Two rulebooks decide the money in your business, and they aren’t the same.
One tells you what you’re allowed to charge a participant. The other tells you what you’re legally required to pay the worker who delivered that support. Two completely separate rulebooks, sitting on top of each other, built by two different bodies, for two different purposes.
Most providers assume they line up. They don’t. Not because the rates are different, they’re always going to be different, one’s a wage, one’s a price limit. It’s that the rules themselves work differently. What counts as billable time isn’t what counts as paid time. What triggers extra pay doesn’t trigger extra billing. That’s where businesses are quietly getting caught out.
If you’re running a team, doing rosters, signing off on payroll, and still wondering why the margin never quite matches what you modelled, this is probably why.
Let’s look at it properly.
Two Different Documents, Two Different Jobs
NDIS pricing tells you what you’re allowed to bill. SCHADS tells you what you’re required to pay. Two different documents, written by two different bodies, updated on two different timelines, built for two different purposes. Nobody designed them to fit together. They just happen to sit either side of every shift your team works.
Take overtime. On the wage side, SCHADS has a clear rule. Work past your ordinary hours, you get paid more. A lot more. On the billing side, there’s nothing. No overtime concept exists in NDIS pricing at all. It’s just a time band and a day band. So the longer a shift runs, the more you owe, with absolutely nothing extra coming in to cover it. Two systems that were never built to talk to each other. That’s all it is.
Split Shifts: One of the Most Misunderstood Rules in the Award
Split shifts, or broken shifts as SCHADS calls them, are one of the most misunderstood differences in the whole award. A broken shift and a normal gap between clients are mutually exclusive, it’s either one or the other, never both.
If the gap between two clients is genuine paid travel time, the worker gets paid for that time plus the kilometre allowance for the drive. If the gap includes a broken shift, none of that travel pay applies to the broken shift portion, instead the worker gets a separate broken shift allowance for the break itself.
Here’s where it gets specific. A scheduled unpaid meal break of 30 to 60 minutes is its own separate, protected entitlement, and it has to be genuine rest, not time spent driving. So if a worker finishes with one client at 10am, drives 15 minutes to arrive near the next client, and then has 30 minutes of actual unpaid rest before that next client starts at 11am, the drive is paid travel time, and the 30 minutes after it is a normal meal break. Nothing unusual, no broken shift.
But stretch the rest period out, not the drive. Same 15 minute paid drive, but now the worker has an hour and 15 minutes of genuine unpaid rest after arriving, before the next client starts. That’s past the 60 minute ceiling a meal break is allowed to run to. Once the actual rest time exceeds that ceiling, it can’t be explained away as a meal break anymore, and that’s when it tips into a broken shift under SCHADS, triggering the allowance instead.
NDIS billing has no equivalent item for that allowance at all. It’s not a lower rate on the billing side, it’s a different set of rules entirely, one that simply never accounted for the concept of a broken shift. That allowance comes straight out of margin, every time, with nothing to offset it.
On Call and First Aid Allowances: Real Obligations With No Billing Counterpart
On call is actually two separate provisions under SCHADS, not one, and it’s easy to only account for the first.
The on call allowance itself is a flat daily payment for the burden of simply being available, paid whether the worker is ever actually contacted or not. It currently sits at $25.66 for a 24 hour period Monday to Friday, and $50.81 for a 24 hour period on weekends or public holidays.
What happens if that worker is actually contacted is a separate payment again. If they’re required to physically return to a worksite, that’s a minimum of 2 hours paid at the applicable overtime rate, even if the task itself only takes 30 minutes once they’re there. If the work can be handled remotely, without leaving home, the minimum payment depends on the time of day, 15 minutes minimum per occasion between 6am and 10pm, or 30 minutes minimum per occasion between 10pm and 6am. Remote work outside a scheduled on-call period, or remote participation in a meeting or training session, carries its own 1 hour minimum.
It’s also worth being clear on who this applies to. On call obligations under the award aren’t limited to frontline support workers. Any employee required to be contactable and ready to respond, coordinators and management included, is covered by the same rules if they’re taking after-hours calls as part of their role.
First aid allowance is a simpler obligation, but works on the same principle. It’s a genuine wage cost triggered the moment a worker holds a current first aid certificate and is required to use it in their role.
Neither of these has a matching line item anywhere in the NDIS Price Guide. Both are real, ongoing wage obligations under SCHADS, and neither has a billing equivalent built to recover them, no matter how the rest of your pricing is structured.
Travel: Same Rule Name, Completely Different Structure
And travel. SCHADS pays your worker for every minute of genuine travel time between clients, plus a per kilometre allowance, uncapped. That’s the wage rule.
The billing rule is completely different in structure, not just in rate. NDIS billing lets you claim travel, but only up to whatever cap you’ve written into your service agreement. If your agreements were written with a thirty minute cap and your actual rosters run people further than that, you’re paying the full uncapped wage cost under one rule and recovering only part of it under a completely separate rule.
This is worth checking properly, because it’s easy to assume your travel cap and your actual travel patterns still match each other. If your service area has grown, or if rosters have shifted since those agreements were first written, that cap might be quietly out of date, and every kilometre past it is coming straight out of margin.
Why This Keeps Happening
It happens because SCHADS and the NDIS Price Guide are two entirely separate rule sets, written for two entirely different purposes, by two entirely different bodies. One governs what you owe an employee. The other governs what you’re allowed to charge a participant. Nobody designed them to be read side by side, and most people in this sector were only ever taught one of them properly.
Most businesses inherited two rulebooks that were never meant to line up. That’s not a failure on anyone’s part, it’s simply how the sector’s compliance landscape was built. But once both sides are actually understood properly, not just the one side most people were trained on, rostering and pricing can be built around the reality of both.
What To Do This Week
Pull the roster for one ordinary week. Just one. Look for split shifts, on call hours, and any travel between clients.
For each one, don’t ask whether what was paid matches what was billed, they were never designed to match. Ask instead, was the SCHADS rule applied correctly on the wage side, and separately, was the NDIS rule applied correctly on the billing side. Two separate checks, not one comparison.
This isn’t a someday task. Getting the wage side wrong isn’t just a margin problem, it’s underpayment, and underpayment is exactly what Fair Work audits this sector for. That’s back pay, penalties, and a business’s name attached to a finding, not just a number to fix next quarter.
The businesses that get ahead of this aren’t the ones with the best rates. They’re the ones who actually understand both rulebooks, and check them separately, every single time.
Two of the shift types where this shows up hardest, sleepovers and cancellations, are getting their own detailed breakdowns as part of this series. If either one is a regular part of your rostering, keep an eye out for those next.
For the full video and more insights on this topic, visit the link below.
Why NDIS Pricing and SCHADS Don’t Match (And Why It Matters)
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