There’s a date circled on every aged care executive’s calendar right now: 31 October 2026. That’s the day existing Extra Service Fee and Additional Service Fee arrangements stop, and every resident still on one needs to have moved to a compliant Higher Everyday Living Fee agreement or have ceased those services.
And yet, when Mirus Australia polled 240 professionals across 137 aged care organisations earlier this year, 49% said they still hadn’t implemented a HELF model. Only 8% were confident their current pricing fully recovered the cost of care, and 42% named operational complexity as their single biggest concern.
If you’re in that half, this post is for you. Not to pile on. The reform is genuinely complex, and most providers are dealing with it on top of everything else the new Aged Care Act has thrown at the sector. But the gap between “we have a working group” and “we’re ready” is wider than most boards realise, and the time left to close it is now measured in months, not years.
Why HELF is harder than it looks
It looks like a fee change. Most of the actual work, though, sits in operations rather than pricing.
Under the old model, premium services were largely packaged. A resident signed up to a tier, the tier had a price, and that was broadly that. HELF flips this. Under the government’s rules, services must be optional, individually agreed, clearly itemised and easy to vary or cancel. Residents with capacity make their own decisions, in a face-to-face conversation, after they’ve entered care. Never before, and never as a condition of entry.
That sounds manageable until you do the multiplication. Every resident currently on a legacy arrangement needs a conversation, a decision, a new agreement, and a documented closure of the old one. Then every agreement needs ongoing lifecycle management: 28-day cooling-off periods, 28-day notice periods, variations, cancellations and an annual review that lands on every resident’s anniversary, every year, forever.
So it isn’t really one project. It’s thousands of small ones, and every one of them has to be done consistently, documented properly and finished before 31 October.
The three risks providers are underestimating
Revenue leakage. If a legacy arrangement lapses before a new HELF agreement is signed, you lose the ability to charge for those services in the gap. Multiply a few weeks of slippage across hundreds of residents and the number gets serious quickly. And because residents can now select individual services rather than accepting a package, conversion below 100% is the realistic planning assumption, not the pessimistic one.
Compliance exposure. The ACQSC won’t take your word that agreements exist. It expects to see the evidence: itemised agreements, signatures captured at the right time, services charged only when actually delivered, and an audit trail for every variation and opt-out. A filing cabinet of Word documents and a shared drive won’t survive that scrutiny gracefully.
The spreadsheet ceiling. Most providers we talk to are tracking the transition in Excel. That works for fifty residents at one home. It does not work for thousands of residents across dozens of homes, each with their own conversation status, agreement status, cooling-off clock and review date. By around the third tab and the fourth facility, you’re not really tracking the transition anymore. You’re hoping nothing slips through.
There’s a tax question worth raising with your finance team too. The treatment of services under HELF agreements may differ from the old extra service regime, so it’s worth confirming your HELF pricing has been modelled on the right basis rather than carried over from the previous arrangements.
The part most providers miss: you might already own the answer
Plenty of vendors are right now selling aged care providers brand new systems to manage HELF. Sometimes that’s the right call. Often it isn’t, because the capability already exists inside a platform many providers have been paying for all along.
If your organisation runs Salesforce, the building blocks for HELF readiness are largely already in your hands. Tracking every resident’s transition status in one place. Managing agreement lifecycles with the dates and deadlines enforced by the system rather than by someone’s memory. Giving families a clear, plain-language view of what’s been agreed and what it costs. Producing the audit-ready evidence the ACQSC expects, on demand rather than in a panicked scramble.
None of that requires new software. It requires configuring what you have around the way HELF actually works, which is a much shorter journey than a new system procurement, and a far more achievable one with under five months on the clock.
What to do with the time you have left
If your HELF plan is still forming, the sequence matters more than the speed. Get clear on which residents are in scope and what state their current arrangements are in. Decide how transitions will be tracked, by whom, and in what system. Then work backwards from 31 October and be brutally honest about whether the plan fits in the time.
If that’s an uncomfortable thing to look at, it’s still better to look at it now than in September.
We’re 8Squad, a 100% Australian Salesforce consultancy. We’ve delivered over 1,000 projects with a 9.8 client satisfaction score, and we’re currently helping aged care providers work through exactly this challenge. If you run Salesforce and you want a straight answer on what’s achievable before the deadline, book 30 minutes with us. We’ll tell you what we see, including if the answer is that you’re further along than you think.
