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About Australia · 10 June 2026
Editorial · about Australia
Understanding aged care Star Ratings
By Our Mate editorial ·
What the government's Star Ratings for residential aged care measure, what they miss, and how to use them without leaning on them too hard.
Residential aged care homes carry an official Star Rating from one to five stars. It is a genuinely useful starting point, as long as you know what sits behind the number.
What the rating is built from
The overall Star Rating combines four parts: residents' own experience (gathered by interview), staffing minutes per resident per day, quality measures such as falls and pressure injuries, and compliance with the standards. Residents' experience and staffing carry the most weight.
How to read it
Treat four and five stars as a shortlist filter, not a guarantee, and treat one and two stars as a prompt for harder questions rather than an automatic no. The staffing component matters because minutes of care per resident is one of the few hard, comparable numbers in the sector.
What the number cannot tell you
A rating cannot capture whether the home feels right for your family member, how it smells at 4pm, whether the staff know residents by name, or how a manager handles a complaint. Visit in person, ideally unannounced, and talk to families in the car park.
Our Mate shows the official Star Rating on residential aged care listings where the regulator publishes one, alongside the date we last verified the listing.
