Before School Care: Start Times, Fees and What CCS Covers

Before school care opens between 6am and 7am at almost every service, and the session ends when children are taken to class. That makes it the shortest session of care you will buy — anywhere from 55 minutes to two and a half hours — for a published fee of roughly $16 to $32.50 a morning before subsidy.

The number that decides your actual bill is not the fee. It is the fee divided by the length of the session, because Child Care Subsidy stops helping above $13.30 an hour. Do that one division before you enrol and you will know more than most families working out their childcare budget.

Key takeaways

• Opening time is 7am at most services, and as early as 6am at some — that is the NSW Department of Education's own description, and it matches every fee schedule we read.
• The same morning care costs $8.50 an hour at one school and $24.00 at another. Session length is doing most of that work, not the sticker price: the dearest hour on our list has only the third-highest fee.
• $13.30 an hour is the line. It is the 2026–27 Child Care Subsidy hourly rate cap for school-age children in outside school hours care, up from $12.81. Below it, a family on the maximum 90% subsidy pays 10% of the fee. Above it, they pay 10% of the cap plus every cent of the excess.
• Nationally, 81.6% of outside school hours care sessions were priced at or under the cap. Among the 28 morning sessions we checked at one operator, only 16 were — the morning is the session most likely to cross the line.
• Arriving late does not cost less. The fee and the subsidy both follow the hours in the session, not the hours your child is there.
• Getting a place is the other half of the problem. Services publish hard caps — one of the schools below stops taking permanent bookings at 125 children a session — and no waiting list is published anywhere, so ask the service where the queue stands and when bookings open.

What time does before school care start?

7am is the standard, 6am is the earliest. The NSW Department of Education puts it plainly on its own before-and-after-school-care page: most services operate before school from 7am and after school until 6pm, and some run from as early as 6am through to 6.30pm to suit their community.

Every schedule we read sits inside that. Start times cluster at 6.30am, 6.45am and 7am; finish times at 8.30am, 8.45am or 9am, or simply whenever the children are walked to class.

Every fee above is the permanent-booking rate where the service publishes one, read on its own page or fee schedule on 27 September 2026. Santa Clara's is the rate that applies from 1 July 2026; Fraser Coast's and Hutchins' come from schedules headed 2026.

Look at what that table does to the cheap-and-expensive instinct. Fraser Coast charges the lowest fee on the list and still lands in the three dearest hours. Hutchins charges $22 — third-highest — and is the dearest hour by a distance, because 7.30am to 8.25am is 55 minutes.

How much does before school care cost?

Expect $16 to $32.50 a session before subsidy, and $2 to $10 a morning after it. The published range narrows a lot once you look at one operator at a time. Across the 28 before-school sessions on one South Australian operator's 2026 pricing page, fees run $19.50 to $32.50, all for sessions of between 1.5 and 2.25 hours.

Three things to establish before you compare two services:

• Permanent beats casual, by $3 to $5 a session. Prospect Primary School charges $21.00 permanent and $26.00 casual for the same morning; The Heights charges $17 and $20.
• Breakfast is the usual morning inclusion, often served up to a cut-off around 8.15am. Hutchins' $22 session includes it; so does Fraser Coast's $16.
• The afternoon session is longer and usually cheaper per hour. Mawson Lakes charges $18.50 for a 1-hour-45 morning and $24.00 for a 3-hour afternoon — $10.57 an hour against $8.00. At the 28 sites we checked, the morning cost more per hour than the afternoon at 25 of them, by a median of 95 cents.

Why $13.30 an hour is the number that matters

Child Care Subsidy is not a discount on your invoice. It is a percentage of an hourly rate, and the government caps the hourly rate it will recognise. From 6 July 2026 the cap for school-age children in outside school hours care is $13.30 an hour, up from $12.81 in 2025–26. Services Australia spells out how your hourly fee is worked out: if a service charges a daily session rate, you divide it by the number of hours in the session.

The cap creates a cliff, not a slope. For a family on the maximum 90% subsidy:

• Under the cap — you pay 10% of the fee. A $23.50 morning over two hours is $11.75 an hour, and costs you $2.35.
• Over the cap — you pay 10% of the cap for every hour, plus 100% of the amount above it. A $31.50 morning over two hours is $15.75 an hour: $2.45 an hour above the cap, so $4.90 is unsubsidised and you pay $7.56.

Below the cap, a dollar added to the sticker price of a morning costs your family ten cents. Above the cap, that same dollar costs you the whole dollar.

That is why six sessions of the same length, from the same operator, in the same state, produce a 67% spread in the fee and a 339% spread in the family's bill.

Across those 28 morning sessions the hourly rate runs from $9.75 to $18.00, with a median of $12.50 — just under the cap — and 12 of the 28 sit above it. For national context, the Department of Education reports that 81.6% of all outside school hours care sessions were priced at or under the cap in the June quarter of 2026. Mornings are over-represented in the other 18.4%, and short mornings especially so.

One caution on the out-of-pocket figures services advertise. The operator behind those 28 sites publishes an indicative gap fee beside each price, marked as based on a 90% CCS entitlement, with a note to use their calculator for your exact rate At the 12 above-cap sites those figures reproduce exactly on the 2025–26 cap of $12.81, so they read 60 to 90 cents a morning high against the current cap. Any advertised gap fee is indicative — ask which year's cap it uses.

What a year of mornings actually costs

Here the number of school days does the work, and it is not the same number in every state. Counting the weekdays between the first and last student day of each official 2027 term, the school year runs from 194 days in the Northern Territory to 202 in New South Wales.

Five mornings a week through a South Australian school year of 198 days, at the maximum subsidy, is about $386 at the cheapest of those sessions and $1,695 at the dearest — roughly $1,300 a year apart for the same two hours of care. Public holidays inside term and pupil-free days come out of that count, so treat it as the ceiling. Pupil-free days are billed separately and cost far more: the same operator charges $86 to $107.50 for one.

One piece of good news on next year's number. Services receiving the Commonwealth worker retention payment — outside school hours care services are eligible for it — must not raise their fees by more than 5.8% between 8 August 2026 and 7 August 2027. If your service is in the scheme, that is a ceiling on your next increase.

Does arriving at 8am cost less than arriving at 6.30am?

No. You pay for the session, not the attendance. The Child Care Provider Handbook defines a session of care as the minimum period a provider charges a fee for, expressly not the period the child actually attends. Services Australia warns families in the same terms: the number of hours in a session may not be the number of hours your child is there.

Two useful consequences:

• If you are paying for a 6.30am session, you may as well be able to use it. A 7.45am drop-off costs exactly the same.
• A longer session at the same price is better value and safer on the cap. Two services charging $27 look identical until one turns out to run 90 minutes ($18.00 an hour, over the cap) and the other 2 hours 15 ($12.00 an hour, under it). The second is dramatically the cheaper morning.

Will there even be a place?

Availability is the constraint parents underestimate, and it is capped in writing. Every service publishes a limit somewhere, and it is worth reading before you build a work roster around a morning drop-off:

• Prospect Primary School stops taking permanent bookings for a session for the rest of the term once it reaches 125 children, and says places cannot be guaranteed because they are allocated first in, first served.
• The Heights School is licensed for a maximum of 105 places per session across all its care types.
• Santa Clara in Perth asks new families to complete a wait-list application, not an enrolment form.
• Community OOSH in Coffs Harbour warns that its hours are strict and that it cannot take children dropped off before the advertised start.

There is no published waiting-list figure to look up, for before school care or for outside school hours care generally. So get it from the service: how many children are ahead of us, and what date do next term's bookings open? Put that date in your calendar — a morning session can fill in its first week.

Two questions worth asking the school office rather than the service, because the answers differ by school: whether there is an on-site service at all, and what time the school grounds are first supervised. The gap between those two answers is what you are actually buying.

What to check before you enrol

1. Session start and finish times, in writing. This is the denominator for everything else.
2. Divide the fee by the hours. Under $13.30 an hour the subsidy does its full job. Over it, ask how far over.
3. Permanent versus casual rates, and whether a permanent booking can be paused in term time.
4. The cancellation window. Prospect requires text notice 48 hours ahead — by 7am two days before a morning session — or the full fee applies.
5. Pupil-free day and vacation-care rates, which are separate, much longer sessions at much higher prices.
6. Where the queue stands, and the date next term's bookings open.
7. That your subsidy is switched on. Eligibility, the income bands and the fortnightly hours are all in our guide to Child Care Subsidy and free kinder.

If the mornings do not work out

A paid morning place is not the only way to cover 7am to 9am. Plenty of families split the week — two mornings of care, two with a grandparent, one with a later start negotiated at work. Some schools run early sport, choir or band before class, which is supervised time in the same building; our activity directory and the Kids Activity Index show what is listed near your school, and the free council programs in your city are gathered on our free things to do pages. If the cost rather than the place is the problem, our state-by-state guide to school cost help covers the payments and waivers that reduce the rest of the school bill.

Frequently asked questions

What age is before school care for? School-age children, from the first year of school. Services Australia treats a child as below school age only if they are not attending school and are younger than six; once a child is at school the lower $13.30 cap applies.

Is before school care covered by Child Care Subsidy? Yes. Outside school hours care — before, after and vacation care — is an approved care type, subsidised at up to 90% of either the hourly fee or the $13.30 hourly cap, whichever is lower.

How many families use it? In the June quarter of 2026, 571,580 children — 41% of all children in subsidised care — attended outside school hours care, across 5,125 services. It is also the cheapest care type per hour nationally, at an average of $10.05, against $14.60 for centre-based day care.

Why is the morning session more expensive per hour than the afternoon? It is shorter for a similar price. A service opens a building, staffs it to ratio and serves breakfast whether the session is 55 minutes or three hours, and that fixed cost is spread over fewer hours.

Is breakfast included? At most services yes, usually with a cut-off around 8.15am. Confirm it — a service that does not provide it turns your 6.30am saving into a 6.15am kitchen shift.

How far ahead should I book? Before the term you need it, and on the day bookings open. Permanent places go first-come and several services close a session mid-term once it is full.

Can I use a state activity voucher for before school care? State kids' activity vouchers pay for clubs, classes and registered activity providers rather than for care — see our guide to kids' activity vouchers by state for what each one covers.

How we checked

Every session time and fee in this article was read on the service's own published page or fee schedule on 27 September 2026, and each is labelled by the year that schedule states. The 28-session set is one South Australian operator's own 2026 service details and pricing page, which publishes the session times and the full rate for every site — enough to compute an hourly rate, which is rare. It is one operator in one state, so read that distribution as a worked example, not a national average. Subsidy figures come from the Department of Education's hourly rate cap announcement of 9 June 2026, its Child Care Subsidy page, the Child Care Provider Handbook and Services Australia's care-type page, last updated 20 July 2026. Participation and service counts are from the Department's Child Care Subsidy data report for the June quarter 2026, last modified 18 September 2026. Session caps and wait-list arrangements come from each service's own page. School-day counts are weekdays between the first and last student day of each official 2027 term, taken from the eight state and territory education department calendars we hold, checked on 25 September 2026.

Sources: Department of Education — 2026–27 hourly rate caps · Services Australia — the type of child care you use · Department of Education — CCS data report, June quarter 2026 · Department of Education — worker retention payment conditions · NSW Department of Education — before and after school care for parents · Happy Haven OSHC — 2026 service details and pricing · Community OOSH — fees and hours · Santa Clara School — outside school hours care · The Hutchins School — 2026 fee schedule · Fraser Coast Anglican College — ROOS Care 2026 fees · Croydon Hills Primary School — OSHC · Mawson Lakes School — OSHC · The Heights School — OSHC · Prospect Primary School — OSHC fee structure

Related reading

• Child Care Subsidy and free kinder, explained — eligibility, the income bands and the fortnightly hours.
• School cost help, state by state — the back-to-school payments and fee waivers that sit alongside care costs.
• Free school travel by state — the other recurring weekday cost, and who does not pay it.
• After-school activities for kids who are not sporty — what else is on offer in the hours either side of school.