Three weeks after the biggest NDIS reset in years, there is a specific moment happening in inboxes across the country. A provider looks at everything that landed on 1 July, feels the size of it, and thinks, I will get to that properly next week.
That is the moment worth talking about, because next week is exactly when small gaps turn into a real problem. SIL registration, the new SIL claim code, and the 2026 to 2027 Pricing Schedule are all live, all three weeks old. The risk this month was never the announcement itself. It is what happens after the announcement, when the rosters still need filling, the participants still need supporting, and the update gets filed under later.
Below is what has actually shifted, what each change means for how you deliver and claim, where we are watching providers slip, and the one thing to finish this week so none of it turns into something you are cleaning up in October.
SIL registration and the new claim code
There are two different providers reading this, and which one you are changes what your next month looks like.
If you already hold registration group 0115 and have been delivering SIL for years, there is nothing to apply for. The Commission has automatically added registration group 0138, Assistance with Supported Independent Living, to your certificate from 1 July. No form, no request, it happened in the background.
Here is where established providers can slip. Because the registration side was automatic, it is easy to read the whole reform as nothing to do. It is not. A new SIL Practice Standards module commenced the same day, developed with Inclusion Australia and people with disability, and you will be assessed against it at your next scheduled audit. Holding registration does not exempt you from proving your policies, governance, and day to day practice actually meet the new standard. The certificate updated itself. The evidence base did not.
If you are newer, or were operating unregistered and are only now applying, your situation is more urgent, not less. Full SIL registration is a Certification level audit, and it typically takes eight to twelve months from application to approval. The transition rule gives unregistered providers until 1 October 2026 to apply and keep operating in the meantime. Miss that date, and claims for services delivered after 30 September can be rejected outright. Delivering SIL without registration or a lodged application from 1 July 2026 also sits under the NDIS Act, with a maximum penalty of two years imprisonment, 120 penalty units, or both.
If you want the Practice Standards mapped out properly rather than working through the module clause by clause yourself, there is a free downloadable SIL Practice Standards breakdown guide available, which walks through exactly what each domain requires.
Registration status, the claim code, and the Practice Standards are three separate obligations wearing the same headline. You can be compliant on one and exposed on the other two.
This week, established providers should pull their policy folder against the new SIL Practice Standards module and start closing gaps before an audit finds them. Newer providers should confirm the application is actually lodged, not drafted. Then everyone should go back through every SIL claim submitted since 1 July and confirm each one sits under code 0138, since the old code, 0115, still exists but is now reserved for STA, MTA and ILO, not ongoing SIL.
The new Pricing Schedule, and what the plan indexing did not do
Say a participant’s service agreement was signed last year at last year’s rate. On 13 July their plan was indexed, so the new pricing is already sitting in their funding. It is tempting to update the invoice to the new number on the next claim and move on. The funding is there. The schedule allows it.
The paperwork is not done, because the plan moving does not move the agreement. A new number on an invoice is not the same as a signed variation. The NDIA is explicit that you must talk with the participant about any proposed change, and they must agree to it before it happens, not after.
The numbers behind the schedule are also worth knowing properly, because this year is not a flat increase across the board. Support worker rates rose by 4.75 percent, flowing through from the Fair Work Commission’s Annual Wage Review decision handed down on 2 June 2026. Psychology moved from $232.99 an hour to $252.99, bringing it closer to what Medicare and private health funds already pay. Dietetics was cut from $188.99 to $178.99, and exercise physiology from $166.99 to $161.99. The biggest single cut sits in what used to be called Other Professionals, falling from $193.99 to $156.16 an hour, because that category had bundled many different practitioner types under one price without identifying the actual discipline at the point of claim. Occupational therapy, speech pathology, physiotherapy, podiatry and audiology were held steady.
There is a structural change underneath this too. Previously you actually worked from two documents, not one. The Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits, or PAPL, set out the price limits and rules, and a separate spreadsheet, the NDIS Support Catalogue, carried the actual list of item numbers, registration groups and rates your billing system was built from. This year that has been restructured into three publications instead: the Annual Pricing Review, which explains the evidence behind the year’s decisions, the Pricing Schedule, which is what you bill against from 1 July, and the Support Catalogue, which still carries the registration groups, claim types and claiming rules but has been rebuilt as its own standalone publication rather than a companion spreadsheet to the PAPL. That Support Catalogue was still incomplete for several service types as the new financial year began, which is why some billing software was still updating its defaults into July.
For allied health, the old claim type field has been replaced with something built directly into the item number itself. Instead of ticking a separate box to say a session was delivered non face to face, a few extra letters are now added onto the end of the item number, so that detail travels with the code automatically. For support workers, nursing and support coordination, the previous claiming rules around travel, short notice cancellations and NDIA requested reports were simply removed, with no replacement guidance published at the time of writing. That is a genuine gap, worth watching for rather than guessing through.
Worth knowing why the format changed shape this year. It is tied to a Bill currently before the Senate that would hand the Minister formal power to set NDIS prices. Until that Bill passes, the Pricing Schedule carries guidance status rather than a formal legislated instrument, but it is still exactly what you are claiming against from 1 July regardless.
The sequence, once more, because it is the whole compliance step. Check your price list against the new schedule. Have the conversation with the participant. Get the variation agreed in writing. Then, and only then, invoice at the new rate.
New Framework planning is delayed, and what that delay actually means
Some genuinely good news here, held the right way.
New Framework planning, the model that introduces a Support Needs Assessment and a new budget method, has been pushed back to 1 April 2027 following consultation with people with disability, families, carers and advocates. From that date, existing participants transition progressively, in stages, through to the end of 2030. Testing is running now, with a small group of participants aged eighteen and over, and consultation on the supporting rules continues through the rest of this year. Participants under sixteen are not expected to begin transitioning before 1 July 2027 at the earliest.
A distinction worth passing on to any participant or family who asks. The Support Needs Assessment decides how a budget is built. It does not decide who gets into the scheme. Eligibility and access sit under separate arrangements, connected instead to changes proposed for new applicants from 1 January 2028. Two different reforms, two different dates.
Nothing changes in how plans are built today. No new form, no new process, no new method to adopt this month.
But delayed is not the same as ignore. The model that will eventually reshape participant budgets is being tested right now, with real participants, in the background. The providers who handle this calmly when it lands will be the ones who watched it take shape over the year before rather than cramming it into a fortnight in March 2027. A standing note in the diary to follow the testing updates as they come out is the whole job for now.
NSW foundational supports for children, and the longer story underneath the reassurance
This matters most for New South Wales providers, and a great deal for early childhood and allied health services there. This section runs longer than the others, because the short version everyone is repeating right now is not the full picture, and your caseload deserves the full picture.
Governments have committed $4 billion jointly over five years for the first phase of foundational supports, known as Thriving Kids. New South Wales and the Australian Government have committed up to $1,074.3 million of that over the first five years, through to 30 June 2031. This supports children aged eight and under with developmental delay or autism, with low to moderate support needs.
The rollout has two stages. General supports begin from October this year, delivered by non government organisations in local communities, including peer support programs for parents and supported playgroups for children aged five and under. Targeted supports begin from January 2027, and this is where a lot of allied health for children sits, goal focused therapy delivered individually or in small, play based groups, commissioned by the Department of Communities and Justice.
Now the part worth sitting with properly, because it is not as simple as protected or not protected.
Nobody’s existing caseload moves this week, or this quarter. The actual change to NDIS access rules for children is not due to take effect until 1 January 2028, and everything between now and then is staged, not immediate.
But the protection you might have heard about, that children already in the NDIS will simply be reassessed under the rules that applied before 1 January 2028, is not settled law yet. Every government fact sheet describing it also states plainly that it requires amendments to the NDIS Act. Those amendments sit inside the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill, the same one still with a Senate committee until 14 August 2026. It has not passed.
And even once that Bill does pass, being reassessed under the old rules is not a guarantee of staying funded indefinitely. NDIS participants have always gone through periodic reassessment, and a child can still lose eligibility at that point if their needs are judged not to meet the bar, reform or no reform. What this provision fixes is which test gets applied. It does not switch reassessment off altogether.
There is also a bigger number worth knowing, because it changes how you should be planning. Sector analysis has described Thriving Kids as the single largest lever in the government’s own stated target of cutting total NDIS participation from around 760,000 to 600,000 by the end of the decade, a fall of roughly 160,000 people, and children aged eight and under with low to moderate support needs are the exact cohort named as the primary group this reform is built to move. So the honest expectation over the next few years is not that nothing changes for this group. It is that a meaningful share of these children will exit the NDIS across 2027 and 2028 through perfectly ordinary plan reviews, not a forced transfer, not a sweep, just a string of individual reassessments quietly going the other way, because that is explicitly what the reform is designed to achieve.
So if this is your caseload, here is the balanced version, not the reassuring one and not the alarming one. Nobody is being moved out this week, this quarter, or even this financial year. But this is a genuine, deliberate, structural shift, not a paperwork update, and the rules that will eventually decide who moves and who stays have not been finalised or legislated yet. The job right now is to map your caseload into what clearly stays inside the NDIS long term and what is likely to transition, watch the Bill’s progress rather than assume it is settled, and plan your service mix for 2027 and 2028 with that real number in mind rather than treating this as background noise.
The legislative watch, and the discipline underneath it
Two bills sit in this space, and they are not in the same position, which is worth being precise about.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment, Integrity and Safeguarding Act, is not a bill anymore. It passed Parliament on 1 April 2026 and received Royal Assent on 8 April. It has been law since 9 April. The numbers inside it are substantial. Civil penalties for serious code of conduct breaches rose from 1,250 penalty units, around $412,500, to 10,000 penalty units, roughly $3.3 to $3.64 million per contravention for corporations, an eightfold increase. A new category called serious contravention lets the Commission treat a systemic pattern of smaller breaches as one single serious event, and where a provider is found to have multiple contraventions, total exposure can run well beyond that per contravention figure. New anti promotion orders carry penalties around $82,500 for a breach. Whistleblower protections expanded to include anonymous disclosure, and the NDIA is moving toward a fully electronic claiming system.
The second bill, the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment, Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026, is a genuinely different story. Introduced on 14 May 2026, it is still sitting with the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, with the inquiry extended to 14 August 2026. It has not passed. It proposes handing pricing power to the Minister and connects to the access changes from 1 January 2028. A number of disability representative organisations and legal bodies have made public submissions raising concerns about the pace of the reform and the strength of its safeguards. How that plays out is not something to predict here. Repeating a stage or outcome that has not been verified would be exactly the kind of noise this article is trying to cut through.
When a reform is confirmed and dated, it is worth saying so plainly, the way the Integrity and Safeguarding Act can be described above. When another is still moving, the same discipline applies, and only the confirmed date, the 14 August committee deadline, belongs in the conversation, not a guess at what comes after it.
The one thing to finish this week
None of this needs fixing in a single sitting. It needs one afternoon and one list.
Reconcile every active service agreement against the 2026 to 2027 Pricing Schedule, and confirm each variation has actually been agreed by the participant in writing. Not sent. Agreed. One clean pass, start to finish. And from the SIL section, check the one word in the portal that tells you everything, confirmed or pending, this week rather than next.
Five reforms do not need to be sorted by Friday. One does. That is enough for this week, and it is what stops a small gap becoming a real problem later.
If this gave you a clearer picture of what actually needs doing, that is exactly how we work with providers inside Bestie in Business, translating what changes into the small, doable checks that keep a business clean and calm every time something shifts.
Speed creates momentum. Clarity creates confidence.