An ageing population, increasing demand for disability care in the community and more Australians struggling financially under the weight of sustained cost-of-living pressure are all placing greater demands on Australia’s charity sector.
The pressures on the sector don’t end there.
The nation’s 65,000 registered charities are also looking for ways to provide more value to their employees without diverting resources from their frontline services in health, education, social welfare, religion, culture, human rights, the environment and animal welfare.
Australia’s leading salary packaging and novated leasing provider, Smart, has partnered with Western Australian registered charity Brightwater Care Group for seven years.
Salary packaging, or salary sacrificing, allows Brightwater’s employees to pay for a range of everyday living expenses from pre-tax income, helping them to stretch their pay and their household budget further.
As Brightwater marks 125 years of providing services across aged care, disability support and rehabilitation in Western Australia, CEO Dr Catherine Stoddart says the care sector is becoming more complex than ever before. She says not-for-profit care providers need to change how they think about workforce design, retention and the support their workers need to continue delivering high-quality services.
This is particularly true for Brightwater’s workforce of more than 2,600 employees, who work in demanding roles supporting people with acquired brain injuries, neurological conditions, dementia and complex disabilities.
“We have to get the hygiene factors right to retain people. You’ve got to get your salary on time. If salary packaging is available, people need to be using it and benefiting from it, because people are trying to pay a mortgage and manage the rising cost of living,” she says.
“As leaders, you have to be empathetic. You need to be empathetic about clients and families and empathetic about what staff are going through, I think.”
Smart’s head of customer delivery and operations Danielle Crawford says around 40 per cent of Smart’s 500,000-plus salary packaging customers work for charitable organisations and public benevolent institutions (PBIs), and employee benefits play an important role in workforce strategy within the sector.
“We know that many people working in the not-for-profit sector are really motivated by a strong sense of purpose, but they aren’t immune from the cost-of-living pressures that are facing Australians in all walks of life,” Ms Crawford says.
“Employee benefits such as salary packaging are a practical way for businesses to help their employees stretch their salary further and boost their financial wellbeing.”
Dr Stoddart agrees, saying salary packaging is practical and can contribute to stability in the workforce.
“Our staff come to us partly because we have salary packaging. It does give a bit of certainty, because you allocate funds for your mortgage or whatever it is – the big stuff,” she says.
“Then you can use that other money for the other things to live your life.”
Dr Stoddart says education about salary packaging is particularly important for workers who may not fully understand the benefit or how it could support their financial confidence.
“I’m really interested in women and the vulnerability of women and their ability to control their own destiny,” she says.
“I think education about salary packaging is really important because people don’t realise what it means.”
The 2026 Smart Cost of Living Report, published recently by Smart, includes insights from a national survey of more than 2,000 working Australians. It found that 98 per cent of surveyed workers believed maximising their take-home pay and reducing tax were important considerations in remuneration.
More than half of respondents (59 per cent) indicated their current employer offered salary packaging, but many are missing out on opportunities to stretch their salary further. Among those whose employer offered salary packaging, almost one in four (23 per cent) hadn’t used it in the past 12 months.
Ms Crawford says for not-for-profit and charity employers, salary packaging can be an important part of their employee value proposition, helping organisations compete for talent, support retention and streamline access to additional employment benefits.
Eligible employees working for a public benevolent institution (PBI) can typically use pre-tax income to pay for everyday living expenses such as rent, mortgage payments, bills or groceries up to an annual cap of $15,900. In addition, some may be eligible to package meals and entertainment expenses from their pre-tax salary, up to around $2,600 annually. An employee working for a PBI and earning around $70,000 a year could save almost $6,000 annually by salary packaging the maximum amount.
Smart’s support for Brightwater extends beyond salary packaging to managing Brightwater’s fleet of 125 vehicles through its Smartfleet brand. Many of those fleet vehicles are offered on Smartfleet’s nine-month buyback program, designed to help charities keep vehicle costs down while enjoying the benefits of a fleet of new vehicles and certainty over the buyback value at the end of the lease.
While the services offered by Smart are important in driving additional value and workforce stability for Brightwater, Dr Stoddart says purpose also remains a defining feature in attracting people to work in the sector.
“People want to be in it,” Dr Stoddart says. “We have people moving from other sectors because they are seeking purpose.”
That sense of purpose, she believes, is becoming more visible as the social care sector expands.
“It’s a more interesting space than it’s ever been,” she says.
