The Need is Growing. The Price Hasn’t Moved.
A reflection from our Director Kurt on the current state of Support Coordination, the pressure facing registered providers, and why protecting participant choice depends on keeping quality local providers in the sector.
“This week I sat across from two business owners, and both conversations have stayed with me.”
The first runs an allied health company that has been going for seven years. Only 40% of their work is now in the NDIS. They have deliberately diversified into other schemes, not because they wanted to leave the disability sector, but because they could see where the wind was blowing and decided not to stake their livelihood on it.
The second has spent the best part of a decade building a large business that employs a team of over 200 staff. He also reports experiencing intense anxiety and frequent panic attacks, which he attributes to the stress of running the business with so much uncertainty about the future. His own accountant has told him he cannot understand why he keeps doing it: the work he pours in simply does not match what comes back out.
Sit with that for a moment: someone employing a team of over 200 people, being quietly advised that the rational financial decision is to stop.
These are not failing operators. They are exactly the kind of experienced, quality providers the agency says it wants. I write this as someone who runs an intermediary business myself (support coordination), so I read these conversations not as an outsider looking in, but as someone making the same calculations at my own desk.
On 22 June, the NDIA confirmed that the monthly fee for Support Coordination and Plan Management will not change for 2026–27.
That is the seventh consecutive year these limits have stayed frozen. They have not changed since 2019–20. At the same time, disability support worker rates and Psychosocial Recovery Coaching both rose 4.75%, indexed to the Fair Work Commission's wage decision. The two main supports provided by intermediaries, support coordination and plan management, are once again the only NDIS-funded categories left out of indexation altogether.
Meanwhile, the costs have not frozen. Over those same seven years we have absorbed portable long service leave, minimum wage increases, higher superannuation, rising workers' compensation premiums, and ever-growing audit and compliance obligations. We have been asked to carry all of it, on 2019 prices, while being given no guarantee that the service will even exist in its current form a year from now.
This year's price guide hands an independent support worker a 4.75% pay rise. The same guide hands a registered support coordination provider (one who has been operating for a decade, who carries the audit obligations, the compliance overhead and the registration costs that the support worker does not) a seventh year frozen, which after inflation is not a flat line at all but a pay cut. The powers that be have managed to engineer an outcome where being registered, experienced and accountable leaves you worse off than if you were none of those things. It is hard to make that make sense.
It gets harder still when you look at what registration is meant to count for.
The NDIA has talked for some time about differentiated pricing, recognising the compliance, supervision and quality investment that registered providers carry, but for 2026–27 none of it has actually been put in place. It remains a consultation question, not a rule. So an independent, unregistered worker with no external accountability, no supervision structure and none of the compliance costs is still able to charge the very same rate as a registered provider who carries all of it. The same is true in support coordination. When the price is identical whether or not you invest in quality and accountability, the system is quietly incentivising exactly the wrong behaviour, rewarding those who carry the least obligation and leaving those who carry the most to wonder why they bother.
Nowhere is the gap between price and reality wider than in Support Coordination. The NDIA's own 2025–26 Annual Pricing Review, the report that informed this very decision, concedes it: providers consistently describe a role that has expanded well beyond what current pricing assumes. Cross-system navigation, regular reporting, crisis response, the mountain of non-billable administrative work, intensive capacity building.
All of it was raised in consultation, and all of it is now expected of a good support coordinator. The job today is not the one that was priced in 2019. It has quietly absorbed the cracks between every other system a participant touches (health, housing, justice, child protection, mental health), and it holds people steady when those systems fail them. None of that expansion has been matched by a single dollar of movement in the price.
This is the point too easily lost in the debate about provider viability: the work itself is not going anywhere.
The need for complex case management does not disappear because the price is frozen. If anything, the need for it is growing. As the scheme becomes more complex, with tighter eligibility, more contested decisions, more reassessments, more participants navigating systems that do not talk to each other, the demand for someone to hold all of it together only intensifies. The participants with the most complex lives need skilled coordination more than ever, not less. You cannot freeze the price of a service while steadily increasing what it has to do and expect the people delivering it to keep absorbing the difference indefinitely. The work will still need doing long after the experienced people willing to do it have gone.
Rather than act on what it has acknowledged, the NDIA has essentially bought itself more time. Any pricing response now waits on evidence from a new Support Coordination pilot of three registered providers, running for twelve months from August 2025, which the agency describes as "a deliberate sequencing decision rather than an absence of policy position." In the meantime, the coordinators doing this expanded work today are asked to keep doing it at a price that everyone now agrees does not reflect it.
The deeper problem is trust.
The rules change with the wind. The government says one thing and does another, and after a while you stop reading it as incompetence and start reading it as something more deliberate. The changes to the scheme were sold to the public on a narrative of widespread fraud, a narrative the NDIS minister has relied upon to push these changes through and justify cutting the NDIS budget. Yet the actions in the recent Bill do little to actually address fraud. What they have achieved is a public perception of NDIS business owners that is worse than it has ever been. We have been made the villains of a story written to justify a decision that was already made. The idea raised by the NDIS minister Mark Butler in his recent press conference, when he said that NDIS plan values were being inflated due to support coordinators submitting plan review requests, conveniently ignores the fact that these requests had to be approved by the NDIS planners... If the requests weren't justified, why were they approved?
The new Bill proposes moving both Support Coordination and Plan Management to a commissioned provider panel. The entire logic of commissioning rests on there still being a pool of viable, quality providers to choose from when the panels are built. But good providers do not wait around on blind faith for a better future. They make decisions based on what they are paid today. By the time the panels are ready, the people they would most want to select may already be gone, and the participants whose needs are only becoming more complex will be the ones left without them.
There is a participant cost to all of this that rarely makes it into a pricing decision.
Choice and control is not a slogan; it is the principle the scheme was built on, and it depends on there being something real to choose from. A diverse marketplace of locally based, high-quality providers is what gives a participant genuine choice: someone who knows their town, their services and their circumstances, rather than whoever happens to be left. Every year of frozen pricing thins that marketplace, and a commissioned panel thins it further. When the local, experienced providers are gone, participants are not exercising choice and control. They are taking what they are given. Protecting the viability of these supports was never about protecting businesses for their own sake. It is about protecting a participant's right to a real choice between quality providers who are actually there, in their own community.
The review report acknowledges that the Support Coordination role has expanded well beyond what the price reflects, and that the flat Plan Management fee creates a structural imbalance. Both problems are acknowledged. Neither is being fixed. Each is pushed to a pilot or a future review, in the same pattern we have watched repeat for seven years: raised, accepted, deferred.
The remedy is not complicated, and it is not radical.
Apply indexation to support coordination and plan management this year, the same wage-linked increase every other support category has already received, rather than deferring it behind another pilot or another review. Price the role as it actually exists now, not as it was imagined in 2019. High-quality support coordination and plan management cannot be delivered indefinitely at 2019 prices; the evidence increasingly says so, and the people leaving the sector are saying so with their feet. The need is not going away. It is growing. The only real question is whether this gets fixed while there are still experienced providers left to deliver it, or after they have gone and someone has to rebuild what was lost.
Newcastle Social Workers is committed to delivering independent, registered Support Coordination that puts participants, families and genuine choice at the centre. We believe a strong NDIS depends on quality local providers being able to continue doing this work well.
