Every residential aged care provider in Australia has a new deadline on 31 October 2026. On that date the 2025-26 Aged Care Financial Report falls due, and for the first time it has to carry a Care Minutes Performance Statement that an external auditor has signed off. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has confirmed the audit sits under ASAE 3000 at reasonable assurance, which is the highest level of assurance an audit can give.

That single line changes the size of the job. An auditor working to reasonable assurance does not accept a summary report from a rostering system. They trace numbers back to signed timesheets, electronic verification logs and payroll. Whether a provider can survive that depends almost entirely on work that had to happen months ago, inside the organisation, by people doing the kind of evidence and controls work that sits at the centre of quality auditing.

Care minutes are the amount of direct care time a residential aged care home delivers per resident per day. Providers already report them quarterly. What is new is an annual statement, externally audited, that becomes the finalised view of care time for the whole year.

Money is the reason it exists. From 1 April 2026 part of the Base Care Tariff for non-specialised metropolitan homes was replaced by a care minutes supplement, paid according to performance against the care minutes responsibility. Once funding follows reported minutes, the Government needs assurance that the reported minutes are real. Homes that received the supplement can have it recalculated if the audited statement disagrees with what was reported through the quarterly financial reports during the year.

After this year it becomes an ongoing annual requirement.

Assurance engagements come at two levels. Limited assurance is the lighter one, where the practitioner does enough work to say nothing has come to their attention suggesting the subject matter is wrong. Reasonable assurance requires the practitioner to gather enough evidence to positively express an opinion that the statement is free from material misstatement.

Guidance for auditors from the department is direct about what that means in practice: more extensive evidence gathering and detailed testing. Auditors are pointed at both sides of the work. They test whether the provider’s internal controls over care time capture were properly designed and actually implemented, and they run substantive testing on the numbers themselves, including tracing reported care time against what staff logged, recalculating recorded hours, vouching reported minutes to signed timesheets or electronic verification logs, reconciling paid hours to reported hours in payroll, and cut-off testing at period boundaries.

Read that list as a provider rather than as an auditor and it becomes a checklist of records that either exist or do not. A payroll reconciliation only works if paid hours and reported hours were ever captured in a way that can be lined up. None of this can be assembled in October for care that was delivered in April.

Only a registered company auditor, or another auditor approved by the department, can perform the audit of the statement itself. That is a narrow, licensed role, and it is not the job most people in aged care quality will do.

Far more of the work sits on the provider side, and there is a lot of it. Someone has to know which systems feed the statement and how they connect, because the department’s guidance explicitly notes that timesheet and care minute information can be affected by payroll systems that sit inside the financial statement audit. A second person has to test the controls before the auditor does, so that a weakness turns up as an internal finding in June rather than a qualified opinion in October. A third has to reconcile the draft statement against previously lodged quarterly reports and write the explanation for every difference, because the statement includes a section for exactly that and the department has said providers should not simply copy the old figures across. Then the findings that come back have to be handled, and the fix has to hold.

That is internal audit and quality assurance work. That distinction matters if you are weighing up study or a career move, so it is worth reading our guide to the difference between internal and external auditors in healthcare before you decide which side of the line you want to be on.

Evidence for 2025-26 is already made or already missing. What is still open is how well the provider can find it, explain it and defend it.

Aged care has been moving this way for a while. The strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards already turned broad expectations into specific, checkable actions. This statement extends the same logic to funding, and it is stricter, because the test is no longer a regulator’s assessment but an audit opinion.

Interested in the work that gets an organisation ready for an audit rather than the audit itself? Explore the BSB50920 Diploma of Quality Auditing, delivered 100% online and self-paced over 12 months with daily intakes, or read the quality auditing career guide.

TalentMed Pty Ltd, RTO 22151. Nationally recognised training delivered online across Australia. This article summarises publicly available Department of Health, Disability and Ageing material about the Care Minutes Performance Statement and its audit requirements, current at 7 September 2026. It is not financial, audit or legal advice, and it is not a substitute for the department’s published guidance.