If you deliver Supported Independent Living, the way your business is assessed just changed.
The NDIS Commission released the draft SIL Practice Standards in May. 4 new domains. 4 new areas an auditor will sit across the table from your team and want evidence for. They’re enforceable from 1 July 2026. They sit on top of your Core Module obligations, not instead of them. And your next audit will test all of it.
Most SIL providers I’m hearing from right now fall into one of two groups.
The first group read the email from the Commission and thought “we’re already doing this, we’ll be fine.” They haven’t pulled their documentation out and tested it against what the new standards actually require.
The second group felt the familiar weight of it. Another thing. Another deadline. Another layer on top of everything already running. And the email went into a folder they’ll get to eventually.
Neither of those positions is going to serve you at your next audit.
So let’s do this properly.
I want to walk you through what the 4 standards actually require, what auditors will be looking for, what the registration deadlines mean for your specific situation, and the concrete things you need to be doing in your business right now. Not eventually. Now.
Why these standards exist
The NDIS Commission didn’t introduce these in a vacuum. They came directly out of 3 major reviews. The NDIS Review, the Disability Royal Commission, and the Commission’s own motion inquiries into supported accommodation. All 3 surfaced the same thing. Real, systemic gaps in participant safety, tenancy rights, worker capability, and provider accountability, specifically inside SIL and group home settings.
The Commission also co-designed these standards with Inclusion Australia and with people with disability. That matters. Because it means the standards aren’t written from a compliance and paperwork perspective. They’re written from a what does a person actually experience in this house perspective.
That shift changes what an audit looks like.
Because now, a policy that says the right things on paper isn’t enough. An auditor walking into your SIL home is looking for evidence that your participants actually experience the rights your documentation describes. They’re listening to what your workers say. They’re looking at whether the records you keep tell a story that matches the words in your policies.
The gap between what you document and what you actually do has always mattered. Under these standards, it matters more.
The new SIL Practice Standards sit across 4 domains. Let me take you through each one.
Domain 1. Supported decision making
Here’s the intent of this standard in plain language. The participant decides about their own life. Not the provider. Not the key worker. Not the house manager who knows them best and genuinely cares about them. The participant.
That sounds obvious. And for providers doing this well, it probably already feels embedded. And here’s where I see the gap most often.
A support plan written in 2024 that accurately reflected the participant’s preferences in 2024 isn’t evidence of supported decision making in 2026. Decisions change. Goals change. Relationships change. Who someone wants to live with might change. How they want their morning to run might change.
The standard requires providers to show that decision making is ongoing. That participants have the time, the information, and the actual support to understand their options and make choices consistently, not just at intake.
What auditors want to see here isn’t a tick on a consent form. They want to see who was involved in a decision, what options were offered, how the participant communicated their preference, and what happened after. They want to see that when a participant’s needs or preferences changed, the response was to go back to them, not to make an internal call about what was best.
If your support plans are written about your participants rather than genuinely with them, this is the domain that surfaces it.
Domain 2. Safeguarding
SIL providers manage complex risk every single day. People with high support needs, living together, with workers rotating across shifts. Risks between housemates. Risks from the community. Risks that come from the nature of 24 hour support in a home environment.
The Commission knows this. The new standards are, in part, an acknowledgement of how much SIL providers carry.
And that acknowledgement comes with a heightened expectation. Because the Commission will also be watching more closely.
This standard requires providers to show that safeguarding is embedded in daily operational practice. Not filed in a policy folder. Operational. Practised.
Every worker supporting participants in your SIL homes must be trained in de-escalation, trauma informed practice, and positive behaviour support. That training needs to be recorded and current. Not a one off induction that happened 18 months ago. Refresher training that’s tracked, documented, and relevant to the specific participants that worker is supporting.
Incident management is where this domain gets tested hardest. An incident register that exists isn’t enough. An auditor can tell the difference between a register that’s maintained and one that’s lived in. They look for the date, the participant, the immediate action taken, and what the follow up was. They look for complaints that were received and what happened to them. They look at whether a pattern of incidents triggered a review.
If your incidents are being logged in shift notes and not reaching your incident register, that gap shows up at audit.
Domain 3. Practice governance
This is the domain that asks whether your organisation is actually managed in a way that makes safe, consistent service delivery possible. Not whether your policies say so. Whether the structure of your business makes it real.
Risk management comes into scope here. Not a static risk register that was created in 2023 and reviewed once. An active process where risk is identified, reviewed, and applied to real decisions happening in the business.
Quality improvement also sits inside this domain. Are you using your incident data. Are you using participant feedback. Are you using audit findings to actually change something. A quality improvement system that generates reports no one acts on isn’t evidence of governance. Evidence is what changed, when it changed, and why.
Workforce oversight is in here too. Supervision records. Performance reviews. Training matched to the specific needs of the participants a worker is supporting. If you have a worker supporting a participant with complex communication needs and there’s no evidence that worker received relevant training for that specific context, that’s a gap.
Here’s the part I want you to hear clearly. This domain is essentially asking whether you’re running a real business with real governance, or whether things are running on tribal knowledge and the goodwill of your experienced staff.
A lot of SIL businesses are held together by key people. A house manager who knows every participant. A coordinator who holds everything in their head. That person being good at their job isn’t the same as the business having governance. Because what happens when that person leaves. What happens when they’re on leave. What happens in an audit when the auditor asks a question only one person in your organisation can answer.
Governance means the business can show how it operates independent of any single individual.
This is the domain where the standards stop being about compliance and start being about whether the business can hold without you.
Domain 4. Tenancy and housing arrangements
This one needs its own attention because it carries a structural requirement many SIL providers aren’t yet meeting.
Where a provider is both delivering the SIL support and managing the tenancy, the service agreement and the tenancy agreement must be legally separate documents. Not packaged together. Not cross referenced in a way that makes one contingent on the other. Separate.
A participant’s right to remain in their home can’t be contingent on their SIL service continuing with a particular provider. Their tenancy is a standalone legal arrangement. The standard requires that this is not only documented, and that it’s understood by the participant. That their rights inside the home are clear. That they know they have access to their own space, their own keys, the right to have visitors.
Conflict of interest must also be managed and documented. If you’re both the SIL provider and the landlord, you have a conflict of interest. That conflict doesn’t disqualify you from operating in both roles. And it must be identified, documented, and actively managed.
Participants must also have a real say in who they live with and how their supports are delivered inside the home. Not a theoretical say. An actual, documented, supported process where that choice was offered and that preference was recorded.
A note before we go further
If you’re reading this and feeling the weight of what these standards are asking of you, that’s a reasonable response to a genuinely significant shift in how SIL is regulated.
And if you’re sitting with the question of how you build a business that holds this kind of compliance pressure without everything falling on you personally, that’s the work we do inside Bestie in Business.
Twelve months of group coaching for disability business owners who are serious about building something structured, profitable, and genuinely sustainable. Where the governance is real. Where the documentation reflects actual practice. Where compliance is operational, not reactive.
You can book a free 15 minute Clarity Call with our team when you want to know whether it’s the right fit for where your business is right now. We’ll give you an honest answer.
Now, back to what your business needs to be doing.
Registration. The deadline that sits underneath all of this
For some providers reading this, the standards aren’t the only thing to navigate. The mandatory registration requirement is.
From 1 July 2026, SIL providers must be registered under a new registration group. 0138, Assistance with Supported Independent Living.
Here’s the critical timeline. If you were already delivering SIL before 1 July 2026, you can continue delivering during the transition period. And you must have applied for registration by 1 October 2026. If you haven’t applied by that date, you must stop providing SIL.
This is the part I need you to hear clearly. Delivering SIL without registration after the cutoff isn’t a paperwork issue. It’s a serious breach of the NDIS Act. The maximum penalty is 2 years imprisonment, a fine of 120 penalty units, or both. The way you avoid that is by acting inside the window, not around it.
The registration window isn’t generous. Registration under the certification pathway, which SIL sits under, involves an independent audit. That audit process takes time to schedule, prepare for, and complete. The later you start, the more exposed you are to delays that put your service delivery at risk.
If you’re already registered as an NDIS provider and not yet under 0138, the Commission sent a Notice of Intention to Vary Registration in June 2026 to providers currently registered under group 0115. That notice adds 0138 to your registration. Read it carefully and respond within the required timeframe.
If you’re currently unregistered and delivering SIL, apply now. Not after the holidays. Not after you get through the next busy period. Now.
What you actually need to be doing
I’m going to give you the practical starting points. Not an exhaustive list. The starting points.
The first thing is a gap analysis against the 4 domains.
Pull your current documentation. Your policies, your procedures, your support plans, your incident register, your training records. Put them next to the 4 domains and ask one question for each quality indicator. Do we have evidence this is happening in practice, not just on paper.
Be honest. The point of doing this now is to find the gaps before an auditor does. A gap you find yourself can be fixed. A gap an auditor finds becomes a nonconformance that requires a formal response and a follow up audit.
The second thing is your policies.
You need 4 specific policies for the SIL module. Supported decision making, safeguarding, practice governance, and conflict of interest. If you have older policies that touch these areas and were written against the previous standards, they need to be reviewed and updated to reflect what the new standards actually require.
The policies need to describe what your staff actually do. Not what you aspire to do. Not what the best version of your service looks like. What happens in the house, on the shift, in real practice. Because the auditor reads your policy and then asks your workers questions that test whether the policy describes reality.
The third thing is your training records.
Every worker supporting participants in your SIL homes needs documented, current training in de-escalation, trauma informed practice, and positive behaviour support. Pull the records now. Identify who’s current and who’s not. Build a schedule to get everyone current before your next audit date, not the week before.
Training that happened once at induction and hasn’t been refreshed isn’t sufficient evidence. And training that isn’t recorded didn’t happen, as far as an auditor is concerned.
The fourth thing is your service and tenancy agreements.
If you’re the SIL provider and the landlord, audit your agreements today. Are they separate documents. Is the tenancy legally independent of the service arrangement. Can a participant change their SIL provider without losing their housing.
If your current agreements bundle these two things together, that needs to change. This is the most common structural gap in SIL businesses right now, and it’s one of the clearest signals an auditor looks for.
The fifth thing is your incident register.
Open it. Look at the last 3 months. Does it tell the story of what’s actually happening in your homes. Are incidents recorded with dates, actions, and outcomes. Are complaints represented. Is there evidence that patterns were noticed and responded to.
If your register is sparse, or if you know incidents are being managed at house level and not reaching the register, that’s the gap to close.
The thing about midterm audits
A lot of SIL providers assume that because they passed their last certification audit, the midterm is a lighter touch process. And historically, that has sometimes been the case.
Under the new SIL standards, that assumption is worth revisiting.
Midterm audits for SIL providers from 1 July 2026 will include assessment against the new SIL module. That means even if your last certification was 3 years ago, your midterm will be assessed against a standard that didn’t exist when you first audited. You’re not protected by your previous certification. You’re being assessed against where the standards sit now.
The time between your last audit and your next one isn’t a grace period. It’s preparation time. Use it like that.
The providers who move through their midterms with confidence are the ones who treat the new standards as operational changes, not documentation exercises. They’re not printing a new policy and filing it. They’re changing how the house runs, how workers are briefed, how decisions are supported, how incidents are recorded.
Documentation reflects practice. Not the other way around. If the practice isn’t there, the documentation isn’t enough.
These standards were co-designed with people with disability. That’s not just a process note. It’s a signal about what compliance looks like under this framework.
The question auditors are now trained to ask isn’t just “does your policy say this.” It’s “does the person living in this home actually experience this.”
That’s a different question. It requires a different kind of answer.
And here’s what I want you to hold onto. The safeguards in these standards aren’t a burden imposed on good care. They’re the architecture of good care. When a participant genuinely makes their own decisions, when they’re genuinely safe, when the workforce is genuinely competent and consistent, when their housing is genuinely secure, that’s the business the standards are designed to create the conditions for.
This is a correction, and corrections reward the providers who built it right. The businesses running on shortcuts feel this. The businesses running on structure barely do. The compliance piece gets significantly lighter when the practice is genuinely there.
One thing to do today
Pull your incident register for the last 90 days. Not your policy. The register itself.
Look at what’s recorded. Look at what the follow up was. Look at whether patterns were noticed.
That one document tells you more about where your business sits against the new standards than any policy review will. Because your incident register is the live record of what’s actually happening in your homes. And it’s the first thing a well prepared auditor asks for.
If it’s thin, you know what to work on.
If it’s comprehensive, you’re starting from a stronger place than most.
Either way, you’ll know.