The Department of Education and Training (DET) has recently announced two new developments surrounding the new Child Care Package and the new Child Care Subsidy:
1/ Online calculation of fortnightly $ support for families
Families can now calculate the level of fortnightly financial support they can expect to receive using Centrelink's Payment and Service Finder.
This online tool will ask families a set of questions about their circumstances, in including their shared income and estimated hours of work/study along with the hourly rate of their particular Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) service, to provide an estimate of their fortnightly Child Care Subsidy.
Please note: In most cases, families will need to calculate their hourly rate before using this tool. To do this they need to look at one of their weekly/fortnightly billing statements from their ECEC service, find the full daily fee before CCB/CCR payment, then divide it by the number of hours of their child's daily session, which is effectively the number of hours that the service is open - in many cases this is 12 hours but families will need to check with their service.
The revised Payment and Service Finder replaces the previous "new Child Care Subsidy online estimator", which is no longer available.
Families are also reminded to complete their Child Care Subsidy assessment by providing some new information and confirming their details using their Centrelink online account through myGov. Families need to do this before 2 July 2018 to ensure the new subsidy is paid to their ECEC service on their behalf.
For more information families should visit www.education.gov.au/childcare.
2/ Default withholding rate reduced to 5% for all families
The Child Care Subsidy default withholding rate will be reduced to 5% for all families.
This follows frequent feedback from the ACA and the broader Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector about the potential impact a 10% withholding rate could have on families who receive less than the maximum benefit of their entitlement up-front, particularly those on lower incomes, as well as on child care business arrangements.
DET reports that the 5% rate is intended to strike a balance between addressing the concerns that have been raised and the risk of families incurring debts to the Federal Government.
Further information on withholding, along with other FAQs, is available here.
The media release about these two new developments from Simon Birmingham, Minister for Education and Training, is available to read pdf here .