How buyers value a home care business under Support at Home
Updated: 4 days ago
For about a decade, if you wanted to know what a home care business was, you asked how many packages it managed. It was a good question. The owner knew the answer by heart, the buyer asked it first, and most of the rest of the conversation was arithmetic.
It is a worse question now. Support at Home replaced Home Care Packages on 1 November 2025 and changed three things at once: how providers get paid, how care management is funded, and how much clients contribute. A year in, buyers have adjusted. A lot of owners have not, which is understandable, because the old number is still sitting there on the dashboard looking important.
So here is how a buyer now reads a home care business, and what an owner can do about it in the year before a sale.
The old model, and why it stopped working
Under packages, providers charged package management and care management as fees against each client's package, month after month, whether or not much care was delivered that month. Until 2021 they also held the unspent balances that built up when it wasn't. Some of what you were buying, when you bought a home care business, was a fee stream attached to packages held rather than to care delivered. That is a nice thing to own. It is not, strictly, a care business. It is more like a custody business with a care business attached.¹
Support at Home took that away. Revenue now follows the services a client actually receives. Package management can no longer be charged as a separate fee; its cost has to be built into the price of each service. Care management is capped at 10 per cent of each client's budget and claimed as it is delivered. Client contributions depend on the kind of service: clinical care is free to the client, and everyday living services carry the highest contribution.
The consequence is a little counterintuitive. Two businesses with identical client numbers can now earn very different amounts, depending on how much of each client's budget gets used, and on what. "Clients equal revenue" used to be roughly true. Now it is a hypothesis.
And the first year was rough. StewartBrown's March 2026 financial performance survey reported an average operating loss for home care providers in the March 2026 quarter, with utilisation of client budgets averaging 62.2 per cent. Those are averages, and results varied a lot between providers, which is the whole point. A buyer is trying to work out which side of the average you are on, and would like evidence rather than reassurance.
Five things a buyer now measures
1. Utilisation
The share of each client's budget that becomes delivered services. Low utilisation is revenue you were entitled to and did not collect, and it usually points to a rostering or workforce problem rather than a demand problem. Buyers will ask for it monthly since November 2025, by region and by service type. If you do not have it monthly, they will notice that too.
2. Client tenure and flow
How long clients stay, how many leave each quarter and why, and how many arrive and from where. A business losing clients to residential care or to competitors faster than it replaces them is a melting ice cube with a pleasant current revenue line. A business with a steady flow of referrals from hospitals, general practitioners or assessment services is the opposite.
3. Care management capacity
Care management is now capped at a tenth of each client's budget and paid as it is delivered, so the number of clients each care manager carries drives margin and quality at the same time, in opposite directions. Too few clients per care manager and the business loses money. Too many and clients leave. The right answer is somewhere in the middle, and buyers will ask for caseloads and care manager turnover to see whether you have found it.
4. Service mix
Clinical, independence and everyday living services carry different prices, different client contributions and different workforce needs. A business concentrated in one category is making a bet on policy for that category, whether or not it meant to. Buyers will map revenue by category and ask how the mix has moved since the transition.
5. Density and workforce
Clients clustered in one region can be served with less travel and more consistent staff. A business that grew by accepting clients from wherever they came carries a travel cost that often does not show up anywhere obvious in its accounts. Buyers will find it anyway, by asking for travel time, the share of shifts covered by agency staff, and how long care workers stay.
Things that count for less than they used to
The headline client number. Without utilisation and tenure beside it, it is mostly trivia.
Revenue from before November 2025. Buyers will normalise it or set it aside.
Unspent client funds. They were never the provider's asset, and under the new rules nobody is confused about that.
Growth plans that depend on new regions without the workforce already in place. These are plans, not assets.
Structure, which is now also a timetable
Registration under the Aged Care Act 2024 sits with the legal entity, which makes the choice between selling shares and selling assets more than a tax question.
In a share sale the registration stays where it is. The provider must notify the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission within 14 days of becoming aware of a notifiable change, such as a change in the people responsible for the business or a significant change in its governance or scale. Note what the trigger is: the changes that come with a sale, not the sale itself. Lawyers enjoy this distinction, and so should you.
In an asset sale the buyer must already be registered in the right categories, and clients move across through a transfer of the service delivery branch, which needs at least 90 days' notice to the Department. That puts at least three months between signing and the clients moving, during which everyone is nervous.
The asset route suits buyers who are already registered and want only the clients and staff. The share route suits buyers who want the business as it stands. The choice changes who can buy, how long it takes and how much of the price is at risk in between, so it is worth settling early.
Who is buying
In 2026 three kinds of buyers have been active in home care: not-for-profit groups building scale, listed residential operators adding home care, and private equity backed or technology-led operators. They want different things. The not-for-profit may care about mission fit and regional coverage. The listed residential operator may care about clients who will need residential care later, which is a slightly grim but perfectly rational thing to value. The platform may care about density in a region where it already operates.
So the same business can be worth materially different amounts to each of them. You could treat this as a fact about valuation theory. I prefer to treat it as an argument for running a process rather than taking the first approach that arrives.²
The year before a sale
Measure the five things above, monthly, starting from November 2025 if the data allows. A buyer will ask, and a business that already reports them looks lower-risk.
Lift utilisation by fixing the rostering and workforce constraints behind it before adding clients. More clients at low utilisation is just more unused budget.
Set care manager caseloads deliberately and watch what happens to retention.
Consolidate geography. Decline growth that adds travel without density, which will feel wrong at the time.
Close audit findings and keep a record of how each was resolved.
Step back from the client relationships that matter most, so the business is seen to run without you.
Decide on structure early, with advice, and prepare the business for it.
None of these requires a decision to sell. Each makes the business more valuable whether or not it is sold, which is a nice property for a to-do list to have.
In short
Support at Home moved the value of a home care business from how many clients it holds to how well it serves them, and whether it can show that. Buyers have adjusted. Owners who measure their business the way a buyer will, a year before anyone asks, get to choose who buys it and on what terms.
¹ This is unfair to the many providers who were running excellent care businesses all along. But the old economics did reward holding packages, and buyers priced that.
² I would say that, given what we do. It is still true.
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General information only. Not financial, legal or tax advice.
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