Bolton Clarke Pay Rates 2026: Aged Care, Home Care & Nurse Pay

Bolton Clarke is one of Australia's largest not-for-profit aged care providers, employing around 13,000 people across roughly 88 residential communities plus a large home-care operation (it grew out of RSL Care and RDNS). Pay is set state by state through enterprise agreements: the Bolton Clarke (Queensland) Enterprise Agreement 2025 (approved September 2025, nominal expiry 19 September 2028), the Bolton Clarke (New South Wales) Enterprise Agreement 2025 (approved July 2025, nominal expiry 12 August 2028) and the Bolton Clarke (Victoria) Enterprise Agreement 2024 (nominal expiry 30 June 2027).

The awards underneath: the Aged Care Award 2020 (MA000018) for residential care and support staff, the Nurses Award 2020 (MA000034) for RNs and ENs, and the SCHADS Award home-care stream for home-care workers. Agreement rates sit above these floors.

Direct-care classifications carry the aged care work-value increases (completed 1 October 2025). Adult minimums under the Aged Care Award from 1 July 2026:

Source: Fair Work Commission modern awards pay database, rates operative from 1 July 2026 (hourly is the 38-hour equivalent). Casuals add 25% — a casual Level 1 floor is $40.76/hr. A Cert III personal care worker doing medication-support or wound-care assistance should be at Level 3, not Level 2.

Non-care roles in Bolton Clarke homes — catering, laundry, cleaning, maintenance, administration — sit on the award's general stream:

• Level 1: $27.77/hr
• Level 2: $28.87/hr
• Level 3: $29.98/hr
• Level 4: $30.34/hr
• Level 5: $31.36/hr
• Level 6: $33.05/hr — Level 7: $33.65/hr

The direct-care and general streams diverged with the work-value case — if you spend most of your shift on personal care but are classified on the general stream, you're on the wrong (lower) ladder.

Registered and enrolled nurses at Bolton Clarke sit under the Nurses Award's aged care classifications, which carry their own work-value increases — the aged-care nurse scales are materially higher than the award's other-than-aged-care scales, so make sure any comparison uses the right stream. Current figures by classification and pay point are on our Nurses Award pay rates page.

Home-care field staff (the RDNS heritage side) are generally under the SCHADS Award's home-care stream rather than the Aged Care Award — a different classification ladder again, with its own minimum-engagement and broken-shift rules. The state enterprise agreements linked above set the actual Bolton Clarke rates over all of these floors.

Aged care runs around the clock, and weekend, evening, night and public-holiday penalties apply on top of the base rates above — with the enterprise agreements setting their own penalty tables that must leave you better off overall than the award. Rather than guessing from a roster, price a specific shift with our penalty rates calculator and compare it against your payslip line by line.

The patterns worth checking:

• Stream misclassification — care work paid on the general stream, or Cert III qualified carers left at Level 2.
• Work-value uplift not flowing through — agreement rates must sit above the post-uplift direct-care floor, not the old one.
• Unpaid handover — clinical handover before and after shift is work time.
• Home-care travel time — time between clients is generally paid time under the SCHADS structure.

Price any gap with our back-pay calculator, raise it in writing with your manager or People team, and if unresolved, the Fair Work Ombudsman (13 13 94) recovers underpayments at no cost — up to six years back. The ANMF and HSU cover this sector.