Additional Child Care Subsidy for financial hardship

This gives people in temporary financial hardship extra help with the cost of approved child care.

Services Australia pays the subsidy to your child care provider to reduce the fees you pay.

Who can get it

To get this payment, you must:

get Child Care Subsidy
have experienced temporary financial hardship due to an event that happened in the last 6 months
have a substantially reduced ability to pay child care fees.

Find out more about who can get it and how much you can get on the Services Australia website.

You can apply for Temporary Financial Hardship within your Child Care Subsidy claim. The option will only appear if you’re eligible for it.

You can claim Temporary Financial Hardship online.

You'll need to link Centrelink to your myGov account, if you haven’t already.

Follow the steps to create a myGov account. After you’ve created one, you can link services to your account.

Call the families line on the Services Australia website.

Call the Centrelink multilingual phone service on 131 202 to speak with someone in your language.

Centrelink will be closed on:

Page last updated: 2 December 2024