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The 24/7 registered nurse rule: what aged care homes must roster

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8 min read

Residential aged care homes must have a registered nurse on site and on duty around the clock. Here is what that obligation covers, and what a home keeps on file to show the roster held.

Yes. A residential aged care home must have a registered nurse on site and on duty around the clock, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission sets this out beside care minutes as a workforce obligation of a registered provider (Workforce obligations, as at October 2026).

In short

  • Residential aged care homes must have a registered nurse on site and on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  • The obligation sits with the registered provider, beside care minutes (Workforce obligations, as at October 2026).
  • Evidence is the roster as worked, not as planned: who was on, which hours, and what happened in any gap.
  • Exemptions are granted under the Aged Care Rules, with conditions attached, so check what applies now.
  • Nursing coverage and care minutes are separate measures, read from the same roster records.

What the 24/7 registered nurse rule asks a home to roster

The rule asks for continuous registered nurse coverage: a registered nurse present at the home and on duty for every hour of every day, including nights, weekends and public holidays.

The Commission publishes the 24/7 registered nurse requirement and care minutes together under workforce obligations for registered providers (Workforce obligations, as at October 2026). Three things follow from the words "on site and on duty".

  • On site. A registered nurse available by phone, or covering two homes from one of them, is not the same as coverage. The roster has to answer which building the nurse was in.
  • On duty. A nurse rostered but away from the floor for the whole shift is a weaker answer than a nurse rostered to the floor.
  • Every hour. Coverage is judged across the whole day, so the 10 minutes between one shift ending and the next starting is part of the picture.

A home that reads the obligation this way tends to build its registered nurse roster first and fit everything else around it.

Who counts as a registered nurse for the requirement

A registered nurse means a nurse holding current registration in the registered nurse division with the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia, as at October 2026). An enrolled nurse or a personal care worker does not fill a registered nurse hour.

Two practical points come out of that. The first is registration currency: a nurse whose registration lapses mid-month was not a registered nurse for those shifts, however good the care was. The second is agency and casual cover, which counts if the person holds current registered nurse registration, so the home needs their registration details on file in the same way it holds them for permanent staff. Our guide to aged care workforce reporting covers the vacancy and turnover side of the same workforce picture.

Does the rule apply to every home, and what an exemption changes

The 24/7 registered nurse rule applies to registered providers delivering residential care, and a home does not decide for itself whether it is covered. An exemption is granted under the Aged Care Rules, for a named service, with conditions attached.

Which requirements apply to a provider depends on its registration category under the Aged Care Act 2024 and the Aged Care Rules, and the Department publishes a provider requirements search tool for working out which ones apply to a given service (Provider quality performance, as at October 2026).

Exemptions are the part most often misremembered. The conditions have changed more than once since the requirement began, and we will not restate conditions here that we cannot confirm this month. If a home is relying on an exemption, or thinks it may qualify, the Commission's workforce obligations page and the current Aged Care Rules are the place to check, and the decision is the regulator's rather than the home's (Workforce obligations, as at October 2026). An exemption also does not switch off the record keeping. A home with an exemption still shows what nursing cover it had and how residents' clinical needs were met in the hours without a registered nurse on site.

What records show a home met the 24/7 registered nurse requirement

The records that carry the most weight are the ones showing the roster as it was actually worked: time and attendance by shift, registration details, and a note against every uncovered hour. A planned roster shows intent, while attendance and handover records show coverage.

A home that can answer these four questions for any day in the past year is in a strong position.

  1. Who was the registered nurse on duty, hour by hour? Name, registration number, shift start and finish, and the home they were at.
  2. Where are the hours nobody covered? Counted, not hidden in an average, with the start and end time of each gap.
  3. What was done about each gap? Who was called, who was on call, and what was escalated to whom.
  4. How does this match what was reported? Providers are set up to use the Government Provider Management System for reporting and data collection, so the figures lodged there should reconcile to the home's own roster records (Providing aged care services, as at October 2026).

A monthly coverage view is the simplest way to see this. In an example month using example data, a home records 744 rostered registered nurse hours against the 744 hours in the month, with 6 uncovered hours across two nights, each carrying a note naming the on call nurse who was contacted. Those figures are example data, not a benchmark and not any home's result. The shape of the record is the point: hours required, hours covered, gaps named, action recorded.

There is a second benefit. When an auditor or the Commission asks about a particular night, the home answers from one record instead of rebuilding the month from three systems. MERIT Lumina can connect to the roster, payroll and clinical exports a home already produces, so coverage and care minutes can be read from the same figures the home reports. You can see how we approach this for aged care providers.

When a registered nurse cannot be rostered overnight

An unfilled registered nurse shift is recorded, escalated and reported, not smoothed over. A gap that is written down and managed is a problem being handled, while a gap that surfaces later in a complaint or an audit is a governance failure on top of a staffing one.

What a home can do is decide in advance what happens: who the on call registered nurse is, at what point a resident's needs mean a transfer, who signs off the decision, and where the entry is written. The Commission can take regulatory action where a provider is not meeting its obligations, including action on registration (For providers, as at October 2026), so a documented, escalated gap is a far better position than an undocumented one.

How the 24/7 rule relates to care minutes

The 24/7 registered nurse requirement and care minutes targets are two separate obligations that the Commission publishes together as workforce obligations (Workforce obligations, as at October 2026). One asks whether a registered nurse was present at every hour, and the other asks how much care time residents received on average per day.

A home can meet one and miss the other. A care minutes average says nothing about the 3am hour on a Tuesday, and continuous coverage by one nurse says nothing about total care time across the resident group. Both are read from the same roster and time records, which is why one clean source of roster data answers both. For the second measure, see care minutes and staffing: how to read the numbers.

Common questions

What counts as a registered nurse for the 24/7 nursing requirement?

A nurse holding current registration as a registered nurse with the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia, as at October 2026). Enrolled nurses and personal care workers do not fill a registered nurse hour, and agency nurses do if their registration is current and on file.

Can an aged care home get an exemption from the 24/7 registered nurse rule?

Exemptions exist and are granted under the Aged Care Rules, with conditions attached, and the regulator decides. The conditions have changed since the requirement started, so a home should read the Commission's workforce obligations page for what applies now rather than rely on an earlier year's criteria (Workforce obligations, as at October 2026).

What records show a home met the 24/7 registered nurse requirement?

The roster as worked, with time and attendance for each registered nurse shift, registration details, every uncovered hour named with its start and end time, and the escalation note for each gap. These should reconcile to what the provider lodges for reporting.

What happens if a home cannot roster a registered nurse overnight?

The home records the gap, follows its escalation plan, and reports it as required. The Commission can act where obligations are not met, including action on a provider's registration (For providers, as at October 2026), and a recorded, managed gap is treated very differently from one that was never disclosed.

Does the 24/7 registered nurse rule apply to every aged care home?

The rule applies to registered providers delivering residential care, and the requirements that apply to a given service follow from its registration category under the Aged Care Act 2024 and the Aged Care Rules. The Department's provider requirements search tool is the way to confirm which requirements apply to a particular service (Provider quality performance, as at October 2026).

Sources

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