Every shift is a claim. Every claim has a rule attached.
NDIS admin is claiming. Every support delivered must be claimed against the right item at or under the price limit — $73.58 an hour for weekday daytime self-care from 1 July 2026 — inside the cancellation, travel and non-face-to-face rules, then paid in 2 to 3 business days. Automation should carry that, not the support.
The published shape of the scheme — every figure dated
- Participants
- 774,456 at 31 March 2026 (NDIS Quarterly Report Q3 2025–26)
- Registered / unregistered providers
- 16,363 / 254,018, Q4 2024–25 (ANAO)
- Weekday daytime self-care limit
- $73.58 an hour from 1 July 2026 (NDIA Pricing Schedule 2026–27)
- Payment turnaround
- 2 to 3 business days for valid claims (NDIA)
- Short-notice cancellation
- less than 2 clear business days; 7 days for disability support worker items (PAPL 2025–26)
- Reportable incident notice
- 24 hours for certain incidents (Incident Management Rules 2018)
None of these are Kindra measurements. Each links to the document it came from.
What an NDIS provider actually spends admin time on
Claiming. Rostering that produces the claim. Service agreements that authorise the claim. Incident and complaint records that the Commission can ask for. The support work is the business; the claim is the paperwork.
The scheme is very large and very fragmented. The NDIS Quarterly Report for Q3 2025–26 counted 774,456 participants with approved plans at 31 March 2026 and $38.0 billion of scheme expenses in the nine months to March 2026. The Australian National Audit Office found 16,363 active registered providers and 254,018 active unregistered providers in Q4 2024–25, with 181,938 of the unregistered ones receiving 42% of plan-managed payments, and concluded the Commission is "partly effective" and "does not have full visibility of the market it regulates" (report published 2025).
Health care and social assistance was the fastest-growing industry by business count in the year to June 2026, up 6.7% to 227,702 businesses (ABS Counts of Australian Businesses, released 18 August 2026). Most of those are small, and most do their own claiming.
The 2026–27 Pricing Schedule: the limits you claim against
From 1 July 2026 the NDIA published a Pricing Schedule rather than a full Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits document — price tables only, with the claiming rules still coming from the 2025–26 PAPL and Support Catalogue (SupportAbility’s release note, July 2026). You have to read two documents to claim one shift.
- KNDR·01Disability support worker, standard weekday daytime$73.58 an hour, up from $70.23 in 2025–26 — about 4.8% (NDIA Pricing Schedule 2026–27, with the year-on-year comparison from NDSP, 25 August 2026). Saturday $103.54, Sunday $133.50, public holiday $163.46, weekday evening $81.07 (MyCareSpace summary of the Schedule).
- KNDR·02TherapyPsychology rose to $252.99 an hour from $232.99; occupational therapy and speech pathology held at $193.99; physiotherapy held at $183.99; dietetics fell to $178.99 from $188.99 and exercise physiology to $161.99 from $166.99 (NDSP, 25 August 2026, effective 1 July 2026). Therapy provider travel is claimed at half the hourly rate through a dedicated item.
- KNDR·03Support coordination and plan managementSupport coordination held at $80.06, $100.14 and $190.54 an hour across the three levels; plan management monthly fee $104.45 (MyCareSpace, July 2026). If you are a plan manager, that is the whole price of processing every invoice for a participant for a month.
- KNDR·04The agreement ruleThe NDIA is explicit that you must discuss any price change with the participant and the participant must agree before you charge the new amount. A price rise is a service agreement variation, and it needs a record.
Cancellation, travel and non-face-to-face: the rules that decide whether a claim survives
The 2025–26 Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits, version 1.1, still governs the rules. A short-notice cancellation is less than 2 clear business days’ notice for most supports, and less than 7 days’ notice for disability support worker items (PAPL 2025–26 v1.1, page 26). Claim a cancellation outside those windows and it is not claimable.
Provider travel is claimable up to 30 minutes to and from each participant in MMM1–3 areas and up to 60 minutes in MMM4–5 for each eligible worker (same document, page 22). Non-face-to-face activity is claimable only when it is part of delivering a specific support item to that participant and the participant has agreed in advance (page 20). Both need the roster, the address, the item number and the agreement to line up before the claim is submitted.
This is why claiming is an automation problem rather than a typing problem. The rules are mechanical, dated, and change every July. A person applying them to 400 shifts a fortnight will get some wrong in both directions.
Getting paid: NDIA timeframes, plan managers and the 90-day trap
Valid claims are usually paid within 2 to 3 business days; claims needing verification take about 10 business days (NDIA, Guide to getting paid). Every payment request needs the participant name, NDIS number, dates of support, support item reference number and price. Miss one and the claim bounces.
The deadlines run the other way too. You must submit payment requests within 2 years of delivering the support, but for agency-managed funding the payment request must go in within 90 days of the end of the service booking, and anything submitted more than 6 months after delivery may be held for a review of up to 28 days (same guide). A missed 90-day window is revenue you did the work for and will not receive.
Plan-managed participants are a different flow: you invoice the plan manager, who claims from the NDIA. For everyone outside the scheme, the general small business picture applies — paid 22.9 days after invoicing on average, 6.0 days late, in the June quarter 2026 (Xero Small Business Insights, 30 July 2026). Debtor chasing for a provider is mostly plan-manager follow-up with the item number attached.
Service agreements, rosters and incidents: the records the Commission asks for
Registered providers must notify the Commissioner of certain reportable incidents within 24 hours and others within five business days, and keep the records for 7 years from the day they are made (NDIS (Incident Management and Reportable Incidents) Rules 2018, sections 12, 20 and 25). Complaints to the Commission ran to 29,054 in 2023–24, from 1,422 in its first year (ANAO).
The roster is where the award meets the price limit. Under the SCHADS Award, casual and part-time disability and home care employees have a 2-hour minimum engagement per shift or per period of a broken shift; a broken shift with one unpaid break attracts an allowance of 1.7% of the standard rate ($20.82), two breaks 2.25% ($27.56), and anything beyond a 12-hour span is double time (Fair Work Ombudsman, MA000100, allowance figures from the 1 July 2025 variation). A home care employee level 2 pay point 1 sits on $1,046.90 a week at that variation. Roster a 90-minute shift and you pay for two hours while claiming for one and a half.
The service agreement is the document that authorises all of it: the supports, the price, the cancellation policy consistent with the NDIS rules, and the participant’s agreement to any non-face-to-face claiming. A provider without a current agreement for a participant is claiming on hope.
The flows worth automating for an NDIS provider
In the order we would propose them to a provider with 20 to 200 workers.
- KNDR·011. Roster to claim, with the rules appliedEach completed shift becomes a claim line at the right item and price, checked against the cancellation window, the travel cap and the service agreement before it leaves. Bulk payment request assembled from that, not typed.
- KNDR·022. The 90-day and 6-month watchEvery agency-managed service booking with its end date, every unsubmitted shift, surfaced weeks before the window closes.
- KNDR·033. Service agreement generation and price-change consentAgreement produced from the plan and the schedule, price changes recorded with the participant’s agreement each July. Document generation.
- KNDR·044. Plan manager invoicing and follow-upInvoice to the plan manager with the item numbers, chased on terms, reconciled against the remittance.
- KNDR·055. Incident and complaint clockIncident logged, 24-hour and 5-business-day notification deadlines started, record retained for 7 years. Compliance documents.
What we have not built, and what to buy first
We have not built against any NDIS provider management product. Not ShiftCare, not Brevity, not Lumary, not any of them. We have built against Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks Online, Stripe and the automation layer — n8n and Zapier — and a provider’s claiming flow touches all of them. Our NDIS provider software comparison ranks the products on what they publish about PACE and bulk claiming, and says plainly that we have implemented none of them.
Buy a rostering and claiming product first. Build the joins second — the rules check before submission, the 90-day watch, the plan manager reconciliation into Xero, the incident clock. Those are cheaper than the platform, reversible if you change products, and they are where the money and the compliance risk sit.
Two flows we would not automate: the decision to accept a participant, and anything that touches restrictive practices. What not to automate is the longer version.
What we have not measured, and what we would measure for you
We have not published a measured hours-per-week figure for NDIS provider admin, and we are not going to borrow one from a software vendor to make this page more persuasive. Every number above is a published Australian fact with its date attached. None of it is a Kindra measurement.
What we would do on a first call is count it on one of your jobs. Follow a single job from enquiry to paid invoice, note every time a person re-types something or hunts for a service agreement, and multiply by what that person costs you loaded. ABS Average Weekly Earnings puts full-time adult ordinary earnings at $2,083.70 a week in May 2026 — about $55 an hour before the 12% super guarantee the ATO has applied since 1 July 2025 — so the loaded figure is not small. That is a real number about your business, and it takes an afternoon.
If the number comes back under our minimum engagement, that is a real answer too, and you should keep the spreadsheet. The leak calculator runs the same arithmetic in two minutes and returns a range rather than a confident single figure.
The questions people actually ask.
01You have not built for NDIS. Why would we talk to you?
Because we say so on the page, and because the part we would build — rules checked before a claim leaves, reconciliation into Xero, deadline watching — is the part we have built for other industries many times. If you want someone who has implemented ShiftCare, we are not that, and we will tell you on the call.
02The Pricing Schedule changes every July. Will the build break?
Only if the price tables are hard-coded, which is the mistake to avoid. The limits live in a table you update once a year; the rules — cancellation windows, travel caps, agreement checks — change less often and are versioned. A July update should take an hour, not a project.
03Where is your NDIS case study?
Not published. We have no measured before-and-after figures for an NDIS provider and will not invent them. When one exists it will be published with the sample size attached.
Stop bending.
Start shipping.
Bring the one flow that keeps costing you a Tuesday afternoon. We map it live and tell you what we'd build, what we wouldn't, and what it costs.