Carer Support Subsidy

Before you apply

It is allocated in days but you can treat it as a budget for the whole year. That single fact changes what it is worth. Take the number of days times the daily rate and that is your total. You do not have to spend it a day at a time, and you can claim for several days at once — the old one-day-at-a-time rule is gone.

You can pay someone who lives in the same house. A sibling, an aunty, another adult in the whare can be compensated to provide the respite. For whānau where the care is shared across the household anyway, that is the change worth knowing about.

From 1 April 2026 Carer Support sits under the same liberalised purchasing rules as the rest of flexible funding. There is no list of approved purchases. The question to ask is simply: will this give the full-time carer a break? It has covered things like a weighted blanket for someone living with anxiety, or a home monitoring device for someone caring for a person with dementia.

The carer cannot be paid the subsidy themselves. It goes to the person providing the relief care. And that payment may count as income for them — Inland Revenue have guidance on Carer Support payments, and if you are on a benefit check with Work and Income before you start.

It may not cover the full cost of a service or item, so a top-up is sometimes needed.

Claims go to Health New Zealand — csclaims@health.govt.nz, or post to Private Bag 1942, Dunedin 9054. Their mailing address is postage paid, so no stamp is needed. Carer Support Line 0800 855 066.

Individualised Funding and the wider flexible funding rules are listed here separately and are worth reading alongside this, since the same April 2026 change applies to both.