A client cancels a shift. You do everything right. You pay your worker properly, because that’s who you are, that’s the kind of employer you’ve built yourself to be. And somehow, you still end up out of pocket.

That’s not bad luck. That’s not a fluke. That’s two completely separate rulebooks making two completely separate decisions about the exact same cancelled shift, and most providers have never once put them side by side to check.

If you’ve ever looked at a month’s cancellations and felt like the numbers just don’t add up, this one’s for you. Here’s exactly what you’re required to pay, exactly what you’re allowed to bill, where the two aren’t the same, and the one difference almost nobody in this sector talks about, permanent staff versus casual staff, because SCHADS treats them completely differently, and that changes everything about where your risk actually sits.

Let’s take it apart properly.

What the Billing Side Actually Allows

The NDIS allows a cancellation policy of up to 7 clear days’ notice for a support worker shift, or up to 2 clear business days for most other supports like therapy. But you don’t have to use the full window the NDIS allows. Say you’ve chosen to set your own business cancellation policy at 24 hours, like a lot of providers do. That’s what’s written into your service agreement, and that’s the notice period that actually applies to your participants, not the 7 day maximum the NDIS permits.

Miss that 24 hour window, and you might be able to claim a fee, but only if you also meet every other condition. It has to be written into the service agreement properly. You have to be able to show the worker genuinely couldn’t be redeployed. And the item itself has to be one you’re allowed to claim a cancellation fee against at all.

What the Paying Side Actually Requires

On the paying side, it’s a completely different rule, set by SCHADS, not by your service agreement, and it only applies to certain staff. If the worker rostered on is full-time or part-time, and the client cancels, you’ve got exactly two options. Find them other paid work for those exact hours, or pay them in full as if the shift went ahead. There’s no minimum notice period that gets you out of it. Even if the client cancels five minutes before the shift starts, you still owe that worker something.

Redeployment means directing the worker to do other work during the exact same hours they were already rostered for, same start time, same finish time, just a different task or a different client instead of the cancelled one. Because that time block was already properly rostered, there’s no fresh notice requirement for redeployment itself. You’re not creating a new shift, you’re re-tasking an existing one, which is why it’s still available even with zero notice of the cancellation. The catch is entirely practical. You need another client who genuinely needs support at that exact same start and finish time, with a task that worker is qualified and available to do. If nothing lines up, redeployment simply isn’t possible, and you’re straight back to the notice rules to work out what you actually owe.

The only way around paying for hours they didn’t work, when redeployment isn’t possible, is make up time, and it only applies if you meet three conditions together:

• At least 12 hours’ notice of the original cancellation, measured against the original shift’s start time
• At least 7 days’ notice of the actual make up shift, though that 7 days can be shortened by agreement between you and the worker
• The make up shift has to happen within 6 weeks

Miss the 12 hour condition, and make up time isn’t available at all, it doesn’t matter how much notice you then give for a replacement shift. Under 12 hours, your only options become redeploy that day or pay in full.

The Five Minute Scenario

Now take that to the extreme. A participant cancels 5 minutes before the shift starts. In practice, you’re not going to have another client ready and waiting at that exact same start and finish time, so redeployment collapses into a theoretical option that rarely holds up when the notice is that short. And 5 minutes is nowhere near the 12 hours needed for make up time either.

So there’s exactly one obligation left standing, pay the worker in full for the shift, even though they did no work at all. Same 4 hours, same rate, purely because the cancellation came in too late for either of the other two options to be realistically usable.

Here’s the twist though. This is actually one of the few scenarios where billing and paying line up properly. Five minutes’ notice is about as clear a breach of your 24 hour policy as it gets, and proving the worker genuinely couldn’t be redeployed is easy when there was no time to arrange it. So if your service agreement and paperwork are in order, this is a case where you pay the worker in full, and you can also recover the fee from the participant’s plan.

The Sunday Scenario

Picture the more ordinary version of this. A participant cancels a Tuesday 4 hour shift on the Sunday before, well outside your 24 hour policy but well over the 12 hours’ notice SCHADS needs for make up time to even be an option.

From here you’ve got two options. Find your permanent worker other paid hours that Tuesday, or lock in a make up shift within the next 6 weeks, giving them at least 7 days’ notice before it happens. If neither of those works out, you pay them the 4 hours in full, whether you’re able to recover anything from the participant’s plan or not.

The Seven Day Scenario

Now change the notice period again. Say the same participant cancels that Tuesday shift with a full 7 days’ notice instead.

On the billing side, this isn’t even a chargeable cancellation. Your service agreement sets a 24 hour notice period, and the participant’s given you 7 days. They’ve met your policy comfortably, so there’s no breach of notice to point to, and nothing to claim. You can’t charge a cancellation fee here at all, and you shouldn’t, the participant did exactly what they were supposed to do.

On the paying side, none of that matters. SCHADS doesn’t care how much notice the participant gave. The pay or redeploy obligation kicks in the moment the shift is cancelled, whether it’s 7 days out or 7 minutes out. So you’ve still got the same two options for your permanent worker, find them other paid work, or pay them for the shift.

Here’s the difference 7 days actually makes. It gives you room to fix it properly. You’ve got plenty of time to redeploy that worker to another client in the same slot. Or, if redeployment isn’t possible, you’ve easily got the 12 hours’ notice needed to arrange make up time, and 7 days is more than enough runway to line up a make up shift with its own required 7 days’ notice, all within the 6 week window.

So with 7 days’ notice, the risk isn’t really about whether you’ll be allowed to bill, you won’t, and that’s fair enough. The risk is entirely about whether you actually use that lead time to redeploy or arrange make up work. If you don’t, and the shift just falls through the cracks, you’re paying that worker in full for a shift you were never going to be able to charge anyone for in the first place, and this time it’s not a paperwork failure. It’s a rostering failure.

The Casual Comparison

Now put a casual in that same slot instead of the permanent worker, back with the Sunday scenario. Same cancellation, same notice.

On the paying side, you owe them nothing. No pay, no make-up time, nothing at all. The whole clause simply doesn’t apply to casual staff.

Here’s where people get this wrong. It’s tempting to assume that if you’re not paying the worker anything, you’re at least free to bill the participant instead. You’re not.

One of the conditions the NDIS actually requires before you can charge a cancellation fee is specific: where staff are employed, you must have been required to pay the worker for that time, not simply have chosen to, and not simply have incurred some cost somewhere. Required to.

A permanent worker satisfies that condition automatically, because SCHADS obligates you to pay them regardless of the cancellation. Whether you can actually recover the fee still depends on everything else lining up, your service agreement’s cancellation clause has to meet the Pricing Arrangements properly, and your evidence of failed redeployment has to hold up. Get any of that wrong, and you can pay the worker in full and still recover nothing.

A casual worker never triggers that requirement in the first place. There’s no SCHADS obligation to pay a casual for a shift that didn’t go ahead, so there’s no required payment for the claim to rest on. That means billing the participant for the cancellation isn’t a compliant option here either, the basis for the fee, a genuine cost you were required to wear, simply didn’t exist.

What To Do This Week

Pull your last ten cancelled shifts. For each one, write down three things, whether the worker was permanent or casual, whether you paid or arranged make up time, and whether you actually claimed anything back from the participant’s plan. Ten cancellations, properly worked through, will tell you honestly whether your paperwork is doing its job or whether you’ve been absorbing losses that were genuinely recoverable.

If most of them line up, that’s real evidence your service agreements and your redeployment process are solid. If they don’t, you’ve found what’s worth fixing before the next ten happen the same way.

For the full video and more insights on this topic, visit the link below.

The Real Cost of NDIS Cancellations (And How to Fix It)

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