The NDIS support coordination market closes 1 July 2028. Here’s what’s confirmed, the timeline, and what to do before submissions close 2 October 2026.

The NDIS support coordination market closes on 1 July 2028. That’s confirmed. It was locked in with the 2026-27 Budget, and the consultation paper released in September 2026 is not asking whether this happens. It’s asking how the replacement gets designed.

If you run a support coordination business, employ support coordinators, or manage psychosocial recovery coaches, this is the most significant structural change to this service line in the history of the NDIS. Here’s what the consultation paper actually says: what’s confirmed, what’s still being decided, what hasn’t been said at all, and what to do before the consultation closes on 2 October 2026.

What the Government Has Confirmed

The decision to replace the open market is done. From 1 July 2028, participants will no longer receive support coordination funding in their NDIS plan. Instead, the NDIA will directly commission and pay a set of approved organisations to deliver a new service called Support Coordination and Connection, referred to as SCC.

The current arrangement, where any eligible provider can receive plan funding from any participant who chooses them, ends on that date.

Approximately 11,000 support coordinators are currently active across Australia. Under the new model, only a small number of contracted lead organisations will be eligible to deliver funded SCC services from 1 July 2028.

The Government made this decision after three years of reviews. The NDIS Review, the Disability Royal Commission, and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission inquiry into support coordination all found the same problems: inconsistent service quality, conflicts of interest, fraudulent practices, and a market structure not producing reliable outcomes for participants.

The consultation is not reopening that decision. It’s asking how to build the replacement.

The Timeline

The consultation paper sets out four stages with specific dates.

Mid to late 2026: Service design. That’s now. The consultation closes on 2 October 2026. Submissions feed directly into the Government’s final design decisions.

2027: Procurement. The NDIA runs a formal tender and awards contracts to organisations that will deliver SCC services in each region. This is when providers apply to become commissioned SCC organisations.

Early 2028: Transition. The NDIA works with providers and participants to manage the handover from the current market to the commissioned service.

1 July 2028: Start date. The new SCC service goes live and replaces the current market entirely.

That’s roughly 18 months from now to either position for a procurement bid, establish a subcontracting relationship with an organisation that will bid, or make a clear decision about exiting this service line. Eighteen months sounds like a long time. In a procurement process, it isn’t.

What the New Model Looks Like

The proposed model has two service levels.

SCC is the standard level. It covers participants who need ongoing support to connect with and coordinate services. Participants with moderate coordination needs, multiple service providers, or difficulty navigating the system on their own.

SCC+ is the intensive level. This is for participants with complex circumstances, significant safety considerations, very high coordination needs, or serious risk of disengagement. The paper describes SCC+ as likely to involve more contact hours and specialist workforce skills. It’s available to a small proportion of participants.

The NDIA will determine eligibility for each level using criteria that haven’t been finalised yet. Factors under consideration include decision-making capacity, safety risk, stability of informal supports, and engagement with multiple service systems.

The preferred commissioning approach is a lead organisation model. One contracted organisation per geographic region, responsible for delivering or coordinating all SCC services in that area. Multi-provider models, where several organisations pool resources across a region, are still under consideration and haven’t been ruled out. The consultation is explicitly asking for feedback on this.

Regional boundaries haven’t been set. The paper lists four options under consideration: Primary Health Network regions, Local Hospital Network regions, NDIS planning regions, or a new boundary system. Each option carries different implications for how large the contracted footprint would be and how many organisations could realistically bid.

What Hasn’t Been Decided

The consultation paper leaves several significant questions open, and they matter.

Whether subcontracting will be permitted. The paper doesn’t rule it out, and it doesn’t confirm it. If subcontracting is allowed, current support coordination businesses could potentially operate under a lead organisation’s contract. If it isn’t, the options narrow significantly for smaller providers.

How many organisations will be contracted per region. The paper acknowledges that one organisation covering an entire Primary Health Network region would need to be very large. It’s asking for feedback on whether smaller, more localised contracts make sense.

What happens to participants partway through their plan. The paper acknowledges transition risk. It doesn’t confirm how participants who are still in an active plan on 1 July 2028 will be supported through the changeover.

What the eligibility criteria look like in practice. The factors listed are broad. How the NDIA weighs them and what the documentation process looks like is still to be designed.

How pricing will work. The current NDIS Pricing Arrangement sets rates for support coordination. Under the commissioned model, the NDIA negotiates pricing with contracted organisations directly. How that affects what frontline coordinators are actually paid hasn’t been addressed in the paper.

The relationship between SCC and psychosocial recovery coaching. The paper doesn’t explicitly address PRC in detail. That gap is worth raising in a submission. If that question isn’t asked now, it won’t be answered before the model is locked in.

What It Means for Your Business

This plays out differently depending on where you sit right now.

If you run a dedicated support coordination business, the core question is whether you are positioned to win a contracted lead organisation role in 2027, or whether you need a relationship with an organisation that is. Scale matters. The tender process will likely favour organisations that can demonstrate geographic coverage, workforce depth, governance systems, and outcome data. Sole practitioners and very small teams will find it difficult to meet those requirements as a lead organisation. That doesn’t mean the market is closed to them. It means the pathway changes, and the time to work out which pathway is now.

If you’re a larger NDIS provider that offers support coordination alongside other service lines, the calculus is different. You may have the infrastructure to bid. You may also find the commissioned model creates stability, because contracted volumes replace the current market where participants choose their own provider one by one.

If you employ support coordinators as part of a broader team, the workforce question matters now, not in 2027. The paper flags that SCC+ will require specialist skills. Investing in that workforce before procurement puts you in a stronger position when the tender opens.

If you manage psychosocial recovery coaches, push for clarity on how PRC sits within the new model. The consultation is the right place to do it. Use your submission to ask the question directly.

How to Make a Submission

Submissions close 2 October 2026. Send to SCCreform@health.gov.au.

You don’t need legal language or formal formatting. The consultation paper lists specific questions it’s seeking feedback on. Answer the ones most relevant to your business type and service context.

The questions the paper is asking include:

• What should eligibility criteria for SCC and SCC+ look like in practice?
• How should regional boundaries be drawn?
• What should the lead organisation model look like, and should subcontracting be permitted?
• What workforce and capability standards should contracted organisations meet?
• How should the transition be managed for participants currently receiving support coordination?

Your direct experience as a provider is exactly what these questions are designed to surface. The Government can read policy. It can’t read what actually happens when a participant with complex needs loses their coordinator partway through a plan, or what it takes to build a coordination workforce in a regional area. That knowledge is yours, and a submission is where it counts.

A short, specific, honest submission carries more weight than a long one that doesn’t say anything particular. Two pages with real examples beats ten pages of general comment.

What to Do This Week

Read the consultation paper. It’s on health.gov.au. The summary version is manageable. The full version has the detail.

Mark 2 October 2026 as a hard deadline. If support coordination is part of your business, this is a submission worth making.

Talk to your support coordinators now, not in 2027. They need to understand what’s coming, and you need to understand what they want. Some will want to move with you into whatever structure you build. Some won’t. Knowing that now is better than finding out during a procurement process.

If you’re not sure what your position should be in the new market, that’s the right question to be sitting with. Work backwards from what you’re genuinely good at and where your volume and relationships sit. The answer comes from that, not from what sounds strategically neat on paper.

The consultation is open. The timeline is fixed. The only variable now is what you do with the next 18 months.

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

The End of NDIS Support Coordination: What You Need to Know

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