On the 1st of November 2025, the rulebook for hiring in aged care changed. The Aged Care Act 1997 retired after almost three decades, the Aged Care Act 2024 took over, and every registered provider in the country inherited a new set of worker screening obligations overnight — with no grace period to figure it out.
Since then, the official guidance has already moved to its second version, and a promised national screening check has drifted off the government’s published timelines. For the people running workforce compliance, the screening itself was never the hard part, knowing you’ve got it right is. Get it wrong and it isn’t just a paperwork problem, it’s an unsuitable person left caring for someone’s parent, a Quality Standards breach on your record, or a Commission audit that turns up a gap nobody caught.
The new Act also covers far more of your workforce than the old one did, and the offence list now shifts depending on which programs you deliver. And underneath all of that, every police certificate in the building is still on a three-year clock, whether someone’s watching or not.
Here’s the reassuring part: what you actually need to do today is clearer than all that movement suggests. This guide lays out the current requirements in plain terms, covers what’s still coming, and shows how your business can stay compliant while the ground keeps shifting.
In this guide:
Under the Aged Care Act 2024 and the Aged Care Rules 2025, every aged care worker and responsible person of a registered provider must be screened before they start. And “every” means every single hire, no matter what their role or arrangement. This includes the obvious roles like carers and nurses, but it’s also kitchen and cleaning staff, admin teams, volunteers, board members, and anyone engaged through an agency, a subcontractor, or a digital platform. If a person helps deliver funded aged care services or helps run the organisation, they’re in scope.
There are currently two ways to satisfy the requirement. The first is a police certificate issued within the last three years that doesn’t record a precluding offence. The second is a valid NDIS Worker Screening Clearance. Either works, and which one makes sense usually comes down to the worker’s history and whether your organisation also delivers NDIS services. (South Australian providers have a third option, the state’s own Aged Care Sector Employment Check, which the Aged Care Rules recognise.)
“Precluding offences” are the shortlist of convictions that rule a person out of aged care work entirely. For most providers, that means a conviction for murder or sexual assault, or a conviction and imprisonment for another form of assault. Providers delivering Commonwealth Home Support Programme or National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Flexible Aged Care Program services work to an expanded list, which also covers offences involving the death of a person and crimes involving dishonesty.
Timing matters too. Screening has to be in place before a person starts work. A new worker whose police certificate is still being processed can begin under appropriate supervision with a statutory declaration confirming they’ve never been convicted of a precluding offence. That option only exists for new workers. An existing worker whose certificate has expired needs a fresh one, and a statutory declaration won’t cover the gap.
The legal minimum is one thing. What providers actually run to meet their obligations under the Act and the strengthened Quality Standards is usually a broader package. Here are the six that do the heavy lifting.
The national police check is the workhorse of aged care screening. It’s a nationwide search of a person’s criminal history, and the certificate it produces is what you assess against the precluding offences. The catch is that it’s a snapshot. It tells you who the person was on the day it was issued, and it stops satisfying your screening obligation the day it turns three years old. Across a workforce of hundreds, that’s a rolling renewal cycle that never finishes, and it’s where most screening gaps open up.
An NDIS Worker Screening Clearance goes further than a police check. It’s issued by a state or territory screening unit, it weighs workplace misconduct alongside criminal history, and it comes with ongoing monitoring built in. It’s valid for five years and recognised in aged care, so a worker arriving from the disability sector may already hold one. As a provider, you still need to sight evidence of the clearance, confirm it’s valid, and record the details. The clearance doesn’t do that work for you. It’s also worth knowing that a clearance can be suspended or cancelled at any time, and the worker must tell you immediately if it is, so you need a plan for that conversation before it happens.
Aged care draws on international workers more than almost any other sector, which makes work rights checks routine rather than occasional. A VEVO check confirms a candidate’s visa status and work conditions directly with the Department of Home Affairs. The penalties for employing someone without valid work rights apply whether you knew or not, and being able to show you ran the check is your defence. Visa conditions can also change mid-employment, so this is another check that ages.
Every other check on this list assumes you’re screening a real person, and that assumption is getting less and less safe these days. Synthetic candidates built on stolen or fabricated credentials are showing up across every sector, and a workforce shortage makes aged care a soft target. Biometric identity verification matches a live selfie to a government-issued ID, which catches what a photocopied licence can’t. Get identity right and then every other result on this list belongs to the right person.
The strengthened Quality Standards expect providers to engage workers with the qualifications, skills, and experience the role needs. A referee who has watched someone care for vulnerable people is the best evidence of that you’ll get, provided you ask the right questions. Generic teamwork questions won’t surface a pattern of shortcuts with medication or a history of complaints. Structured reference checks with role-specific questions make the process repeatable, and built-in fraud detection confirms referees are who they claim to be.
The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission keeps a public register of banning orders against people prohibited from working in aged care. Checking it takes minutes, and it belongs in every screening package as the cheapest peace of mind on the list. Responsible persons, meaning the CEOs, board members, and key personnel who run the organisation, carry their own suitability requirements on top of the standard screening.
The most straightforward answer: there’s no confirmed start date yet.
Here’s the state of play. The plan announced alongside the new Act is to extend the NDIS worker screening model to aged care. One clearance for risk-assessed roles, valid across both sectors, with ongoing monitoring of the worker’s record instead of a certificate that sits in a drawer. Risk-assessed roles will cover responsible persons, anyone directly delivering care, and anyone whose duties involve more than incidental contact with older people.
The original guidance said the new check wouldn’t start before mid-2026. Then the March 2026 update to the government’s guidance material removed the future-screening section altogether, and the work now sits with a national taskforce designing a single screening check for the whole care and support economy. No start date has been published.
The regulator’s advice in the meantime is refreshingly plain: don’t prepare for the new check yet. Existing police certificates and NDIS clearances stay valid, workers won’t need the new check on day one when it launches, and transitional arrangements will smooth the change when it comes.
The full process is still worth understanding. Every reform signal points the same way, which is away from point-in-time certificates and towards clearances that are monitored continuously. Providers who already treat screening as ongoing rather than just a hiring-day task won’t struggle with the transition much at all.
Because almost nothing in aged care screening stays checked.
Police certificates expire every three years, for every worker, volunteers included. Someone has to know which certificates lapse next, and “someone” is usually a spreadsheet nobody monitors daily. Once a certificate ticks past three years, that worker no longer meets the screening requirement, and there’s no statutory declaration to fall back on.
NDIS clearances can be suspended or cancelled between renewals, and while the worker is obliged to tell you, your records need to show exactly what you did about it. Visa conditions shift mid-employment in a workforce where visas are common. And the Code of Conduct for Aged Care applies for as long as a person works in the sector, with banning orders possible at any point, so the register you checked at hire doesn’t stay checked either.
Underneath all of it sits record keeping. Providers must hold screening records for every worker and responsible person, including those engaged through third parties, for seven years, even after the person leaves. When the Commission asks, saying “we ran the check” isn’t enough. You need to show when, what it found, and what you did about it.
That’s a lot of moving parts to track by hand. But it’s exactly the kind of problem well-designed software is built to catch.
Nobody joins the aged care industry because they’re passionate about compliance paperwork. They join to look after people and make a difference, and every hour spent chasing certificate renewals is an hour that doesn’t go to care. Checkmate was built to hand those hours back.
Pre-employment screening bundles the checks in this guide into role-based packages, so a personal carer triggers a different set than a board appointment. Identity verification with biometric liveness catches synthetic candidates before their credentials enter your system, police checks and VEVO checks run through one platform, and structured reference checks come with fraud detection built in. Flags surface up front, and nothing gets chased over email.
After the start date, Ongoing Compliance takes over. It schedules police certificate renewals on the three-year cycle, tracks visa status and work rights in real time, alerts the right person before anything lapses, and logs every check and renewal to an audit trail. When the Commission asks how you know your workforce is screened, the answer is a report, and it takes one click.
If you’re mapping your screening process against the new Act, we’d love to show you how other aged care providers have set theirs up.
All aged care workers and responsible persons of a registered provider need screening, but a police check is one of two ways to meet it. A police certificate issued within the last three years works, and so does a valid NDIS Worker Screening Clearance. The requirement covers everyone connected to delivering funded aged care services: direct carers, kitchen and admin staff, volunteers, board members, and workers engaged through agencies or subcontractors.
Yes. A valid NDIS Worker Screening Clearance is recognised in aged care, and a worker who holds one doesn’t need a separate police certificate. The provider still has obligations: you need to sight evidence of the clearance, verify it’s valid, and record the details. Workers must notify you immediately if their clearance is suspended or cancelled, so build that into your process.
Every three years. A police certificate older than three years no longer satisfies the screening requirement under the Aged Care Act 2024, and existing workers can’t bridge the gap with a statutory declaration. A fresh certificate is the only fix, which is why tracking expiry dates across the whole workforce matters as much as running the original check.
Yes, under conditions. A new worker whose police certificate or NDIS clearance is still pending can start with a statutory declaration confirming they’ve never been convicted of a precluding offence, with appropriate supervision in place. This only applies to new workers with a check underway. It isn’t available to existing staff whose certificate has expired.
There’s no confirmed date. Early guidance said the new check wouldn’t begin before mid-2026, but the government’s March 2026 guidance update removed the timeline, and design work now sits with a national taskforce covering the whole care and support economy. The regulator’s advice is that providers don’t need to prepare yet, and current police certificates and NDIS clearances remain valid.
A responsible person is someone involved in running a registered provider, such as a CEO, a board member, or other key personnel. Responsible persons must meet the same screening requirements as aged care workers, meaning a current police certificate or NDIS clearance, plus suitability requirements attached to their governance role. Providers must keep screening records for responsible persons the same way they do for workers.
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