NDIS or a Home Care Package? What Changes at 65

Published by SESI Care Services · Updated September 2026 · 4-minute summary

Quick answer: You must be younger than 65 on the day you apply to the NDIS. There is no exception and no later application. If you are already a participant at 65, nothing pushes you out: your plan continues. If you are not a participant by then, the pathway is aged care, and since 1 November 2025 that means the Support at Home program, not a Home Care Package. Packages no longer exist, although the phrase is still what people search for. You cannot hold an NDIS plan and aged care funding at once, and after 65 the move into aged care is effectively one way, because a fresh NDIS access request is closed to you. That is why this decision belongs in your early sixties, not on your 65th birthday.

Key takeaways

• Age at application is the whole rule. You must be younger than 65 on the day you apply, and turning 65 does not remove an existing participant from the scheme.
• Home Care Packages ended on 1 November 2025, when Support at Home replaced them and Short-Term Restorative Care.
• Support at Home has 8 ongoing classifications, quarterly budgets from $2,682.75 to $19,526.59, plus three short-term pathways.
• Aged care asks you to contribute; the NDIS does not. Contributions are means tested and vary by service type.
• You cannot hold both. Approval for aged care support at home after 65 means leaving the NDIS, with no cooling off period.
• The aged care wait is real. At 31 March 2026, 100,191 people were waiting in the Support at Home priority system.
• If you are 63 or 64 with a permanent disability, the decision is now. At 66 it will not be available to you.

The rule that decides everything

The NDIS has one hard age gate: you must be under 65 when you apply. Not when your condition began, not when your evidence was gathered, not when the NDIA finishes assessing. On the day the request is made, you must be 64 or younger.

If you are already a participant at 65, nothing happens automatically. Your plan, funding periods and reassessments continue, and the NDIA says you decide whether to keep NDIS supports or change to aged care. If someone tells you that you must move at 65, that is wrong.

If you are not a participant and under 65, you can still apply, and the usual disability and evidence criteria apply. If your birthday is close, this is more time-critical than most people realise.

If you are not a participant and 65 or over, the NDIS is closed and aged care is the pathway, through My Aged Care. Assessment opens at 65, at 50 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and at 50 (45 for First Nations people) for people on a low income who are homeless or at risk of it.

Home Care Packages are history: what replaced them

Most pages people find when they search “Home Care Package” are out of date. On 1 November 2025, Support at Home replaced that program and Short-Term Restorative Care. The Commonwealth Home Support Programme, the entry-level program for smaller amounts of help, still runs separately and is not scheduled to fold in before 1 July 2027.

Where a package had four levels, Support at Home has 8 ongoing classifications. Your assessment sets the classification; the classification sets a quarterly budget.

Classification	Quarterly budget	Annual equivalent
1	$2,682.75	$10,731.00
2	$4,008.61	$16,034.45
3	$5,491.43	$21,965.70
4	$7,424.10	$29,696.40
5	$9,924.35	$39,697.40
6	$12,028.58	$48,114.30
7	$14,537.04	$58,148.15
8	$19,526.59	$78,106.35

Amounts effective 1 November 2025, indexed each July. About 10% is set aside for care management, and unspent funds carry into the next quarter, capped at $1,000 or 10% of the quarterly budget, whichever is greater. Three short-term pathways sit alongside: assistive technology and home modifications at roughly $500, $2,000 and $15,000 or more; a Restorative Care Pathway of around $6,000 for up to 16 weeks; and an End-of-Life Pathway of around $25,000 for 12 weeks.

People who already had a package. Anyone receiving one on 31 October 2025, and anyone approved and still waiting on the old National Priority System, moved across automatically. No new assessment was required, funding was set at a level equivalent to the package held or approved, and unspent funds came with them.

What each system actually funds

	NDIS (applied before 65)	Support at Home (65 and over)
Who runs it	National Disability Insurance Agency	Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, via My Aged Care
What it is for	Permanent, significant disability; capacity and participation	Ageing related care needs; staying safe at home
How the amount is set	Assessed reasonable and necessary supports	One of 8 classifications, each a fixed quarterly budget
What you pay	Nothing toward funded supports	A means tested contribution on most services
How you start	Access request to the NDIA, then a plan	Assessment through My Aged Care, 1800 200 422
Waiting	At access and plan approval	At assessment, then again in the priority system
Flexibility	Budget categories, under the NDIS supports rules	Three categories, from a set service list

The NDIS funds only what counts as an NDIS support: disability related, in your plan, and not something another system should pay for. Day to day living costs are explicitly out.

Support at Home groups services into clinical care, independence (personal care, social support, transport, respite) and everyday living (cleaning, gardening, shopping, meals). If your needs are mostly practical and domestic, that structure works well. If they are about learning skills and joining in community life, an NDIS plan is usually the better fit, because that is what it is built around. Our guide to community participation for older adults compares how each funds getting out of the house. In broad terms an NDIS plan is often more generous for significant disability related needs, but that depends on your assessed classification.

What aged care costs you, and what the NDIS does not

NDIS funded supports cost you nothing. Support at Home asks for a contribution on most services, set as a percentage of each service you receive, with the government paying the rest. Under the participant contribution rules, nobody contributes toward clinical care, whatever their income or assets. Full pensioners contribute 5% toward independence services and 17.5% toward everyday living; self funded retirees contribute 50% and 80% for those categories. Part pensioners and Commonwealth Seniors Health Card holders sit between, on a Services Australia income and assets assessment.

Two protections matter. A lifetime cap applies, $135,318.69 when the program began and indexed on 20 March and 20 September each year, after which you contribute nothing further. And a no worse off principle covers anyone receiving or approved for a Home Care Package on or before 12 September 2024: you pay the same or less than under the old program, with a lower lifetime cap of $84,571.66. So the real comparison is not “which system gives more hours” but “which gives more hours, after what I will be asked to pay”.

How long the wait actually is

Approval is not funding. Once approved and seeking services you enter a national priority system with four categories: urgent, high, medium and standard. Funding is released by category and approval date. My Aged Care states that urgent ongoing funding is released within one month, as is assistive technology and home modifications funding, and that the two short-term care pathways are funded immediately. Where the wait would otherwise be long, interim funding at 60% of your approved budget can be released first, with the remaining 40% following later.

Two official measures say different things, and both are worth knowing.

• The Support at Home ongoing services data report for January to March 2026 records 100,191 people waiting at 31 March 2026, 74.9% of them standard priority. Estimated waits: within one month for urgent, one to two months for high, six to seven for medium, seven to eight for standard.
• The Department’s Aged Care Act 2024 Wait Times Report for 1 November 2025 to 31 March 2026 records an average of 364 days and a median of 347 days.

They are differently framed rather than contradictory: the first measures funding release from approval, the second the whole journey from first application to services starting, including assessment, the queue and the time people take to choose a provider. Read together, plan for many months, and for a full journey that has been running close to a year. The NDIS has its own waits at access and plan approval, and the 2026 legislative changes added new timing considerations, but an approved plan does not then sit in a queue waiting for funding to be released.

You cannot hold both, and the door only swings one way

You cannot receive an NDIS plan and aged care funding at the same time. The NDIA is explicit: if you are approved for aged care support at home services after you turn 65, you leave the NDIS. The same applies on the day you move permanently into residential aged care for the first time after 65.

One detail is easy to miss and hard to undo. The NDIS normally gives a minimum 90 day cooling off period when you tell the agency you are leaving. That period does not apply when you leave because you are receiving aged care supports for the first time after turning 65. There is no built-in window to change your mind. Combine that with the age gate and the position is clear: an over-65 participant who leaves cannot make a new access request afterwards, because that would require being under 65. In practice the decision is permanent. Your Local Area Coordinator, an aged care navigator or a support coordinator can help you compare what each system would actually deliver, in hours and in dollars, before anything is signed.

If you are in your early sixties, this is the decision

Someone at 63 with a permanent and significant disability has an option that will not exist at 66. Lodging an access request before your 65th birthday keeps both doors open: stay in the NDIS afterwards, or move to aged care later. Waiting closes one of them for good.

• Check the access criteria now. Evidence takes time, and the date that counts is the date the request is made.
• Do not assume aged care is simpler. It is a separate assessment, a separate queue and a contribution you may not expect.
• Ask both systems what they would fund, in hours per week, for your actual routine.

If you are already in the NDIS and turning 65

Very little changes on the day. What is worth doing is checking that the plan still describes your life. Needs shift with age, and a plan built around goals set in your fifties may need to change. Personal care, household tasks and community access are where funded hours most often drift out of step with reality.

One group is often confused with the 65 rule: the Disability Support for Older Australians program supports people who were already 65 or over when the NDIS reached their region, were not eligible for the scheme, and were receiving state or territory disability services at the time. It replaced the Commonwealth Continuity of Support Programme in 2021 and is closed to new clients, so if you are not already in it, My Aged Care is the pathway.

Where SESI fits

SESI Care Services delivers both NDIS supports and aged care at home, which is less common than you would expect: many disability providers cap the ages they work with, and many aged care providers do not take NDIS participants at all. That matters for a household supporting more than one person under different systems, and for anyone whose needs sit at the crossover. It also means we can talk this through without steering you toward the answer that suits us. In-person supports run across Victoria, including Melbourne and the south-east, covering personal care and daily living support under either funding source. Our guide to the benefits of home care services covers the wider picture.

Frequently asked questions

Talk to SESI

Tell us your situation and we will talk through what each system would actually deliver for you, without pushing you either way.

Tell us what’s going on: sesi.com.au/referral · Call: 1800 017 374

This guide is general information based on National Disability Insurance Agency, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing and My Aged Care guidance current at September 2026. Funding amounts, contribution rates and wait times change with indexation and demand. It is not advice about your individual plan or eligibility. For your NDIS plan, contact the NDIA on 1800 800 110. For aged care, contact My Aged Care on 1800 200 422.