This report focuses on health and aged care expenditure estimates that:
- are directly attributable to dementia (rather than all costs for people with dementia), to avoid including expenditure related to other conditions
- have been adjusted to reflect the contribution of comorbidities to the costs for treatment and care of people with dementia
- excludes indirect expenditure, such as costs arising from the social and economic burden on carers and family, or from lost wages and productivity.
All spending is presented in ‘current prices’, meaning they reflect the dollar amount spent in that year without adjusting for inflation.
Detailed information on the methodology and data sources used to estimate expenditure directly attributable to dementia can be found in the Technical notes. Briefly:
Aged care
This section previously used health condition data from the Aged Care Funding Instrument to identify people living with dementia who used the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Flexible Aged Care Program or who lived in permanent residential aged care.
In October 2022 the Aged Care Funding Instrument was replaced with the Australian National Aged Care Classification funding model, which does not capture health condition information. In the absence of updated funding data for dementia in residential aged care, the proportion of spending allocated to dementia in residential aged care from the Aged Care Funding Instrument 2020–21 was applied to 2022–23 residential aged care data.
The AIHW is working with the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing to determine appropriate methods to capture data on people living with dementia in aged care.
- Australian Government expenditure on aged care programs and assessments is sourced from publicly available reports (Department of Health, Disability and Ageing 2023, Productivity Commission 2024). This is combined with the proportion of people with dementia accessing aged care programs and assessments (derived using the National Aged Care Data Clearinghouse) to estimate expenditure on aged care programs due to dementia.
- Data from the National Screening and Assessment Form for 2022–23 were used to allocate spending on Community-based aged care services, respite care services, flexible aged care services and aged care assessments due to dementia in 2022–23.
- Proportional spending due to dementia from the 2020–21 Aged Care Funding Instrument were used to allocate spending on the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Flexible Aged Care Program due to dementia in 2022–23.
- Proportional spending due to dementia from the 2020–21 Aged Care Funding Instrument, together with the 2018 Survey of Disability Ageing and Carers, was used to estimate spending on permanent residential aged care due to dementia in 2022–23.
Dementia Support Services
Direct spending on dementia-specific programs, packages and services are sourced from the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.
Health care
Health care expenditure attributable to dementia in 2022–23 is derived from the AIHW’s Disease Expenditure Database, that contains spending estimates for 17 Australian Burden of Disease Study (ABDS) groups and the 220 conditions within those groups. Expenditure is reported by area of expenditure, age group and sex. The data in the AIHW Disease expenditure database includes all sources of funding, including patient co-payments. Spending estimates are based on hospital admissions, emergency department records, outpatient records, MBS and PBS records.
The revised AIHW Disease Expenditure Database methodology is used for estimates in this report (AIHW 2025), hence data are not directly comparable to data in earlier reports.
