"Can aged care funding pay for a gardener?" It's the sort of thing you'd type into Google late on a Sunday, and it's exactly what a husband-and-wife gardening business in Ballarat did. Their spring is chaos (everyone wants a tidy-up at once), but winter is thin, and quoting one-off jobs eats their evenings. Their favourite clients are the handful of older regulars they see every fortnight, year-round, rain or shine. When one of those regulars mentioned her new Support at Home budget could pay for the visits, they started to wonder if their steadiest work could also become their biggest market.

This example is illustrative, created to show how the local partner model works in practice.

If you run a cleaning or gardening business, aged care is arguably the best-fit client base you'll ever have. Far from a sideline.

Your services are on the funded list

Support at Home, the program that replaced Home Care Packages on 1 November 2025, funds services across three categories: clinical supports, independence supports and everyday living supports. That third category includes domestic assistance (cleaning, laundry), meal preparation, and home maintenance including gardening.

In other words, the work you already do is exactly what government funding exists to pay for, whenever it's in a client's care plan.

Recurring work beats one-off jobs

Every trade knows the difference between a pipeline of quotes and a book of regulars. One-off jobs mean quoting, travel between scattered addresses and revenue that resets to zero each month. Aged care clients are the opposite: a weekly or fortnightly clean, a regular garden round to keep paths safe and yards manageable. The work is ongoing by nature, because the need doesn't go away.

Funding arrives in quarterly budgets, which encourages clients to set up regular services and stick with them. And with Australia's ageing population and government policy favouring care at home, this client base is growing, not shrinking.

Self-managing clients choose their own suppliers

This is where small local operators hold the advantage. Support at Home participants who self-manage choose their own workers and suppliers. They aren't assigned whoever a big provider's roster spits out. They pick the cleaner their neighbour recommends, or the gardener who's done their street for years. Reputation, reliability and familiarity win. That's your home ground.

The one thing you can't do alone: Support at Home funding can only be claimed by a registered provider. Your business becomes bookable by working through one; that's the local partner model. Partner with Care is the registered backbone: we carry the provider obligations and handle claiming and compliance, while you keep your brand, your clients and your pricing.

How to become bookable

The path is short. You get in touch, complete a set of documents and checks, and sign the partner agreement. New partners are typically live in around two weeks once documents are complete. From there, self-managing clients can book you and their funding pays for it, with nothing for you to chase.

Before you call, it's worth pulling together the few things that keep the timeline on track:

  • Your ABN and business details.
  • Current insurance certificates for the work you do.
  • The screening checks relevant to working in older people's homes, for anyone on your crew.

The full picture is at become a partner, and if you want to understand who you'd be partnering with, start with why us.

The regulars you already love working for? Under Support at Home, there are suburbs full of them.