Australian Care Sector Statistics: Aged Care and Early Learning

Demand: how many people use aged care

How many Australians use aged care services?

Aged care demand is growing, but it is not growing evenly. Home-based care has expanded several times faster than residential care, which moves the coordination problem out of a single building and into thousands of separate homes.

Early learning: the size and shape of the sector

How many childcare services operate in Australia, and how are they rated?

The early learning sector is large, highly regulated, and dominated by small operators. Most approved providers run a single service, which means most compliance work is carried by teams without a central quality department behind them.

Workforce: who actually does the recording

How large is the care and early learning workforce in Australia?

Both sectors run on large, predominantly female, heavily credentialled frontline workforces. Every regulatory obligation described further down this page ultimately lands on these people, during shifts already spent with children or residents.

The documentation load on frontline staff

How much of an educator’s time goes to paperwork instead of children?

This is the best-evidenced operational finding in the dataset, and the one with the clearest link to quality. It comes from a peer-reviewed national survey rather than from a vendor, and the researchers themselves describe it as the first Australian study to connect educator workload with education quality.

What regulators now require providers to evidence

What are the current aged care and early learning compliance requirements?

Both sectors moved in the same direction: obligations that were once described in policy are now measured, reported on a schedule, and in aged care increasingly audited and tied to funding. Each of these requirements is, in practice, a recording requirement.

What the numbers mean for care operations

Read together, the datasets describe one problem arriving from two directions. Demand is shifting to settings that are harder to observe — home care grew 307% in eight years while residential care grew 9.9% — at the same time as regulators moved from describing obligations to measuring them. The strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards are, in the Commission’s own words, more detailed and measurable than what they replaced, and care minutes now flow through an externally audited performance statement into funding.

Both changes increase the volume of evidence a provider has to produce. The workforce data shows who absorbs that increase: 258,000 people in residential aged care, around half of them personal care workers, and 240,453 paid contact staff across early learning. The peer-reviewed workload survey is the clearest evidence of what happens next — under 30% of paid hours in undistracted contact with children, nine unpaid hours a week for most respondents, and 73% reporting that the workload is undermining quality at their own service.

The structural detail that makes this harder is provider size. 78% of approved early learning providers operate a single service. They face the same National Quality Standard as the 1% of providers who run 25 or more services and hold 36% of all services, without a central quality team to absorb the work. Sector-level averages conceal this: a figure like “92% Meeting NQS or above” describes an outcome, not the effort a single-service operator spent reaching it.

This is the problem HoloCare builds for. Holo Seniors covers resident support records, family updates, medication tracking, and daily activity coordination; Holo Children covers EYLF learning documentation, family communication, meal planning, and attendance and safety checks. Neither removes a provider’s accountability for the accuracy of its own records, and nothing on this page should be read as a compliance guarantee.

Frequently asked questions

How many Australians use aged care services?

In 2024–25, about 839,000 people were assisted under the Commonwealth Home Support Program. At 30 June 2025, a further 293,000 people were using home care, 204,000 were using permanent or respite residential care, and 5,700 were using transition care or short-term restorative care. These figures are published by the AIHW through GEN Aged Care Data.

How many childcare services operate in Australia?

18,197 children’s education and care services were approved to operate under the National Quality Framework at 1 July 2026, run by 7,200 approved providers. 78% of those providers were approved to operate only one service.

What proportion of Australian childcare services meet the National Quality Standard?

92% of rated services — 15,805 of the 17,131 services holding a quality rating at 1 July 2026 — were rated Meeting the National Quality Standard or above. 19% were rated Exceeding NQS and 8% were rated Working Towards NQS.

How much time do early childhood educators spend on documentation?

A peer-reviewed national survey of 570 Australian educators, published in The Australian Educational Researcher in July 2025, found early childhood teachers spent less than 30% of their paid hours — under 2.5 hours a day — in undistracted contact with children, and that more than three-quarters worked around nine unpaid hours a week.

What are the current aged care documentation and reporting requirements?

The Aged Care Act 2024 took effect on 1 November 2025, along with seven strengthened Quality Standards. Residential providers must deliver a sector-wide average of 215 direct care minutes per resident per day including 44 registered nurse minutes, report care hours through the Quarterly Financial Report, and from the 2025–26 reporting year submit an externally audited Care Minutes Performance Statement.

Methodology, limitations, and how to cite this page

This page collects published statistics. HoloCare did not run a survey and does not claim any of these findings as its own research. Figures are transcribed from the cited release, with the source’s own wording preserved where a qualifier changes the meaning. All figures describe Australia.

Limitations to read alongside the figures

• Reporting periods differ. Early learning service counts are as at 1 July 2026, aged care usage is 2024–25, and the workforce figures are older still. They should not be combined into a single point-in-time picture.
• AIHW notes that national aged care workforce collections are largely limited to residential services, which it says limits understanding of the size and skills of the broader aged care workforce. The residential figures here inherit that limitation.
• Aged care usage data predates the Aged Care Act 2024 and the Support at Home program. AIHW will report post-commencement data when it becomes available.
• Child attendance counts are not counts of individual children — a child attending more than one service is counted more than once.
• ACECQA service-type data is self-reported by providers at approval, and providers may select multiple service types.
• This page is general information about sector conditions. It is not legal, clinical, or compliance advice, and it does not establish whether any provider meets any obligation.

Citation

This page is free to cite and quote with attribution. Individual figures have their own anchors, so a citation can link directly to the statistic it references.

HoloCare Editorial Team, “Australian Care Sector Statistics: Aged Care and Early Learning”, HoloCare, 31 August 2026, https://www.holocare.app/resources/australian-care-sector-statistics

Next scheduled review: 2026-11-30, or earlier if a cited source publishes a new release. Found an error? Report it through our corrections process.