Who cares when governments spend more? Regional aged care funding and informal care provision

While most research on long-term care focuses on older adults’ demand for formal and informal services, less attention has been paid to how government spending on aged care is related to the provision and organisation of informal care. This gap is important for ageing high-income countries concerned about the future availability of unpaid care. We link nationally representative Australian longitudinal survey data (212,223 observations from 24,151 individuals over 2009–10 to 2022–23) to regional aged care expenditure data, to examine how public spending is associated with informal care provision. Individual fixed effects estimates show that greater spending on in-home aged care is not associated with a significant reduction in the overall probability of providing informal care. Instead, it is associated with a lower probability that respondents report being the main care provider, particularly for someone outside the household, and some evidence that care is more often shared. This pattern is consistent with a reorganisation of informal caring roles rather than withdrawal from informal care altogether. Reductions in main informal care and increases in shared informal care appear across different groups and settings rather than as a one-for-one shift within the same carers. Higher nursing home spending has no consistent association with overall informal care, although it is associated with less shared care within the household. Overall, greater public spending on in-home aged care may reduce the likelihood that an informal carer reports being the main care provider, without reducing informal care participation altogether.