a Dec-2024 StewartBrown report (secondary, via The Weekly Source, NOT independently re-verified by me this pass) — care management alone had been running at ~18.7% of revenue, on top of a separate ~13% package-management fee that has now been folded into (and effectively shrunk within) the same 10% pool. If that secondary figure is even roughly right, going from ~18.7%+13%=~31.7% of revenue in overhead-recovery fees to a single fixed 10% is a large real-terms cut to overhead funding — consistent with the negative operating result being an overhead-recovery problem, not a direct-labour-cost problem.

Verdict: CONFIRMED as a fixed, mandatory 10% deduction at the level of two independent government/IHACPA descriptions. NOT CONFIRMED at Program-Manual level of legal precision (document not opened; access blocked).

4. How does a provider actually earn under Support at Home?

Primary sources:

• myagedcare.gov.au, Support at Home pricing changes (fetched directly): "For the first year of the program, providers will continue to set their own prices for services"; "The price for a Support at Home service will reflect the entire cost of delivering that service. This includes administrative costs" (unlike the old HCP model where administrative charges were a separate fee).

• health.gov.au, Funding classifications for Support at Home (fetched directly): the eight ongoing classification levels each carry a fixed quarterly/annual dollar budget, "effective from 1 November 2025 and … subject to change in July each year in line with indexation," and these amounts "include 10% allocated for care management."

Quoted table (primary, health.gov.au):

Mechanism, reconstructed from these two primary sources: a provider sets its own per-unit price for each service (currently unconstrained by any enforced cap — see §1's caveat), and bills that price against the participant's fixed classification-level budget until the budget (minus the 10% care-management set-aside) is exhausted. There is no per-hour subsidy and no guarantee of hours — revenue per client is capped by (budget × fraction spent on that service ÷ price charged), not by the provider's willingness to deliver more hours.

Charter's own worked question — a ~$30,000 annual budget, how many hours at $103/hour, and is that the real constraint? Using the actual Level 4 classification ($29,696.40/yr, closest primary figure to the charter's "$30,000" example):

• 10% care management set-aside: $29,696.40 × 0.10 = $2,969.64

• Remaining for services: $29,696.40 − $2,969.64 = $26,726.76

• At $103.11/hour, and assuming (unrealistically, for illustration) 100% of the remaining budget went to personal care alone: $26,726.76 ÷ $103.11 = 259.2 hours/year ≈ 4.98 hours/week

Doing the same for the top and bottom classifications:

• Level 1: $10,731.00 × 0.90 = $9,657.90 ÷ $103.11 = 93.7 hrs/yr ≈ 1.8 hrs/week

• Level 8: $78,106.35 × 0.90 = $70,295.72 ÷ $103.11 = 681.8 hrs/yr ≈ 13.1 hrs/week

In reality a participant's remaining budget also has to cover domestic assistance, nursing, allied health, transport, etc., so actual personal-care hours purchasable are lower than these ceilings. Verdict: CONFIRMED — the classification budget, not the hourly price, is the hard ceiling on revenue per client, and it is a severe one: even at the top classification a participant can afford at most ~13 hours/week of personal care alone at the IHACPA reference price, and most classifications buy under 5 hours/week. This directly confirms charter hypothesis (c).

5. What is the real margin per billable hour, and why does the sector average differ?

Re-derivation of the "theoretical" wage-to-price gap (both sides re-checked against primary sources this pass):

Level 2 casual base rate (Schedule F, "Home Carer"), 1 Sept 2026     $43.03/hr
On-costs multiplier: super 12% + WorkCover 1.8% + portable LSL 1.65% = 15.45%
Fully loaded cost  = $43.03 × 1.1545                                 = $49.68/hr   [re-checked: 43.03 + 43.03×0.1545 = 43.03+6.65 = 49.68 ✓]

Level 3 casual base rate ("Qualified"), 1 Sept 2026                  $45.29/hr
Fully loaded cost  = $45.29 × 1.1545                                 = $52.29/hr   [re-checked: 45.29+6.997 = 52.29 ✓]

IHACPA advisory personal-care unit price, weekday                    $103.11/hr

Gross wage-to-price gap, Level 2                                     $103.11 − $49.68 = $53.43/hr
Gross wage-to-price gap, Level 3                                     $103.11 − $52.29 = $50.82/hr

This arithmetic is internally correct and both inputs are primary-sourced (award rates: A3's own primary fetch from calculate.fairwork.gov.au, not re-fetched by me this pass but the arithmetic re-checked digit-by-digit; the $103.11 price: re-confirmed directly by me in §1). This $50–53/hr figure is real, but it is a list-price-minus-wage number, not a realised margin — it says nothing about utilisation, overhead, or whether $103.11 is actually what gets billed and paid.

What the sector's own realised numbers say (StewartBrown, §2), and why they don't reduce to a single clean $/hour figure:

Direct services revenue, YTD Mar-26                                  $63.85 per client day
Direct service costs, QTD Mar-26                                     $47.75 per client day
Implied gross contribution on the "direct services" line             ≈ $16.10 per client day

This $16.10/day figure blends all direct services (personal care, domestic assistance, nursing, allied health, etc.) across a client base with an undisclosed, declining number of hours/day — the report shows a declining hours-per-week trend chart but I could not extract the actual hours figure from the fetched text. I cannot honestly convert $16.10/client/day into a $/hour margin without that denominator, and I did not find it in a primary source, so I am not going to manufacture one. What I can say responsibly:

• If a client received on the order of 0.5–1.0 hours of direct service per day (a plausible range given the classification-budget arithmetic in §4, which shows most classifications buying well under an hour/day of personal care alone once other service types are subtracted), the implied realised margin on the direct-services line would be roughly $16–32/hour — materially lower than the $50–53/hr wage-to-list-price gap.

• The gap between "$50/hr theoretical" and "$16–32/hr implied realised" is consistent with some combination of: providers not achieving the full $103.11 on every billed hour (mix effects, discounting, non-labour costs embedded in the "direct service cost" line such as travel and consumables, per the report's own comment about travel costs now being "built into" service rates), and/or the $47.75 direct-service cost figure including more than raw wages.

• Separately and on top of this, the overhead-recovery lines (10% care management pool, and the now-abolished separate package-management fee) are shown directly by StewartBrown to be running a deficit relative to what they used to recover (§2, §3) — this is the dominant driver of the whole-of-business negative result, independent of whatever margin exists on the direct-service line itself.

My own reconciliation of the paradox, stated plainly: The $50/hr figure and the –$0.46/day sector result are not actually contradictory — they are measuring different things and can both be true simultaneously:

1. The nominal wage-to-advisory-price spread on a personal-care hour is genuinely large (~$50/hr) — Pass A3's arithmetic and sourcing hold up.

1. But (i) a fixed participant budget severely rations how many hours at that price can ever be sold to one client (§4 — often under 5 hrs/week), so the $50/hr spread cannot be scaled into large revenue per client; (ii) not all of a worked hour is a billed hour (travel, rostering, cancellations — asserted qualitatively by StewartBrown, not quantified by any primary source found); (iii) the 10%-of-budget care-management pool, which is meant to fund the actual coordination/compliance work of running a case, is shown by the sector's own numbers to already be running below its predecessor funding level and in deficit; and (iv) providers are absorbing costs (travel, admin) that used to be separately billed into their per-service price, compressing the effective per-hour margin below the naive gap.

1. Point (iii) — overhead-recovery failure — is, on this evidence, the larger and more immediate driver of the sector-wide negative result than the direct-service margin itself, which the StewartBrown data show is still slightly positive in aggregate ($16.10 pcd). This most closely matches charter hypothesis (b), with (c) (budget rationing limiting scale) and (d) (unbillable time, qualitatively) as contributing, secondary mechanisms. Hypothesis (a) is only partly right (the price is advisory, but the evidence doesn't show providers being paid below it — if anything a secondary market-median figure of $115/hr sits above it). Hypothesis (e) is not the explanation for the specific QTD figure that anchors the "not investable" headline (§2). Hypothesis (f) — one figure simply wrong — is not supported; both figures check out against their primary sources.

A lean new entrant vs. the sector average — is the gap explained by overhead, or does a new entrant face the same economics? Partly explained, partly not, on the evidence:

• A solo/lean new entrant plausibly can avoid legacy drags that are visible in StewartBrown's own numbers: administrative systems built for the old dual-fee (care management + package management) model, existing corporate headcount sized for a bigger overhead-recovery pool that no longer exists, and the transition costs of migrating the existing client book onto SAH pricing and co-contribution rules. To that extent, a new entrant's overhead side of the ledger could genuinely look better than the sector average.

• What a new entrant cannot avoid, because they are structural features of the scheme itself, not legacy baggage: the fixed classification-budget ceiling per client (§4), the 10% care-management cap that the sector's own data show is thin relative to real coordination cost (§3), and — if travel/unbillable time is a real cost of domiciliary care (which it structurally must be, though I found no primary figure quantifying it for aged care specifically) — that cost applies to any provider regardless of size or age. A new entrant is also exposed to the same policy risk as everyone else: if a binding price cap does eventually land at or near $103.11 (§1), the very margin a new entrant is counting on shrinks.

• My own judgement, flagged explicitly as inference rather than a sourced finding: a lean new entrant likely captures a real efficiency advantage over the sector average shown by StewartBrown, but the scheme's structural constraints (budget-capped revenue per client, thin care-management funding, no billed-hour guarantee) mean the achievable margin is well short of the $50/hr theoretical figure even for a well-run new operator, and probably closer to (though I cannot pin a number on) the lower end of the $16–32/hr range implied above, before that operator's own general overhead (insurance, HR, rostering software, compliance, marketing, vehicle costs) is deducted.

6. Is a new in-home aged care business in Victoria more or less attractive than the NDIS equivalent?

Two readings, both defensible on the evidence gathered, and I am not going to force them into one number:

• On narrow per-hour unit economics: more attractive than NDIS. The wage side is essentially the same order of magnitude in both programs (aged care Schedule F Level 2/3 casual, $49.68–$52.29/hr fully loaded, sits close to — if anything slightly below — the NDIS-study's comparable Schedule B figure per A3's own cross-check). The revenue side is structurally more favourable in aged care as of today: the $103.11 advisory price is ~40% above the NDIS's binding $73.58 price limit (a hard ceiling), and aged care currently has no enforced ceiling at all (§1) — a secondary market-median figure even shows providers charging above $103.11. A hard ceiling (NDIS) versus an unenforced advisory figure with evidence of prices running above it (aged care) is a real structural difference in the provider's favour for aged care, on this one dimension.

• On realised, whole-of-business economics right now: no better, and arguably worse in the near term. The aged care home-care sector is reporting its first-ever negative quarterly operating result in the same quarter this analysis is being run against (§2), driven by a collapse in overhead-recovery revenue during an active, disruptive program transition (new pricing model since 1 Nov 2025, co-contribution changes still bedding in, price-transparency/anti-gouging regulatory attention actively increasing, a possible future price cap hanging over the market). Residential aged care shows a comparably distressed picture (62% of surveyed homes loss-making, per A4, sourced from the same StewartBrown family of reports but not independently re-opened by me this pass — flagged, not re-verified here since residential is outside this charter's home-care scope). NDIS, per A4's own prior-pass framing (not re-verified in this pass), shows roughly half of providers loss-making — a different problem (oversupply/price competition in a maturing scheme) from aged care's current problem (a scheme less than a year old still absorbing a funding-model rewrite), but neither sector is currently a case of "everyone is comfortably profitable."

Stated plainly: on the evidence, the structural opportunity in aged care personal care is larger than in NDIS personal care — a genuinely bigger nominal spread between labour cost and a currently-uncapped advisory price, and a real (if narrow and budget-capped) positive contribution on the direct-service line even in the sector's worst-ever quarter. But the sector is presently a bad reference class to benchmark against, because it is mid-transition and its own aggregate numbers are dominated by an overhead-recovery collapse that a new, lean, well-designed entrant could plausibly avoid more than an existing large provider can. I would call it a conditionally more attractive but currently higher-uncertainty opportunity than NDIS, not an unambiguous "yes, build it."

What would change this answer:

1. Whether a binding price cap actually lands, and at what level relative to $103.11 — this is the single biggest lever on the revenue side and I could not obtain a primary-sourced answer this pass (§1 residual conflict).

1. A primary, quantified figure for unbillable/travel time in Australian domiciliary aged care (I found only qualitative acknowledgement that travel cost recovery has moved into per-service pricing, no measured percentage).

1. Direct reading of the Support at Home Program Manual on the 10% care-management deduction's legal precision (mandatory vs. ceiling in edge cases) — not opened this pass.

1. An actual achieved-revenue-per-hour figure for personal care (distinct from the $103.11 advisory list price and the $115 secondary market-median) — I found no primary source publishing this.

1. Whether the negative March-2026 quarter is a one-off transition trough or a persisting trend — only one quarter of pure-SAH data exists as of this analysis; a repeat negative result in the next 1–2 quarters would be much stronger evidence the structural margin is genuinely thin, not just disrupted.

RESIDUAL UNCERTAINTY

1. Price-cap timing conflict, unresolved. myagedcare.gov.au (primary, fetched) states caps apply "from 1 July 2026"; multiple trade-press sources (secondary, dated ~19–20 May 2026, catalogued by A2) report the caps were deferred with no new date. I attempted three separate primary government URLs to resolve this directly and all three were blocked by robots.txt (health.gov.au/news/..., health.gov.au/ministers/..., agedcarequality.gov.au/news-publications/...). Genuinely unresolved from primary sources this pass; indirect evidence (a secondary $115/hr market median above the $103.11 figure) leans toward "no cap currently enforced," but that inference rests on a secondary figure I did not independently re-verify.

1. Support at Home Program Manual not opened. Both A2 and I identified it as the authoritative document for the 10% care-management deduction's precise legal character, and neither pass has opened it. The two independent sources I did read (health.gov.au funding page, IHACPA pricing advice) both describe a flat 10%, with no "up to" language, which I treat as reasonably strong but not Program-Manual-level confirmation.

1. No primary source quantifies hours of personal care delivered per client per day/week. StewartBrown's PDF references a chart showing a declining trend but the number itself was not extractable via the fetch tool's text summarisation. This is the single missing number that would let me convert the $16.10/client/day direct-services margin into a real $/hour figure and settle §5 more precisely than the $16–32/hr band I derived by inference.

1. No primary source quantifies travel time / unbillable time as a percentage of paid hours for aged care domiciliary work specifically (the NDIS-side comparator this charter invites is inherited from a separate pass, not re-derived here). StewartBrown's report acknowledges travel cost recovery has moved into per-service pricing but gives no percentage.

1. A4's own sourcing of the 62%-of-residential-homes-loss-making figure and the "roughly half of NDIS providers loss-making" comparator were not re-opened or re-verified in this pass — they are carried forward from earlier passes as context for §6 and should be treated with whatever confidence those passes assigned them, not elevated by inclusion here.

1. The $115/hour secondary market-median figure (A2, "Medium" confidence, industry aggregator) was used in §1 and §6 as corroborating logic for "no binding cap yet" but was not independently re-fetched or re-verified against a primary source this pass.

1. StewartBrown's package coverage figure differs slightly between the Dec-2025 report (86,325 packages, ~29% of sector, per A4's secondary citation) and the Mar-2026 report I opened directly (89,777 packages, 26% of sector). Both are plausible (different quarters, denominator likely also grew as more packages were released), but this was not reconciled beyond noting it.

SOURCE LOG (this pass only)

Prior-pass documents (A2, A3, A4) were read locally to establish what to re-verify, and their internal wage arithmetic was independently re-checked digit-by-digit in §5; their sourcing of award rates ($43.03, $45.29) was not re-fetched from calculate.fairwork.gov.au this pass (out of the six charter items — the charter's items concern the aged-care price/margin/deduction side, not the award-rate side already primary-verified by A3).

Compiled by V4 — Independent Verifier, AI Project Governance Standard v3.9/v4.0, class STANDARD. Effort ceiling ~45 tool calls; used ~24.