Higher Everyday Living: nine months in, what providers have learned

The Higher Everyday Living Fee (HELF) arrived with the new Aged Care Act on 1 November 2025. Nine months on, and with the HELF replacing Additional and Extra Services from 1st November 2026, it remains a confusing and challenging part of the reforms.

The principle is simple enough. Residents in residential aged care can choose to pay for services that go above the standard care every resident is entitled to receive. The execution has proved harder. Providers are transitioning existing residents, rebuilding offers, training frontline staff to have conversations they have never had before, and doing it all while the regulator sharpens its expectations in public.

Bree Wyatt, Head of Customer Growth at Checked In Care, has worked with providers through the whole transition. In a recent interview she described the compliance environment in blunt terms: the world has been shifting underneath us as we have been building the product. Not an ideal environment in which to be changing software.

Higher Everyday Living (HELF): choice, compliance and getting the offering right from Evaran on Vimeo

What actually changed

Under the old model, an Additional or Extra Service fee could be a compulsory condition of entry. If a prospective resident did not want to pay it, they may be denied access to that home. Choice was limited by design.

HELF turns that around. It is optional. It cannot be a condition of entry. A resident can take a package, cancel it, or purchase individual line items instead.

The mechanics are tightly specified. A separate Higher Everyday Living agreement has to be in place, entered into after the resident has moved into care, and it must set out the cost of each higher service, the standard and frequency at which it will be delivered and how it will be charged. There is a 28 day cooling off period after signing a standing agreement, during which services can be cancelled or varied. Beyond that window, a resident who decides they no longer want a service, can cancel with 28 days notice. Standing agreements have to be reviewed at least annually to confirm the resident still wants the service and can still benefit from it. Once a price is agreed it can only rise in line with indexation for that resident, although providers remain free to set their own prices without approval from government or the pricing authority.

Bundles are permitted, but every bundled service must also be available individually, and a resident must not be worse off than if they had paid only for the components they can or would like to use.

For existing residents, the clock is running. Extra and Additional Service arrangements can continue until 31 October 2026, and no new ones could be entered into after 1 November 2025. Every provider with legacy agreements is therefore working through a conversation with every affected resident and their supporters before that date.

The regulator has drawn its line

In July, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission announced investigations into several providers over HELF charging that the Commission believes may be inconsistent with the rules and with residents’ rights. The Commission has signalled it is prepared to require providers to reinstate withdrawn services and issue refunds, and it can fine providers, issue compliance notices or revoke registration. This has caused significant concern for providers, given several public statements by the Commissioner do not align with material published by the Department.

Providers, for their part, are asking for clearer guidance so they can balance the viability of offering HELF services against consumer expectations and regulatory intent. With no margin available on care, HELF is one of the few levers available to support viability, which is exactly why getting it wrong carries risk.

What a good offering looks like

The regulatory picture tells providers what to avoid. It says much less about what works.

In the video above, Bree is direct about the thing most providers want and cannot have. Everyone would love a list that says this is what will work for your residents. No such list exists. Resident cohorts differ, locations differ, markets differ, room pricing differs, and that changes the financial capacity and the preferences of the people in the building.

The approach she has seen succeed came from two providers of similar size, one for profit and one not for profit, rolling out roughly twelve months apart. Both followed the same sequence. They engaged their consumers directly and asked them what they wanted. They drew on the knowledge of their lifestyle staff, who already know what gets used and what is popular. Where possible they ran short pilots, kept what people actually used and cut what they did not.

Those providers reached up to 80% transition from the old system to the new. The lesson Bree draws is straightforward: get the offering right and people will be interested, and they are willing to pay for it.

The pattern in what engages residents is also worth noting. Where providers have the offering right, the strongest response tends to come from companionship and activity-based services. People want engagement. Get that right and uptake follows.

The conversation nobody was trained for

The operational problem sits with frontline staff.

Under the old model, additional service fees largely sat in the background. Bree points out that the average person had no idea residents were paying them. Now care staff are being asked to hold discussions about money, packages and charges that were never part of their role.

The providers handling this well are being open about it. They explain to staff what the home is required to offer under the Act, and what it is choosing to make available over and above those requirements. They focus on the choice offered under HELF, because nobody is obliged to take anything. And they give staff a route to pass those conversations to someone better qualified and more comfortable having them.

That last point has a technology dimension. One of the clearest learnings for Checked In Care has been finding ways to move the transaction away from the front line altogether, allowing the front line to focus on care.

Why the administration is the hard part

Every HELF agreement carries an evidence trail. Providers running that on spreadsheets and paper forms are finding the administration takes more effort than delivering the services.

Checked In Care came into the transition with an advantage that Bree describes as a happy accident. The platform already had a billing engine handling continuous payments, built years earlier for credit-based retirement living systems and additional services arrangements, and it had a set of concierge, events and meals functions developed for premium co-located care models in New Zealand. When HELF arrived, the two halves met. Residents with the assistance of staff, if required, and families could request meals, book a bus trip, or order a service through the app, while the billing engine raised the transactions behind it and kept the compliance record intact.

As Bree puts it, a residential aged care provider operating a HELF model has to deal with rules and regulations that a shop simply does not.

What comes next

Checked In Care is already working with providers to add functions to the platform, such as agreement generation. Beyond that, with the help of integration with other Evaran software platforms such as eCase and MOA, Checked In Care can begin to scope functions including clinical triggers for HELF reviews. Bree is careful about the limits here. The point is not to switch a service off automatically, because families and residents retain choice and may still feel they benefit. The point is a nudge that says it is time for a check, so that the record is in order whenever the Commission looks at it.

Further out sits the more interesting question, which is performance. How often is each service being used? What is the feedback? How does it map to NPS? Utilisation and satisfaction data would let providers become predictive about what to expand and what to retire, and to get targeted right down to individual sites.

Site-level variation is the part nobody has solved yet. What works in one home will not necessarily work in another, and providers currently have little way of knowing which is which. Benchmarking is the obvious answer, and it is precisely what MOA does, which makes the combination of a resident-facing platform and a benchmarking capability more than the sum of its parts. There is also an open question about whether stronger HELF offerings eventually show up in resident experience surveys and the published star ratings.

Sharing what we learn

Checked In Care runs a community of practice focused on Higher Everyday Living, open to anyone in the sector who wants to join. It has brought in specialists, circulated updates and, more than anything, given providers a place to compare notes during a period of significant change. Checked In Care also runs webinars, and not just about the software product.

The sector is working through this together. Whether or not a provider becomes a Checked In Care or Evaran customer matters far less than getting the experience right for people in care.

If you would like to join the Higher Everyday Living community of practice, get in touch.