MEDIA RELEASE:
NDIS Freezes Support Coordination and Plan Management Pricing Again.
Pricing review offers no detail on the commissioned panel model intermediaries are being asked to plan for.
Disability Intermediaries Australia (DIA), the national peak body for NDIS plan managers, support coordinators and psychosocial recovery coaches, has responded to today’s release of the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits 2026–27, which leaves price limits for support coordination (Levels 1, 2 and 3) and the plan management monthly fee unchanged for a seventh consecutive year. These prices have not moved since 2019–20.
The decision is published on the NDIA’s pricing arrangements page and takes effect 1 July 2026. The full list of support items and price limits is set out in the NDIS support catalogue.
Acting CEO Tanya Walford said:
“For the seventh year running, support coordination and plan management have been priced as though it is still 2019. Every other NDIS-funded workforce category indexed to this year’s Fair Work Commission decision moved. These two did not. The NDIA’s own report all but says why this can’t continue — it just doesn’t act on it.”
The NDIA’s own evidence points the other way
The NDIA’s Annual Pricing Review report finds that providers consistently describe a support coordination role that has expanded well beyond what current pricing assumes — cross-system navigation, crisis response, non-billable administrative work and intensive capacity building. Rather than respond now, the NDIA has deferred any pricing action to evidence expected from a new 12-month support coordination pilot.
On plan management, the contradiction is sharper still. Over the past five years, government has committed more than $1 billion to post-payment fraud detection through the NDIA’s Fraud Fusion Taskforce and related IT systems — money spent finding fraud after it has already left the scheme. In the same period, plan managers have been performing the scheme’s primary pre-payment integrity checks with no corresponding indexation of their fee in seven years.
DIA member data for the December–March quarter shows the scale of this work. A survey of members covering an estimated 30% of plan-managed participants found they stopped $270.5 million in incorrect, duplicate and suspect invoices before a single dollar reached the NDIA — equivalent to $5.61 in stopped claims for every $1 paid in plan management fees. In the same quarter, the NDIA’s own Crack Down on Fraud program reviewed $53.5 million in high-risk claims pre-payment and rejected an estimated $35.7 million of it — meaning this surveyed segment of the plan management sector stopped roughly 7.6 times the value the NDIA’s dedicated fraud-detection program did, across a far broader range of issues including duplicates, billing errors and disputed claims.
It is reasonable to ask why a sector performing this scale of unrecognised pre-payment protection has gone seven years without indexation, while government continues to expand funding for the post-payment systems that catch only what support coordinators and plan managers don’t.
Acting CEO Tanya Walford said:
“Every dollar the Government spends chasing fraud after it’s been paid is a dollar that proves the value of the checks that stop it being paid in the first place. Our members are doing that work today, while their own fee hasn’t moved since 2019. You can’t keep funding the back end of integrity and ignore the front end where the largest amount of non-compliance occurs.”
Provider growth figures mask an unviable market, DIA says
DIA has previously challenged the NDIA’s practice of citing growth in provider numbers as evidence of a healthy support coordination market. This year’s report continues that pattern: registered providers grew 20% to 4,973 in the six months to December 2025, which the NDIA characterises as dilution in an expanding market rather than distress.
DIA’s own evidence tells a different story. Of the 11,129 active providers over that period, more than 5,600 supported five or fewer participants, with average payments of $2,000 to $10,300. While some practitioners choose to operate on a small scale, payments at this level are too low to sustain a viable full-time practice for most. DIA’s assessment, based on direct engagement with members, is that a significant share reflects experienced practitioners who left larger support coordination businesses that were no longer commercially viable, and re-registered as sole operators in response to financial pressure rather than out of confidence in the market.
Acting CEO Tanya Walford said:
“Rising provider numbers should not be read as a sign of confidence in this market. Our members tell us a different story: people leaving unviable businesses and re-registering as sole traders because they have no other choice. Support coordination, at this price, is not a viable service to deliver — the headline growth figures are hiding that, not disproving it.”
The timing compounds the problem. The NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, currently before the Parliament, proposes moving both support coordination and plan management to a commissioned provider panel model. That model depends on a pool of quality, viable providers still being available when panels are established. Good providers do not wait around for a promised future of certainty — they act on bankruptcy risk today. Every year these supports remain unviable is a year in which the providers any future panel would want to commission are deciding they cannot wait that long.
Acting CEO Tanya Walford said:
“If Government wants a commissioned panel of quality providers in a few years’ time, it needs those providers to still be in the market when the panel is formed. They won’t wait that long on the strength of a promise. By the time commissioning arrives, the best providers may already be gone — and no panel process can commission a provider that no longer exists.”
“Our members carry exactly the same award obligations as every other part of this workforce. They pay the same superannuation under the same Payday Super rules, and in most states, they pay into the same portable long service leave schemes. The only thing that hasn’t moved with those costs is the price they’re paid. You can’t hold one side of the ledger flat while the other side keeps rising and call that sustainable.”
Financial intermediaries employ staff under the same Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award (SCHADS) that covers disability support workers, and carry the same statutory on-costs: Payday Super, which from 1 July 2026 requires superannuation to be paid within days of each pay run rather than quarterly, and portable long service leave levies, now in force for the community services sector in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, the ACT and South Australia, charged at between 1.7% and 2.2% of gross wages. These are the same cost pressures driving this year’s 4.75% increase to support worker and Psychosocial Recovery Coaching rates. Intermediary providers carry them in full, with no corresponding movement in the price they are paid.
DIA is also calling on the NDIA to grant providers an amnesty from any new or increased registration costs for support coordination and plan management until the commissioned panel design is finalised. Providers in these two markets are already being asked to absorb seven years of frozen prices while meeting the same award and statutory costs as every other NDIS-funded workforce; asking them to also pay more to maintain registration in a market the Government has confirmed it intends to replace is, in DIA’s view, an unreasonable double burden during a period of acute uncertainty.
Acting CEO Tanya Walford said:
“You cannot tell a sector its market is being replaced and then charge it more to keep operating in the meantime. If Government is confident enough in the panel timeline to legislate it, it should be confident enough to freeze registration costs for the providers it is asking to hold the line until panels are in place.”
An extended inquiry has not extended any relief for intermediaries
The Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee’s inquiry into the Bill has been extended by 8 weeks, with a final report now due 14 August 2026, after the Greens secured the extension as part of a separate agreement with the Government on tax legislation. The Government has also agreed to a small number of amendments to the Bill, including limits on ministerial powers to cut participant budgets and improved transparency requirements.
None of these amendments touch plan management or support coordination commissioning. The provisions establishing the commissioned panel for plan management from 1 October 2027, and the commissioned support coordination and connection function from 1 July 2028, remain wholly unchanged. Intermediaries now have more time for scrutiny of the Bill’s other provisions, but no more clarity on the provisions that matter most to their businesses.
Members are being asked to plan for a future this year’s pricing review will not describe
This is the contradiction at the centre of the 2026–27 Annual Pricing Review. The same report that holds support coordination and plan management pricing flat for a seventh year is silent on the commissioning model that members are now expected to prepare their businesses for. The APR does not mention the commissioned panel once. It contains no transition pricing, no indication of how a panel-based payment model might work, and no acknowledgement that the market it is describing today is the same market being legislated out of existence from October 2027.
DIA is asking members and decision-makers to sit two facts side by side: the NDIA’s own report describes plan management as “the most consolidated” market in the Scheme and support coordination as a market with a “material gap” between its current scope and its pricing basis — and yet recommends no price change, no transition support, and offers no detail on how either market is meant to operate once a panel replaces it. Providers are being asked to plan, invest and make staffing decisions for a model that exists only as a date in a Bill that has not passed.
Acting CEO Tanya Walford said:
“Members are being told two things at once: your prices are not moving, and your entire market is being redesigned. They are being asked to plan for a transition the Annual Pricing Review does not even acknowledge exists. Good providers cannot afford to wait this out — they need to make decisions now, with almost nothing to go on.”
DIA will write to members setting out what is known and not known about the commissioned panel model, and what providers of every size can do now to prepare — while continuing to press the Minister, the NDIA and the Senate inquiry for the detail this year’s pricing review did not provide.
DIA calls on the Minister and the NDIA to:
- Commit to a permanent, predictable indexation mechanism for support coordination and plan management pricing, rather than relying on ad hoc reviews and pilots;
- Bring forward the timeline for the support coordination pilot’s findings, given the scope concerns it is meant to test are already well evidenced in this year’s consultation;
- Guarantee that any commissioned arrangements under the Bill will be priced using genuine, evidence-based sector cost data;
- Address interim viability now, rather than only at the point a commissioned panel is established — a panel cannot commission providers who have already left the market;
- Grant an amnesty from new and increased provider registration costs for support coordination and plan management until the commissioned panel design is finalised — providers should not be required to pay more to remain registered in a market the Government has already signalled it intends to replace;
- Release design detail on the commissioned panel model — selection criteria, payment mechanics and transition arrangements — well ahead of the 1 October 2027 plan management go-live, so providers are not asked to plan for a model that exists only as a date in the Bill.
DIA will continue to put independent, sector-wide cost and viability data before the Parliament, including the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee ahead of its extended reporting date of 14 August 2026, and the Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS.
For more information, please contact:
Tanya Walford
Acting Chief Executive Officer
Disability Intermediaries Australia
E: ceo@intermediaries.org.au