About Aged Care Cost Estimator

This project started because I was helping people close to me figure out aged care for an elderly relative of theirs. They needed to understand what it was going to cost, what the means test would do to the Age Pension, and whether selling the family home or keeping it was the better move. I spent weeks reading legislation, fee schedules, Services Australia documents, and financial advisor blogs, and built a spreadsheet to model the numbers properly.

What struck me was how hard it was for anyone without a finance background to get a clear answer. Australia's aged care system is genuinely complicated: fees are split across four or five components, each with different rules; means testing uses two separate calculations; home exemption depends on who's living where. The government portal (My Aged Care) is accurate but dense, and the official fee estimator is clunky. Everything else I could find was either trying to sell me something, or a blog post three years out of date.

Most families researching aged care are doing it in a hurry, often after a hospital discharge or a sudden decline in a parent's health. What they want is a clear answer to a simple question: what will this actually cost, and how will we pay for it?

Once the model was working, it seemed obvious that other people navigating the same system would benefit from it too. So I turned the spreadsheet into a proper calculator, rewrote the tricky parts in plain English, added side-by-side comparisons of financing strategies (sell the home, rent it out, pay a RAD, use the Home Equity Access Scheme), and put it on the web for free. Everything models the new November 2025 rules.

If it saves you even a couple of hours of confusion at a difficult time, it was worth building.

All fee schedules, thresholds, and means test rules are sourced from official Australian government publications:

• My Aged Care (Department of Health, Disability and Ageing)
• Department of Health, Disability and Ageing fee schedules
• Services Australia Age Pension means test thresholds
• IHACPA Refundable Accommodation Deposit data
• The Aged Care Act 2025 and associated regulations

Fee rates are indexed twice a year in March and September. We update the calculator when new rates are published, typically within 14 days.

This site is independent. We are not affiliated with any aged care provider, financial advisor network, or government department. We do not accept payment for provider listings, and we do not receive commissions on any services you choose after using the calculator.

If that ever changes, we'll disclose it clearly on this page.