Support at Home from 1 October 2026: what actually changes for providers

First, the thing worth being precise about, because a lot of writing on this is loose: Support at Home did not start on 1 October 2026. It began on 1 November 2025, replacing both the Home Care Packages program and the Short-Term Restorative Care programme. If you are delivering Support at Home services, you are already in the program.

What lands on 1 October 2026 is a change inside the program, and it is a billing change: personal care becomes fully government-funded clinical care. Personal care services move out of the Independence category and into Clinical supports, and because clinical supports carry no participant contribution at any means-tested rate, the contribution on personal care becomes 0%. Contributions on other Support at Home services are not changed by this.

So the operational shape of it is narrow and sharp rather than broad: the same personal care service, delivered by the same worker to the same participant, attracts a contribution on 30 September and none on 1 October — and both of those visits land on the same monthly statement. Everything else in this guide follows from that one boundary.

Most systems hold the service-to-category relationship as a property of the service: this item is Independence, that item is Clinical supports. That works right up until a category membership changes on a date, and then it quietly produces wrong money in both directions — re-rating September’s delivered visits if you edit the mapping in place, or charging a contribution into October if you do not.

What the boundary actually requires is that the category is resolved as at the date of service, so the same catalogue answers “Independence” for a 30 September visit and “Clinical supports” for a 1 October one, without anybody editing anything in between and without touching what already went out. If your rostering, budgeting and invoicing all read the same catalogue, that behaviour is defined once, upstream, and everything downstream inherits it. If those three live in different spreadsheets, you are making the same dated decision three times and hoping the three agree in November.

Worth stating plainly which way the risk runs. Charging a contribution on personal care delivered after 1 October means billing a participant for care the Government now funds in full. That is a refund, an apology and a correction on a statement, and it is the error to design against first.

Under HCP, a participant’s package was one number you drew down against. Under Support at Home there are several, they are not interchangeable, and — the part that catches system design out — their carry-over rules point in different directions:

• The ongoing quarterly budget, which carries unspent funds forward but only up to a capped amount.
• Assistive technology and home modifications, which is paid upfront, available for a fixed window, and does not accrue at all.
• The Restorative Care Pathway— a time-boxed episode of intensive restorative services, in addition to the ongoing budget.
• The End-of-Life Pathway, likewise separate and time-boxed.

A single shared “budget” model gets this wrong the moment it assumes one carry-over rule, because two of these buckets behave in opposite ways. So the budget view needs them as genuinely distinct bucket types with their own utilisation, not one total with a note in a description field. A participant heavily under-spent on everyday support who has just had a large home modification approved should read as several pictures — a blended bar hides precisely the thing you need to see.

Care management — the coordination, planning and oversight work behind every package — is funded by a percentage deducted from the participant’s quarterly budget, so the money available for actual services is less than the classification amount they were told they were assigned. That much is a funding mechanic, not a choice.

The part that is a system requirement is that the deduction has to be shown as its own named line, not quietly absorbed. A participant who only ever sees the net figure will reasonably conclude their budget is smaller than the classification they were assessed at, and that conversation is much worse to have in arrears than to pre-empt on a statement. If your invoicing folds care management into a bottom-line total, that logic has to change — because a visible deduction is what the participant, the family and eventually a reviewer expect to be able to reconcile.

Put those together and the October statement has to do something a summary cannot: reconcile. Services grouped under the category that applied on the day they were delivered, each funding bucket carrying its own balance rather than one pool, the care-management deduction named rather than absorbed, and a personal-care contribution that legitimately stops partway through the month.

Getting the category mapping right matters even if you never produce a formal statement, because it is what your utilisation reporting and your claims are built on. Getting it wrong does not just look untidy — it means a client’s remaining budget in a given category is quietly wrong, and nobody notices until that client is over-committed, or under-serviced against funding they thought they still had.

Support at Home also introduces a mandatory monthly statement: a recurring document showing the client exactly what happened to their funding that month, broken out by category and bucket, with care management shown separately as above.

Being direct about our own position, because you should not have to work it out from marketing copy: Corella does not produce that monthly statement today. What is built is the groundwork underneath it — funding buckets modelled separately rather than as one pool, care management as its own priced line rather than netted off, and an effective-dated service-to-category map so a service billed before 1 October and the same service billed after it price against the correct rules. The statement itself is not shipped, and we would rather say so here than have you discover it in a demo.

The general point is worth more than our particular position: if you are choosing or reviewing any system against this reform, ask specifically which parts of Support at Home are shipped today and which are planned. “Supports Support at Home” can mean the invoicing, the claims, the category structure or the statement, and a vendor answering yes may be answering about a different part from the one you are asking about.

Work through this in order, rather than all at once on the day:

• List every personal-care line you bill and confirm each one is recognised as personal care by whatever decides its category. An item somebody named idiosyncratically years ago is the one that keeps charging a contribution in October.
• Rebuild client budget views so each funding bucket is tracked and reported separately — no blended totals.
• Change your invoicing logic so care management is produced as its own priced line rather than a percentage folded into a total.
• Check the boundary date behaves — a personal-care service delivered on 30 September and the same service delivered on 1 October must price against different rules, from the same catalogue, without anyone editing it by hand in between. Then check that re-opening or re-issuing the September invoice still prices it the September way.
• Decide who signs off the mapping, and write down when it was last reviewed. When a client queries a category in November, that note is the difference between a two-minute answer and an afternoon.
• Ask your software vendor the shipped-or-planned question above, in writing, before the date rather than after it.

None of this is difficult work. It is just work that has to happen upstream of the first October invoice, and the providers who find the month painful will mostly be the ones who discovered the boundary when a participant asked why they were still being charged for personal care.