An apprentice living away from home gets $120 a week; a student on placement gets $338.60
Two Commonwealth instruments support people who must be somewhere in order to train. The Living Away From Home Allowance pays up to $120 a week in an apprentice's first year. The Commonwealth Prac Payment pays $338.60 a week, benchmarked to Austudy.
Steps this would change
Rationale
This database has now found the same gap three times, in three sectors, and this is the clearest statement of it.
The Commonwealth Prac Payment pays $338.60 a week in 2026 to eligible students on mandatory placement, benchmarked to the single Austudy rate and adjusted with it each January. It covers nursing, teaching, midwifery and social work in higher education, and the Diploma of Nursing in vocational education.
The Living Away From Home Allowance pays an apprentice up to $120 a week in their first year — the year in which 17.2 per cent of trade apprentices leave, for reasons NCVER records as dissatisfaction with pay or working conditions.
Both instruments exist to solve the same problem: a person cannot train where the training is if they cannot afford to be there. One is benchmarked to a student income support rate and indexed. The other is a fixed amount.
Set that beside the two findings already recorded here:
- A Certificate III early childhood or aged care student doing mandatory unpaid placement receives nothing from either instrument, and cannot borrow through VET Student Loans because those stop at diploma level.
- An apprentice receives $120 a week where a nursing student receives $338.60.
Three support instruments, three different answers, and the vocational pathways come last in all of them. That is not a policy anyone designed. It is what happens when each instrument is built for its own sector without anyone looking across.
The proposal. Benchmark apprentice living-away support to the same reference as the Prac Payment, and index it the same way. That is a modest and principled ask: it does not invent a new instrument, it applies an existing benchmark the Commonwealth has already accepted.
Who acts: the Commonwealth alone.
What is being traded away
An apprentice is an employee and a student on placement is not, and the difference is the whole objection. Apprentices receive a wage, superannuation, leave and workers' compensation. Students on mandatory placement receive nothing at all, which is why the Prac Payment was created. Comparing $120 with $338.60 without that context overstates the gap considerably, and the honest comparison is between total income, not between two allowances.
If apprentice income is too low, the wage is the instrument. Apprentice minimum rates are set in awards by the Fair Work Commission. Topping up low apprentice wages with a Commonwealth allowance shifts a labour cost from employers to taxpayers, which is a subsidy to the employers of apprentices rather than a fix to apprentice pay. This site recorded the same objection about the childcare Worker Retention Payment, and it applies with more force here because apprentices already have an award.
The allowance is narrowly targeted and raising it helps few people. The Living Away From Home Allowance reaches apprentices who must relocate. Most apprentices do not, so a rate rise would leave the bulk of first-year attrition untouched while costing money. If the objective is retention, a broader first-year payment would be a different and more expensive proposal.
And this database is drifting from process into rate-setting. Three of the entries this reform draws on are about payment levels rather than administrative steps. That is a legitimate thing to notice from a process map — the maps are how the gap became visible — but the level of a payment is contested political territory and this project has limited standing in it. Recorded as identifying a pattern rather than pricing its solution.
Precedent
The Commonwealth Prac Payment is itself the precedent. It was created after the Universities Accord identified placement poverty, benchmarked to the single Austudy rate, and indexed to it annually. The principle — that mandatory unpaid or low-paid training time needs income support at a defensible benchmark — is established Commonwealth policy.
Sources
- Department of Education, Commonwealth Prac Payment: $338.60 per week in 2026, benchmarked to the single Austudy rate and adjusted annually
- Living Away From Home Allowance: weekly payments of up to $120 in the first year of an apprenticeship
- NCVER: 17.2 per cent of trade apprenticeships in the 2020 commencing cohort ended without completion within the first year; common reasons included dissatisfaction with pay or working conditions
- VET Student Loans (Courses and Loan Caps) Determination 2016: approved courses at diploma level and above only