Star Ratings in Aged Care: How Providers Can Understand and Improve Their Score
Quality
March 16, 2026
Why regulated care providers must move beyond audit cycles and build real-time compliance systems.
Since their introduction, Star Ratings have become the most visible measure of aged care quality in Australia. For providers, they represent both an opportunity and a challenge — a single composite score that consumers use to compare services, and that regulators use to flag risk. Yet many providers still struggle to understand exactly what drives their rating, how the sub-categories interact, and what practical steps they can take to move the needle. This guide breaks down the Star Ratings system, explains the methodology behind each component, and offers actionable strategies for sustained improvement.
What Are Star Ratings and Why Do They Matter?
The Star Ratings system, published on the My Aged Care website, assigns residential aged care services an overall rating from one to five stars. The system was designed to give older Australians and their families a transparent, easy-to-understand way to compare providers — moving beyond the binary pass/fail of previous accreditation models.
For providers, the implications go well beyond public perception. Star Ratings increasingly influence funding decisions, regulatory scrutiny, and workforce attraction. A low rating can trigger enhanced monitoring from the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, while a high rating becomes a genuine competitive advantage in an increasingly consumer-driven market.
Critically, Star Ratings are not static. They are recalculated as new data flows in — meaning your rating is a living reflection of your current performance, not a snapshot from your last audit.
The Four Sub-Categories Explained
Your overall Star Rating is a weighted composite of four sub-categories, each measuring a different dimension of quality:
Residents' Experience — Based on interviews conducted by the Commission with residents about their lived experience of care. This carries significant weight and is the hardest to influence through systems alone.
Compliance — Reflects your performance against the Aged Care Quality Standards during assessment contacts, site audits, and any regulatory actions. Non-compliance findings directly lower this score.
Staffing — Measures whether you meet mandated care minute targets (200 minutes per resident per day, including 40 registered nurse minutes) based on quarterly reporting data.
Quality Measures — Derived from the National Aged Care Mandatory Quality Indicator Program (QI Program), covering pressure injuries, falls and major injury, physical restraint, unplanned weight loss, and medication management.
Understanding how each sub-category is scored — and how they interact — is the first step toward a meaningful improvement strategy.
Common Reasons Providers Score Poorly
In our conversations with aged care leaders across Australia, several patterns emerge among providers with lower-than-expected ratings:
Data quality issues — Inaccurate or incomplete QI data submissions that misrepresent actual performance. If your data collection processes are manual and inconsistent, your reported numbers may not reflect reality.
Staffing data gaps — Failing to accurately capture and report all care minutes, including allied health contributions. Providers often deliver the care but don't capture the evidence.
Compliance findings that linger — Unresolved non-compliance from previous assessments continues to drag down scores even after the issue has been practically addressed, if formal closure hasn't been achieved.
Resident experience disconnect — Providers focused heavily on clinical compliance but underinvesting in the day-to-day experience factors that residents actually report on: choice, dignity, responsiveness, and feeling heard.
The common thread? It's rarely about the quality of care itself — it's about the systems that capture, report, and demonstrate that quality.
Strategies to Improve Your Quality Measures Score
Quality Measures offer the most controllable path to rating improvement because they're based on data you submit quarterly. Here's how to approach each indicator strategically:
Pressure injuries: Implement consistent skin integrity assessments on admission and at regular intervals. Ensure wound care documentation is thorough and that preventive measures (repositioning schedules, pressure-relieving equipment) are documented as delivered, not just planned.
Falls and major injury: Move beyond incident counting to root cause analysis. Track environmental factors, medication reviews post-fall, and whether individualised falls prevention plans are in place and followed. The goal isn't zero falls — it's demonstrating a robust prevention and response system.
Physical restraint: Audit your use of restrictive practices against the strengthened requirements. Ensure every instance has proper authorisation, regular review, and documented attempts at least-restrictive alternatives.
Unplanned weight loss and medication management: These indicators reward proactive monitoring. Regular nutritional screening, mealtime observation, and medication reconciliation processes should be systematic — not reactive to incidents.
Across all indicators, the differentiator is consistency of process. Technology that automates data collection at the point of care eliminates the lag between delivering care and documenting it — which is where most data quality issues originate.
Improving Residents' Experience Scores
The Residents' Experience sub-category is uniquely challenging because it's based on what residents tell independent interviewers — not on what your documentation says. You can't game it, and that's precisely the point.
What you can do is build a culture where the things residents care about are genuinely prioritised:
Choice and control — Can residents choose when they eat, sleep, and how they spend their day? Small freedoms matter enormously.
Responsiveness — When a resident raises a concern, how quickly and visibly is it addressed? Closed-loop feedback systems build trust.
Dignity and respect — This is reflected in everyday interactions, not policies. Staff training that focuses on communication, empathy, and person-centred language makes a measurable difference.
Feeling safe — Residents who feel safe are more likely to report positive experiences. This ties directly to your incident management, open disclosure, and complaints handling processes.
Run your own internal experience surveys between official interviews. Not to coach residents, but to identify and address issues before they become systemic. The providers with the highest experience scores treat resident feedback as a continuous improvement input, not an annual event.
Getting Your Staffing Data Right
Meeting care minute targets is one thing — proving it is another. The staffing sub-category is calculated from data submitted through the Quarterly Financial Report (QFR), and errors in this data are surprisingly common.
Common pitfalls include:
Not capturing allied health minutes that count toward the care minute target
Rostering data that doesn't reconcile with actual hours worked
Agency staff hours being excluded or incorrectly attributed
Failing to account for leave, training time, and non-direct-care activities that should be excluded
The fix is operational: establish a clear methodology for calculating care minutes, automate the data extraction from your rostering and payroll systems where possible, and reconcile monthly rather than scrambling at quarter-end. Providers who treat care minute reporting as a continuous process rather than a periodic compliance task consistently score higher.
Using Your Star Rating as a Quality Improvement Tool
The most forward-thinking providers don't just try to improve their Star Rating — they use the rating framework as a quality improvement methodology in its own right.
Here's how:
Benchmark internally — If you operate multiple services, compare sub-category scores across sites to identify best practices and outliers.
Set sub-category targets — Rather than chasing an overall number, set specific targets for each of the four sub-categories and assign accountability.
Integrate into governance — Make Star Rating components a standing agenda item in your clinical governance and board meetings. Track trends over time, not just point-in-time scores.
Connect the dots — Link your QI data, incident reports, staffing data, and resident feedback into a single view. When you can see how these data streams interact, you can identify root causes rather than treating symptoms.
This is where compliance platforms that consolidate evidence across multiple frameworks become genuinely valuable — not as a reporting tool, but as a lens for understanding how quality, staffing, compliance, and experience connect in your organisation.
Looking Ahead: What's Next for Star Ratings
The Star Ratings system will continue to evolve as the aged care reform agenda progresses. Providers should anticipate:
Additional quality indicators being added to the QI Program, expanding the data points that feed into ratings
Greater weighting on outcome measures versus process compliance
Potential extension of Star Ratings to home care services, creating a unified quality framework across care settings
Increased integration between Star Ratings and funding models, making quality performance a direct financial lever
The direction of travel is clear: transparency, accountability, and data-driven quality measurement are here to stay. Providers who build the systems, culture, and governance structures to thrive in this environment won't just score well on Star Ratings — they'll deliver genuinely better care.
The time to act is now. Review your current rating, understand your sub-category scores, identify your biggest gaps, and build a structured improvement plan. The providers who treat Star Ratings as a catalyst for meaningful change — rather than a compliance burden — are the ones who will lead the sector forward.
Written by
James Driscoll
BDM at Willow
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