2 in 5 Aged Care Homes Get a New Staffing Rating After Rule Change

From 1 October 2025, Australia changed the way the Staffing sub-rating in its aged care Star Ratings system is calculated, so that the rating better reflects the amount of care time residents receive from staff.

The key shift is straightforward but significant: aged care homes now need to meet both of their legislated care minutes targets — total care minutes and registered nurse care minutes — to achieve a Staffing rating of 3 stars or more. The thresholds for the ratings themselves have also changed.

The updated approach first appeared in the Star Ratings published from the May 2026 quarterly update on the Find a provider tool. The policy and its timing are confirmed by the Australian Government's My Aged Care site, which notes the change started to appear in Star Ratings from mid 2026.

The Staffing rating is based on the total amount of nursing and personal care time delivered by registered nurses, enrolled nurses, personal care workers and assistants in nursing, plus the care time a resident receives specifically from a registered nurse.

Under the rules, up to 10 per cent of the registered nurse target can be delivered by enrolled nurses and still count toward that registered nurse component.

The practical effect of requiring both targets to be met is that strong performance in one area can no longer fully compensate for a shortfall in the other. As industry advisors including Mirus Australia and Acetek have independently described, the change came into effect on 1 October 2025 and flows through to the second quarterly Star Ratings update of 2026.

An analysis by author Filip Reierson (Evaran), published on Australian Ageing Agenda, applied both the old and new rules to the same May 2026 data extract to isolate the effect of the methodology alone.

The result: 912 homes received a different star rating in the staffing sub-category than they would have under the old rule, and 233 homes received a different overall star rating. That works out to nearly 40 per cent of homes — the "2 in 5" of the headline — receiving a different staffing rating, despite the underlying care minute data remaining exactly the same.

Among the 2,283 homes with a staffing rating, 438 ended up higher and 474 ended up lower. Among the 2,180 homes with an overall star rating, 95 moved higher and 138 moved lower.

It is worth noting these specific impact figures are the author's own modelling, not an official government tally. The policy change itself is official and fully verified; the distribution analysis is attributed to the author and Evaran.

Interestingly, the change did not dramatically move the average. The analysis found a mean increase of less than 0.01 in staffing ratings, and the median stayed at three stars.

What changed was the distribution itself — homes ended up more spread out across all five staffing star ratings, with winners and losers in roughly similar numbers.

The analysis offers an illustrative example. A home with 125 per cent of its target registered nurse minutes could previously earn a four-star rating with just 90 per cent of its target total care minutes. Under the new rule, that same home receives a two-star staffing rating — because it no longer clears both targets.

For families using the Find a provider tool, a Star Rating is often a first signal of quality. A methodology change that reshuffles ratings for two in five homes — without any change to actual staffing — can shift perceptions quickly.

For providers, the message is that how performance is measured can be just as consequential as the performance itself. A home that looked solid on a single strong metric may now find that balance across both care minutes targets is what counts.

The episode is a reminder that the rules behind a number are constantly evolving, and that understanding the mechanics is essential to interpreting any rating fairly.

This story is a clear illustration of a broader truth for any business: the same data can tell different stories depending on the rules applied to it. When a methodology shifts overnight, organisations that can re-run the numbers — old rule versus new rule, on the same underlying dataset — are the ones that understand what actually happened and why.

That capability depends on having your information in one reliable, well-organised place. When care minutes, rostering, finance and compliance data live in separate systems, modelling a rule change or responding to a regulator becomes slow and uncertain.

A unified, AI-ready data foundation turns those scenarios from a scramble into a straightforward query. Whether you are in aged care, professional services, retail or construction, bringing your business data together is what lets you adapt to changing rules with confidence rather than guesswork.