Support at Home has been live since November 2025. Here's the compliance side that's easy to let slip — your registration category, which providers face the strengthened Quality Standards, the obligations that apply to everyone, and how to stay audit-ready for care delivered at home.
The Accorda Team · 3 August 2026
If you deliver aged care in people's homes, the last year has been a big one. On 1 November 2025, Support at Home replaced the Home Care Packages Program and the Short-Term Restorative Care Programme, and it did so under a brand-new Aged Care Act. Most of the early scramble went, understandably, into the parts that keep the lights on: new assessments, new budgets, and a new way of claiming.
Nine months in, the part that's easy to let quietly drift is the compliance evidence. Support at Home isn't only a funding change. It made you a registered provider inside a new regulatory model — one that decides, based on what you deliver, exactly which rules you're held to and what you'll need to show. The good news is that the requirements are knowable, and getting your evidence back in step is a finite job. Here's the plain-English version.
Support at Home brought in-home aged care under the new Aged Care Act, alongside a strengthened set of Quality Standards, a Statement of Rights, and a single registration model run by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission. The Commonwealth Home Support Programme (CHSP) hasn't moved across yet — that transition will happen no earlier than 1 July 2027 — so many providers are running in a mixed world for now.
The shift most providers underestimate is this: you're no longer regulated as a "package provider." You're regulated according to your registration category, and that category determines how closely the Commission looks at you.
Under Support at Home, the Commission regulates providers by registration category, numbered 1 to 5. That number isn't just admin — it sets which of the strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards you're actually audited against.
Category 4 providers are held to strengthened Quality Standards 1 to 4 — and Standard 5 (Outcome 5.1) as well if they provide care management or restorative care management.
Category 5 providers are held to strengthened Quality Standards 1 to 5.
Categories 1, 2 and 3 are not audited against the Quality Standards.
Being in category 1, 2 or 3 doesn't mean you're off the hook. It means you're not audited against the Quality Standards — not that the Aged Care Act stops applying to you.
That distinction matters, because the next set of obligations lands on everyone.
Whatever your category, the Commission is clear that all registered Support at Home providers must, from 1 November 2025:
Uphold the Statement of Rights for the older people you support.
Follow the Code of Conduct for Aged Care — and make sure your workers and responsible persons follow it too.
Report serious incidents to the Commission through the Serious Incident Response Scheme (SIRS).
Make sure older people and their supporters know they can make a complaint or give feedback, to you or to the Commission.
None of those depend on your category. A small category 1 provider carries the same four duties as a large category 5 one — the difference is only whether the Quality Standards audit sits on top.
Care delivered in someone's home is harder to evidence than care delivered in a facility, and that's exactly where the gaps tend to open up.
Serious incidents happen out of sight. SIRS now applies to your in-home services. A worker may be the only person who witnesses a fall, an allegation, or a medication error, in a private home, with no one else around. You need a capture-and-triage process that works from a phone in the field, flags what's likely reportable, and gets it to the right person inside the Commission's timeframes — not a paper form that surfaces days later.
Code of Conduct sign-offs have to be provable. "Our staff know the Code" isn't evidence. Can you show, worker by worker, that each person has read and acknowledged the current Code of Conduct for Aged Care — and re-acknowledged it when it changed?
Generic policies won't survive a strengthened-Standards audit. If you're a category 4 or 5 provider, your policies need to reflect how you actually deliver Support at Home, map to the relevant Standards, and show they're current, reviewed, and put into practice — not downloaded, filed, and forgotten.
Records have to hold up as contemporaneous. An auditor doesn't just want the right answer; they want to see it was written at the time and hasn't been quietly tidied up since.
You don't need to boil the ocean. For most in-home providers, audit-readiness under the new model comes down to being able to answer a handful of questions without a scramble:
Do we know our registration category, and exactly which Standards we're audited against?
Are our policies current, tailored to Support at Home, and mapped to the Standards that apply to us?
Can we produce a full sign-off history showing every worker has acknowledged the Code of Conduct and our key policies?
Is there one reliable path for capturing an incident in the field, triaging it, and meeting SIRS timeframes?
Can we pull the evidence for any of the above together quickly, rather than rebuilding it the week before an audit?
If you can answer those calmly, the transition's compliance side is under control.
Let's be straight about the boundary. Accorda won't manage your Support at Home budgets, run your assessments, or lodge your claims. That's the job of your care-management and billing systems, and you almost certainly have those working by now.
What Accorda handles is the evidence side — the part that a strengthened-Standards audit actually tests:
Policy management with staff sign-offs, so your Support at Home policies stay current and you can prove every worker has acknowledged them.
AI policy writing and review to tailor generic templates to how you really deliver in-home care, and to check them against the Standards that apply to your category.
Incident reporting and triage with reportable-incident detection, built for capture in the field and SIRS timeframes.
Records integrity so your evidence is tamper-evident and reads as contemporaneous.
One-click audit evidence packs, so producing your evidence is a task, not a fortnight.
Regulatory Radar to watch for the reforms still landing — including the CHSP transition ahead — and flag which of your policies each change touches.
You run the care. Accorda helps you prove it — quietly, in one place.
If you've got Support at Home delivering but you're not sure your compliance evidence has kept pace, that's a good thing to fix before an audit finds it first. Accorda is built to get it back in step. Have a look at accorda.com.au.
Transition to Support at Home — Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission
Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards — Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission
Support at Home program — Department of Health, Disability and Ageing
Serious Incident Response Scheme (SIRS) — Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission
This article is general information only, current as at August 2026, and is not legal or compliance advice. Regulatory requirements can change.
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