Aged Care Nursing Recruitment
Permanent aged care nursing recruitment, on a fixed fee per hire
Registered nurses, enrolled nurses and care staff for Australian aged care providers. A fixed fee per hire, not a percentage of salary — so agreeing a competitive wage no longer increases your recruitment bill.
Placing permanent nurses across Australia since 2013. Our standard fees are $12,500 for a registered nurse, $7,500 for an enrolled nurse and $3,500 for care staff; subscription clients pay about a third less. Management and senior clinical appointments are charged as a percentage of first-year salary.
Why aged care nursing vacancies are getting harder to fill
Occupancy is rising and most homes are still losing money. What sits between those two facts is labour cost.
Across the 1,173 homes in the StewartBrown survey, occupancy reached 95.2% in the nine months to 31 March 2026, up from 94.2% a year earlier. Over the same period 62% of those homes recorded an operating loss, up from 49% the year before, and the average operating result fell to a loss of $9.16 per bed per day against a surplus of $0.91.1
The squeeze is specifically labour. Direct care revenue rose 6.6% while direct care costs rose 11.7%. The direct care result — the part of the business you are actually funded for — fell from $18.46 to $5.91 per bed per day.1
Care minutes, the 24/7 registered nurse rule, and what they cost you
Since April 2026, staffing performance in metropolitan homes is paid for directly. For homes in Modified Monash 1, the Base Care Tariff was cut from 0.5 to 0.387 NWAU and the difference redirected into a care minutes supplement worth up to $33.41 per resident per day. A home delivering less than 85% of both its total and its registered nurse care minutes targets receives none of it, and the payment steps up from there.3
On a 100-bed Modified Monash 1 home at the sector-average occupancy of 95.2%, the supplement at the maximum rate is worth in the order of $1.16 million over a full year — 95 residents × $33.41 × 365 days. The maximum rate is only paid at full delivery of both targets. Your own figure depends on your casemix, occupancy and location. It is now contingent on whether you can staff to both care minutes targets.
Four in ten homes are not hitting the targets
In the July to September 2025 quarter, 67.4% of homes met their service-level total care minutes target and 80.9% met their registered nurse target, counting the permitted enrolled nurse contribution. Only 60.0% met both.2 From 1 October 2025, a home must meet both targets to be awarded 3 stars or more for Staffing in its public Star Rating.4
The obligations, in brief
A registered provider must ensure at least one registered nurse is on site, and on duty, at all times at each approved residential care home — now section 175 of the Aged Care Act 2024, in force since 1 November 2025.5 Exemptions are narrow: the home must sit in Modified Monash category 5, 6 or 7 and have no more than 30 operational beds, and every exemption granted is published.6
Care minutes are a sector-wide average of 215 minutes of direct care per resident per day including 44 minutes of registered nurse care, in place since 1 October 2024, with each home’s own target set from its resident casemix.7
Agency shifts do count towards care minutes. That is not the argument.
Hours worked by agency nurses count towards your care minutes in the same way permanent hours do, and an agency registered nurse can satisfy the 24/7 requirement. The argument for permanent recruitment is cost and continuity: agency shifts are bought at a premium, they are harder to forecast, and residents see a different face each week.
Registered Nurse (Aged Care) is assessed as being in shortage in every state and territory on the 2025 Occupation Shortage List.8 Between 2020 and 2023 the share of permanent part-time nursing positions in residential aged care fell from 68% to 56%.9 Where permanent positions go unfilled, the shortfall is bought as agency shifts at a premium, on a cost base you cannot forecast.
Aged care roles we recruit
Permanent appointments across residential aged care and home care, nationally — with the strongest candidate coverage in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide.
- Registered Nurse
- Enrolled Nurse
- Clinical Care Coordinator
- Clinical Nurse Specialist
- Clinical Nurse Consultant
- Care Manager
- Facility Manager
- Director of Nursing
- Quality & Compliance Manager
- Assistant in Nursing
- Personal Care Worker
How our aged care nursing recruitment works
IHR runs your permanent nursing recruitment as an extension of your own team. “Outsourced” usually means handing something over. This does not.
Your people team keeps the decisions, the employer brand and the relationship with every hiring manager. What we add is the part that is hard to build in-house and expensive to keep idle: reach into the nursing market, screening throughput, and someone whose whole week is the pipeline.
Your team keeps
Every hiring decision. Salary and offer authority. Your employer brand and candidate experience. The relationship with your directors of nursing and facility managers. The records of every candidate we introduce.
We supply
Market reach into onshore AHPRA-registered nurses. Sourcing, screening, verification and reference checks. Interview coordination and offer management. Pipeline reporting. Sponsorship capability when you need it.
What that changes
Your people team stops spending its week on advertising, phone screening and chasing referees, and spends it on the parts only an internal team can do — onboarding, retention, culture and workforce planning.
Most of the people teams we work with are not short of capability. They are short of hours. This gives them the hours back for a known monthly number.
See our full six-step recruitment process, the subscription tiers and the arithmetic →
We would rather send you three nurses than thirty CVs
Quality is easy to claim and hard to prove, so here is what it means in practice — and why our fee structure is built to enforce it rather than to reward the opposite.
Nobody reaches you unscreened
Every candidate we present has been interviewed by us, had their AHPRA registration verified, their right to work verified and their references checked — before you see them, not after you have shortlisted them. Each comes with a written summary a hiring manager can read in two minutes.
Short shortlists, on purpose
Three or four candidates we would stand behind, not everyone who answered the advert. If only two genuinely fit the brief, you get two and an honest explanation, rather than a longer list padded out to look like effort.
We turn work down
If a role cannot be filled well at the salary, the roster or the location on offer, we will say so and tell you what would need to change. Taking a brief we cannot deliver wastes a quarter of your hiring year and costs us the relationship.
Our fee structure removes the incentives that damage quality
A flat fee means we do not earn more when you pay more. A recruiter on a percentage of salary is paid more for talking you into a higher offer. Our registered nurse fee is the same on a $95,000 nurse as on an $80,000 one, so the salary conversation is about what the market requires rather than about our invoice.
The guarantee puts our fee at risk on a bad placement. If a nurse we place leaves in their first 90 days we replace them at no further placement fee, and if we cannot deliver that replacement inside 90 days we refund the fee. Pushing a marginal candidate through to trigger an invoice is a good way for us to lose the invoice.
And the subscription pays us to build a pipeline, not to close a vacancy this week. When the monthly fee covers the work between vacancies, there is no reason to rush a shortlist so a placement lands inside the month.
Around 80% of the nurses we place are already onshore in Australia with current AHPRA registration and full working rights. That is a quality point as much as a speed one: Australian clinical experience, verifiable Australian references, and no visa condition that can change six weeks before a start date.
Opening a new site? Volume recruitment against a fixed date
A new home, a new wing, or a reconfiguration that lifts your bed count: all of them need a full nursing roster credentialed and inducted before the first resident arrives, and all of them have to satisfy the 24/7 registered nurse rule and your care minutes target from day one.
Commissioning is a different job from filling a vacancy. You are not recruiting one nurse, you are building a roster that has to be complete, credentialed and inducted on a date already sitting in a board paper — and every week of slippage carries full overheads.
We work backwards from the opening date
A cohort plan by discipline and shift, with offer dates set against your credentialing and induction lead times rather than ours. You see the whole roster as one plan, not as a queue of separate vacancies.
Cohorts run in parallel, start dates staggered
Clinical leadership first, because they interview and induct the rest. Then the nursing cohort in overlapping waves, so onboarding is not swamped in one week and there are experienced hands on the floor before the last group arrives.
We plan for the withdrawals
On any cohort of thirty, some accept and then do not resign from their current job. We build that into the plan from the start rather than discovering it a fortnight out — which is the difference between opening on time and opening short.
A 120-bed home opening with 30 registered nurses, 10 enrolled nurses, 60 care staff and four leadership appointments: about $755,000 at our standard fees, or about $582,000 on a Group 12-month subscription — a difference of around $173,000 in the year your hiring volume peaks
Volume is also where recruitment quality usually collapses: the pressure of a date is exactly what produces a stack of unscreened CVs. Everything above about screening and short shortlists applies harder at thirty appointments than at one, and the 90-day guarantee applies to every nurse in the cohort.
If you have a commissioning date, tell us the date first and the numbers second. The date determines whether the plan is achievable, and we would rather say so early than take the brief and miss it.
What it costs
Our standard fees are $12,500 for a registered nurse, $7,500 for an enrolled nurse, $3,500 for care staff and 18.3% of first-year salary on management appointments. With a subscription they are $8,500, $5,000, $2,500 and 14% — about a third less across the board.
| No subscription | With a subscription | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly fee | None | From $1,950 |
| Registered nurse | $12,500 per appointment | $8,500 per appointment |
| Enrolled nurse | $7,500 per appointment | $5,000 per appointment |
| Management and senior clinical | 18.3% of first-year salary | 14% of first-year salary |
| Assistant in nursing, personal care worker | $3,500 per appointment | $2,500 per appointment |
| Do the fees rise with the salary? | No — flat, except management | No — flat, except management |
About a third off every fee
$4,000 on every registered nurse, $2,500 on every enrolled nurse, $1,000 on every care staff appointment, and 4.3 percentage points on management — $6,020 on a $140,000 Care Manager and $6,880 on a $160,000 Director of Nursing.10
6 hires a year, at the entry tier
Each tier publishes its own break-even, and we hold ourselves to it: 6 nursing appointments a year at Single Site, 14 at Group, 36 at National. If your volume sits under the figure for your tier, our standard fee is cheaper and we will tell you so rather than sell you a subscription.
Without a subscription you pay our standard fee per placement — no monthly commitment and nothing owed unless a nurse starts. With a subscription you pay a fixed monthly fee and the reduced fees above. The reduced fees are the same on all three tiers — which tier you need is set by how many sites you want covered, not by the fee.
Australian recruiters commonly charge 15% to 20% of first-year salary for permanent nursing placements.10 Our fees are flat rather than a percentage, and priced by discipline rather than by salary — which is why an enrolled nurse costs less to recruit than a registered nurse, and a care staff appointment less again. We will show you the comparison against your own salary bands before you commit.
The monthly fee builds and holds a pipeline of nurses for your sites — screened and in contact before a vacancy exists — instead of starting a fresh campaign every time a role opens. A campaign begins the day someone resigns. A pipeline is already there.
Subscriptions run on a 3, 6 or 12-month term. The 12-month rate is 29% lower on every tier, but three months is a real option and it is the one we suggest if you have not worked with us before.
See the term options → · See the three subscription tiers → · See the full arithmetic → · Questions your CFO will ask →
Subscriptions are available on a 3, 6 or 12-month term; the 12-month rate is the lowest. At the end of a term the subscription continues month to month. Subscription fees are payable monthly and are not refundable. Placement fees can be refunded under the 90-day guarantee. All figures in Australian dollars.
Our 90-day replacement guarantee
Two separate clocks. If a nurse we place resigns or is terminated for performance within their first 90 days, and the original invoice has been paid, we recruit a replacement at no further placement fee. From the day we receive your replacement brief we have 90 days to present at least three candidates who meet the written brief, or the original placement fee is refunded in full.
A free replacement that never arrives is not a guarantee, so the second clock runs on us. Replacement periods of three to six months are common in the market. Ours is 90 days, with a delivery deadline attached to it.10
The guarantee applies to registered nurse, enrolled nurse and management appointments. It does not apply where the position is made redundant, withdrawn or materially changed, or where candidates meeting the written brief are not interviewed within 10 working days of presentation. Refunds apply to placement fees only, never to subscription fees. Full terms are in your agreement.
Placing permanent nurses into Australian healthcare since 2013
IHR Group has been supplying permanent registered nurses to Australian healthcare employers since 2013, under long-standing agreements that run year after year rather than placement by placement.
Over the 12 months to 30 June 2026, around 80% of the nurses we placed were already onshore in Australia with AHPRA registration and full working rights — no sponsorship, no visa wait, and typical start dates in weeks rather than quarters, subject to the nurse’s notice period and your onboarding.11 We source internationally as well, but it sits behind the onshore pipeline rather than in front of it, and there is no reason to start a sponsorship process for a nurse who is already living in the next suburb.
Aged care nursing recruitment: common questions
Do agency shifts count towards care minutes?
Yes. Hours worked by agency nurses count towards care minutes in the same way as permanent hours, and an agency registered nurse can satisfy the 24/7 registered nurse requirement. The case for permanent recruitment is cost and continuity of care, not compliance.
What is the 24/7 registered nurse requirement?
Under section 175 of the Aged Care Act 2024, in force since 1 November 2025, a registered provider must ensure at least one registered nurse is on site and on duty at all times at each approved residential care home.5 Exemptions require the home to be in Modified Monash category 5, 6 or 7 and to have no more than 30 operational beds, and every exemption granted is published.6
What are the current care minutes targets?
A sector-wide average of 215 minutes of direct care per resident per day including 44 minutes of registered nurse care, in place since 1 October 2024.7 Each home’s own target is calculated from its resident casemix under section 176-20 of the Aged Care Rules 2025.
What does it cost to recruit a registered nurse into an aged care home?
Permanent nursing placements are commonly charged at 15% to 20% of first-year salary.10 Our standard fee is a flat $12,500 per nursing appointment — a flat fee rather than a percentage, so it does not rise with the wage you agree — and 18.3% of first-year salary on management appointments. Subscription clients pay $8,500, $5,000 and 14% on management appointments such as Clinical Care Coordinator, Care Manager and Director of Nursing.
Can you sponsor overseas registered nurses for aged care?
Yes, and we do. But around 80% of the nurses we placed in the 12 months to 30 June 2026 were already onshore in Australia with AHPRA registration and full working rights, so sponsorship sits behind the onshore pipeline rather than in front of it.
Do you recruit for home care as well as residential?
Yes — registered nurses, clinical care coordinators and care managers across both, including Support at Home programs.
Book a call
Send Chris Bailey a short email and he will call you back. Bring your last 12 months of placement fees and agency invoices, and we will model your actual volume against both options — and tell you plainly if you are better off staying as you are.
Email Chris Bailey to book a call
Or write to chris.bailey@ihrgroup.com.au directly, or call +61 (0)2 9231 8481.
Sources
1. StewartBrown, Aged Care Financial Performance Survey, nine months to 31 March 2026; 1,173 homes, approximately 96,000 beds. Reported via Inside Ageing, 21 July 2026. Industry survey of participating homes, not a government dataset or a whole-of-sector figure.
2. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Quarterly Financial Snapshot of the aged care sector, Quarter 1 2025–26 (1 July – 30 September 2025), released 17 February 2026. Registered nurse figures are stated by the Department inclusive of the permitted enrolled nurse contribution.
3. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Care minutes funding changes from April 2026. Applies to Modified Monash 1 homes other than those with specialised homelessness funding; $33.41 is the maximum rate.
4. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Changes to the Staffing rating for aged care Star Ratings, effective 1 October 2025.
5. Aged Care Act 2024, section 175, in force from 1 November 2025.
6. Aged Care Rules 2025, section 175-25; Aged Care Act 2024, section 175(5).
7. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Care minutes; home-level targets are calculated under section 176-20 of the Aged Care Rules 2025. The 215/44 targets took effect on 1 October 2024 — see Mandatory care minutes boost care levels.
8. Jobs and Skills Australia, Occupation Shortage List, 2025 assessment, ANZSCO 254412. Ratings are a point-in-time assessment and apply to that occupation, not to nursing generally.
9. AIHW GEN Aged Care Data, 2023 Aged Care Provider Workforce Survey — Report, section 1.3.2. Staffing figures relate to the first fortnightly pay period in March 2023.
10. Australian recruitment fee benchmarks, 2025–26: Manpower Australia and Experis Australia; salary figures from Healthcare Australia, 2026, national average base salary excluding superannuation, penalties and allowances. Management salary figures are illustrative.
11. IHR Group placement records, 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026. Available on request.
Figures on this page are indicative and were current at the date of publication. Nothing here is legal, financial, tax or procurement advice.
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