How Much Is Reform Costing Australia's Early Years Sector and Its Providers?
NMC has identified around 70 material regulatory and funding changes moving through Australia's early years sector at once, arriving on providers who are already stretched.
Labour typically accounts for well over half the cost of delivering early childhood education and care, and compliance costs increasingly blur into that same workforce and systems base rather than appearing as a separate, visible line. NMC's framework separates the underlying cost of delivering ECEC from the cost of complying with reform, and identifies four levers, reform exposure, absorption capacity, viability testing and reform advocacy, providers need to manage as reform becomes a permanent operating condition rather than an occasional interruption. Providers that can see reform cost before it arrives are better placed to negotiate sequencing and funding with government, rather than absorbing it by default.
