In this guest post, Prestige Inhome Care CEO Mark O’Brien highlights the growing, often overlooked burden on care workers, who are increasingly absorbing the rising cost of fuel to keep essential in-home services running.
Every morning, thousands of Australians wake up and drive not to an office or a school, but to the homes of people who cannot manage without them. They are aged care workers, and right now, many of them are quietly subsidising Australia’s care system out of their own pockets. While the rest of the country debates fuel prices at the bowser, our carers are absorbing a crisis that nobody is talking about.
The workers who can’t work from home
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, more than a million older Australians rely on home support and home care services to maintain their independence, their dignity, and their connection to the home they’ve lived in for decades. Behind every one of those people is a carer, driving across suburbs, navigating regional communities with no public transport, fitting four or five clients into a single morning.
When the government halved the fuel excise to ease pressure on Australian households, most workers had options: take public transport, consolidate trips, or work from home for a few days a week. Carers had none of those. Driving isn’t a perk of the job. It is the job. You cannot Zoom into someone’s home to help them shower, prepare a meal, or take their medication. These workers are on the road by necessity, and when fuel costs rise, there is nowhere for that cost to go except into their own wallets.
The quiet crisis inside the numbers
Reimbursement rates across the sector have largely stayed frozen while fuel costs have surged. The gap between what carers are paid to travel and what travel actually costs them is growing, and it is largely being filled by the workers themselves.
At Prestige Inhome Care, we’ve been delivering care across Australia’s East Coast for over 20 years. We’ve seen workforce pressures before, but this one is different. When we started hearing from carers who were reconsidering their shifts, not because they didn’t want to come to work but because they couldn’t afford to, we knew we needed to take action. We increased reimbursement rates, redesigned shift geography to reduce unnecessary travel, and paired carers with clients closer to home wherever continuity of care allowed.
“These measures helped. But they are a bandage, not a fix. And not every provider has the capacity to absorb these costs the way we have.”
The real cost of a missed visit
Here’s what gets lost in the policy conversation: in-home care isn’t just a lifestyle preference. For many older Australians, it is what stands between them and a hospital bed.
AIHW data shows potentially preventable hospitalisations now cost the public system close to $10,000 each on average, adding up to $7.7 billion a year. A carer visit costs a fraction of that. When services become harder to deliver, as carers cut back their hours and providers quietly reduce their geographic reach, the consequences don’t stay inside the aged care sector. They spill into emergency departments, into hospital wards, into families already stretched thin.
Missed visits aren’t just an inconvenience. Over time, they represent a slow deterioration in the health and independence of some of Australia’s most vulnerable people.
The sector must be part of the solution, but it can’t do this alone
The in-home care sector has shown real resilience throughout recent years. Providers have adapted, innovated, and found ways to keep services running under extraordinary pressure. But the underlying funding frameworks have not kept pace with the real cost of delivering care in 2026.
Travel is not an administrative line item in this industry. It is the mechanism by which home care reaches people. When the cost of that travel rises, and the settings that fund it don’t, the model doesn’t just become inefficient. It becomes unsustainable.
We are calling on the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing to urgently review travel reimbursement settings as part of the Support at Home rollout. The framework was designed for a different cost environment. That environment no longer exists.
The people behind the policy
Think about the carer who leaves home before sunrise to make sure an 84-year-old widow has someone with her when she takes her morning medication. Think about the worker driving 40 minutes between clients because there is simply no one else available. These people are not asking for recognition. They are asking for a system that doesn’t make their job harder than it already is.
If we want Australians to have the choice to age at home, with dignity, with independence, surrounded by the people and things they love, we have to make sure the system actually supports the workforce delivering that care.
Right now, it doesn’t. The carers quietly subsidising this system will not do so forever. When they stop, the cost will not fall on a funding model. It will fall on the older Australians who relied on them, and on a hospital system that cannot absorb what comes next.
