The aged care room decision, priced both ways before you sign

The home will quote you a price. It will not price the decision.

When a room is offered, the paperwork gives you a number — the room price — and a choice about how to pay it: a refundable accommodation deposit, a daily accommodation payment, or some of each. The conversation that follows is usually about whether the family can raise the lump sum. It is almost never about which of the three is cheaper, because the person across the table has no obligation to work that out for you and, on most of the arrangements they are offering, no particular reason to.

The arithmetic underneath is not complicated, but it has four moving parts that interact: the Maximum Permissible Interest Rate of 8.43%, which converts a lump sum into a daily fee; the means test, which reads your income and your assets and moves the fee up or down; the $214,884 cap on how much of the former home is counted; and the $137,917.01 lifetime cap that eventually stops the means tested care fee altogether. Change one and all four answers move.

The gap between the best and the worst lawful way of paying for the same room, in the same home, on the same day, is routinely the largest number in the whole exercise.

It is also the number nobody hands you. That is the entire reason this calculator exists.

What it works out

• Every lawful way of paying for the room, priced side by side. Full refundable deposit, full daily payment, and the combinations in between — each one converted to what it actually costs over the stay and what comes back at the end.
• The means test on your own income and assets. The basic daily fee of $66.80 is the same for everybody. What sits on top of it — up to $22.15 a day towards daily living costs and up to $107.32 a day of care contribution — depends entirely on your figures.
• What happens to the family home. Kept, rented or sold, the home changes the assessment and the cash flow in different directions, and only $214,884 of it is ever counted.
• Where the caps bite. The $137,917.01 lifetime cap and the annual caps end the means tested care fee at a point that depends on your own numbers — often years earlier or later than people assume.
• What is left at the end. Every option is ranked on one stated measure: what the household still has when the stay is over, including the refundable balance after the 2% retention.

What the full report adds

1. Both parents, every home, as many times as you like. Room prices differ between homes and the answer can flip between two offers. Run all of them.
2. The year by year cash flow. Not a single figure, but what each option does to the household's money over the length of a real stay, with the pension interaction included.
3. Every working shown. Each line is traceable back to the rule and the figure it came from, which is what makes it usable in a conversation with a sibling, an accountant or an adviser who disagrees.
4. A PDF and a private link. Keep it, print it, or send it to the family member who was not in the room. Shared links are never indexed.

What it will not do

It will not tell you what to do. It applies the published rules to the figures you enter, shows the arithmetic and ranks the options on one stated measure — and then stops, because whether the money is available at all, what else it would have to come out of, and what the family can live with are not arithmetic. For a genuinely finely balanced position, an accredited aged care financial adviser is the right next step, and this report is what you would walk in holding.

Your actual fees are set by Services Australia after a formal income and assets assessment, and by the written agreement you sign with the aged care home. Nothing here changes either. Every figure it runs on is the published schedule current at 20 March 2026.