Seventeen a day. That’s how many older Australians died last financial year still waiting on home care they’d already been approved for.
The real total is 6,436 people on the aged care waitlist in 2025-26. Every one of them had been assessed and given the green light for Support at Home. The funding just hadn’t come through yet.
The health department slipped the figures out quietly. According to the Opposition, that only happened after the government ignored two Senate orders to cough them up.
Worse than the year before
The year before, 4,812 people died waiting under the old home care package system. That makes the new number almost 34 per cent higher.
Fair enough, the system changed in between, so it’s not quite apples with apples. Still, nobody’s arguing it’s heading the right way.
On 30 June, the official Support at Home waitlist sat at more than 106,000. Some already get a little help and are waiting to step up to more.
Who gets funded first comes down to the Support at Home priority system. The more urgent your needs look on paper, the higher up you go. Get placed lower down, and the wait can stretch out a long way.
And the real figure may be bigger. Four Corners put the number closer to 154,000 back in August. Its reporting suggested the official figure only shrank because the government changed how it counted people.
A year on the aged care waitlist, on average
A report in May found people were waiting about a year on average for aged care services. According to the Opposition, it got buried. It was quietly dropped while everyone was busy with the budget lock-up.
Hospitals are feeling it too. Aged care patients stuck in hospital beds? Up 35 per cent in under a year.
One family told a Senate inquiry last year what that looks like. A Hobart man living with Parkinson’s and cancer waited more than 12 months for a home care package. It was finally approved three days before he died.
“They’re not a statistic”What the minister says
Aged Care Minister Sam Rae pushed back on how the numbers are being read. His point? People on the list are actually dying at a rate “significantly lower than the rate of death for older Australians in the broader population”.
He did concede the point that matters most to families. “Every single death of someone who is waiting for care is a tragedy,” he said.
The government says it delivered an extra 83,000 home care places in 2025-26, with another 32,000 rolling out this year. Rae admits there’s “more work to do”. Back in May, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the state of aged care was “not good enough”.
Why this matters to most families
Sooner or later, most of us end up dealing with this system, for Mum or Dad or for ourselves. Home care is what lets older people stay in their own homes, with help for things like showering, cleaning, meals and getting to appointments.
No help? Then the family picks up the slack. Or it’s off to hospital, which costs a lot more and is the last place most of them want to be.
If you’ve got someone waiting, it’s worth keeping in regular contact with their provider and My Aged Care, and asking to be reassessed if their needs have changed. The longer the wait, the more those check-ins matter.