Is physiotherapy free under Support at Home?

Yes. Under Support at Home, physiotherapy is classified as clinical care, and clinical care carries no participant contribution. The government pays for it. That has been true since Support at Home replaced Home Care Packages on 1 November 2025.

The reason so many families ask is that the main My Aged Care page describing the program doesn’t mention physiotherapy anywhere. So if you have gone looking on behalf of an elderly parent and come away unsure, that is why.

Where the government says it

Two federal pages state it directly. The Department of Health’s participant contributions page sets out what a participant pays for each category of service:

Participants will make: no contribution for clinical support services (such as nursing and physiotherapy), moderate contributions for independence services (such as personal care and assistive technology), the highest contributions for everyday living services (such as domestic assistance and gardening).

And My Aged Care’s page on contributions says the same thing in plainer words:

You will not have to contribute for clinical care services such as nursing and physiotherapy. The government will pay for all clinical care costs.

What this means for your parent

Mum has a quarterly Support at Home budget, and every service draws it down: cleaning, transport, nursing, physiotherapy alike. Separately, she pays contributions toward some of them, worked out from her income and assets. Physiotherapy is not one of them.

So physio is the better-value thing in that budget. An hour of cleaning draws it down and costs her the highest contribution rate. An hour of physiotherapy draws it down and costs her nothing.

How often should she be seen?

Usually weekly. Strength and balance are trained rather than stored, and they fade within a few weeks once the training stops. A short burst of visits followed by nothing tends to give the gains back.

Weekly is also what makes the rest of the work possible. Each visit reviews what she managed at home, progresses or eases the exercises depending on how she went, checks where she is against the goals she set, and gives you an update on how she is going. Stretch the visits out and the program tends to sit still in between.

The right frequency still depends on her goals and on the size of her quarterly budget, which is set at her assessment. We plan it with you rather than assume it.

What to do with this

• Ask her provider or care partner to put physiotherapy in the support plan. It has to be in the plan to be funded, and it is not usually offered unprompted. What a home visit involves is worth a read first.
• You do not need a doctor’s referral to see a physiotherapist. A GP is useful to have in the loop, but nothing waits on one.
• You can choose the physiotherapist. Support at Home funds the service; it does not oblige you to accept whoever the provider sends first.
• If your mother or father has just come out of hospital, ask about the Restorative Care Pathway. Up to 16 weeks of intensive allied health, funded separately from her Support at Home budget, and no waiting list.
• Ask what happens between visits. A program nobody follows up on is a budget spent on nothing. If she has NDIS or private cover as well, fees and funding covers how those sit together.

If what you want is a physiotherapist who writes down what she’s working toward, changes the program as she changes, and empowers her to keep exercising on the days nobody is there, that is the work we do.

Still working out whether it’s worth starting? The two-minute falls-risk check asks the same eight questions we ask at a first assessment.