From 1 October 2026, community access faces a 50% funding cut. What it means for NDIS providers and how to diversify before it hits your revenue.
From 1 October 2026, NDIS community access funding is being reduced by 50%. Capacity building is taking a 10% cut. Other support lines are also affected.
If community access is your main income stream, this is the moment to pay attention.
What the cuts actually mean in your business
These reductions don’t hit your revenue all at once. They arrive plan by plan, as each participant cycles through their scheduled review after 1 October. Some providers will feel the impact within three months. Others will absorb it gradually over two to three years.
That slow drip is what makes it easy to miss until the damage is already done.
Here is what it looks like in practice. In January, two of your participants go through plan reviews. Their community access hours are halved. You cover the gap. In February, three more. You’re still covering it. By mid-year, you’ve lost the equivalent of one full-time worker’s worth of hours, and the business still looks fine on the surface. The cashflow tells a different story.
Run a 50% reduction across your current community access participants and work out what you’re left with. For many providers, that’s 40%, 50%, sometimes 60% of their hours gone over the next 12 to 24 months.
Why community access is your most exposed service line
Community access, which you might also call social and community participation, is classified as a discretionary support. When the NDIA reviews a participant’s plan and looks at what’s reasonable and necessary, community access is more likely to be questioned or reduced than personal care or SIL.
That has nothing to do with how much it matters to participants. It’s about how the NDIA categorises and prioritises funding when plans come under pressure.
There’s also built-in operational variability in this service line. Participants cancel. Weather affects activities. Coordinators change. When funding tightens, community access hours are often the first to go, and the revenue impact lands directly on your business.
Building your entire business model on the support line that’s most exposed to both policy change and day-to-day variability is a real risk. This is the moment to take that seriously.
Where some of that funding is actually going
A portion of the community access funding isn’t simply being removed from the system. Some of it is being transferred to the states as foundational supports, a new funding stream sitting outside the NDIS and administered at a state level.
This matters for your business because foundational supports represent a real opportunity to capture funding that previously sat inside the NDIS. The question is whether you’re set up to pursue it.
How foundational supports are being designed varies across Australia. What it takes to access that funding in one state isn’t the same in another. In most cases, organisations will need to demonstrate community presence, existing participant relationships, and the capacity to deliver at scale.
If you currently deliver community access, you may already have the foundations in place. The issue is knowing what your specific state requires and whether you’re structured to pursue it. Knowing the answer now matters more than knowing it in 12 months.
Do you actually know your revenue split?
Most providers know that community access is their main income stream. They leave it there.
Pull your last three months of NDIS invoices. Break them down by support category. Work out what percentage of your revenue is coming from community access, and what percentage is coming from everything else.
If community access is sitting above 50% of your revenue, you’re exposed. Above 70%, and you need a diversification plan now, not at the end of the financial year.
Put real numbers to it. If you’re invoicing $80,000 a month and $60,000 of that is community access, a 50% reduction to that service line means $30,000 less revenue coming in. Not eventually. Within the next 12 to 24 months, as your participants cycle through their plan reviews.
What diversification actually looks like
Diversifying doesn’t mean abandoning the participants you currently support. It means building other income streams so that a reduction in one area doesn’t take the whole business with it.
In-home supports, including personal care and supported independent living, are more stable right now. The funding reductions in that area are significantly smaller, and the demand is consistent.
Aged Care and DVA are two streams that NDIS providers can access without registering as a new provider type. You can enter via subcontracting arrangements. Under Aged Care, you set your own hourly rates, which gives you more control over your margin than the NDIS price guide does.
These aren’t overnight moves, and they’re not two to three years away either. They’re decisions you can start making this month.
A practical first step is looking at your current participant base and identifying which of your existing clients may also be eligible for Aged Care or DVA support. In some cases, you’re already working with those participants and simply haven’t explored the additional funding streams available to them.
The window is now
The providers who are moving on this now are the ones who will have real options when the funding shifts fully. The ones who wait for it to feel urgent are already behind.
That’s not said to alarm you. It’s the honest shape of what’s in front of you.
The question isn’t whether these cuts will affect your business. They will. The question is what your business looks like on the other side of them, and what you’re doing between now and then.
Pull your revenue breakdown. Work out what percentage is coming from community access. If it’s above 50%, that is the number to move on. Start with daily living. Then look at aged care and DVA as the next layer. If you’re not sure what that would look like in your specific business, that is exactly what I work through with my clients.
The link is below. And if this blog gave you clarity on something you have been putting off thinking about, share it with another provider who needs to hear it. The sector works better when we help each other see what is coming before it arrives.