What the Budget papers didn’t tell you
New report reveals year long waits for aged care services
- 360 day wait: Average delay to receive aged care services nationally
- Support at Home delays: Older Australians waiting around 12 months for care
- 48592 awaiting triage: Thousands still waiting for eligibility decisions
- New transparency: Aged Care Act report exposes sector wait time pressures
In the final hours before Treasurer Jim Chalmers handed down the 2026-27 Federal Budget, a report the sector has been waiting on for months was quietly published on the Department’s website.
The inaugural Aged Care Act 2024 Wait Times Report, a new publication created following the new Aged Care Act, reveals the true state of the aged care sector in Australia.
The average wait time to receive aged care services in Australia for the five-month period between 1 November 2025, when the Act took effect, and 31 March 2026, was 360 days or one year.
The average wait time, from application through My Aged Care to receiving services, for residential aged care was 396 days for ongoing care – 13 months – and 434 days for short-term residential care – 14 months.
For Support at Home, the time older Australians waited from application to receipt of services, was 364 days or 12 months, according to the 31-page report.
Median wait times were shorter, indicating that outliers skewed the average results – but an outlier is still the lived experience of an older Australian waiting to receive care the Government has assessed them as needing. There should be no outliers in a wealthy country like Australia.
The results varied across states – the longest average wait time to receive services was in the ACT at 386 days, while the shortest wait time was 320 days in the NT.
Triage data was published for the first time, the time taken from application through My Aged Care to determining eligibility for Government-funded aged care services – a fraction of the assessment process.
As of 31 March 2026, there were 48,592 older Australians waiting for a triage decision, a 25% decrease on the previous quarter. The data is a snapshot taken on the last day of the quarter.
The last wait time data for Support at Home was published in December for the month to 31 October 2025, the last day of the Home Care Packages Program. Date on wait times for assessments or residential aged care had only been provided through Senate hearings.
The new Aged Care was supposed to provide greater transparency – this report, and the timing of its release, does not provide that.
