Starting an NDIS Business in Australia: The Honest 2026 Guide

I have sat with a lot of people at the very start of this. Support workers who want to stop working for someone else. Nurses leaving hospital shifts. Families who could not find decent support for their own child and decided to build it. The enthusiasm is real. What is usually missing is a clear picture of the money and the calendar. This article is that picture.

Starting an NDIS business is not hard in the way people expect. The paperwork is tedious but it is finite. What catches people out is the gap between being allowed to trade and actually having participants who pay you. That gap is where most new providers quietly run out of savings.

Registered or unregistered: decide this first

Participants have their NDIS funding managed in one of three ways. Agency managed, where the NDIA pays providers directly. Plan managed, where a plan manager sits in the middle and pays your invoices. Self managed, where the participant or their family pays you themselves.

If you are unregistered, you cannot invoice agency managed participants at all. You can work with plan managed and self managed participants without any registration. Across the scheme, agency managed sits somewhere around a quarter to a third of participants, and it skews towards people with more complex needs and larger plans.

Be honest about which one you are. I have watched people spend nine months and $20,000 chasing certification for a service they could have been legally delivering the following Monday. I have also watched unregistered providers hit a ceiling at around fifteen participants because every good referral they get from a support coordinator turns out to be agency managed.

One more thing worth saying plainly. Registration requirements have been tightening, and the direction of travel from both the NDIS Review and the Commission is towards more providers being registered over time, particularly those delivering personal care. If you are building something you intend to still own in five years, plan for registration even if you start without it.

Business structure, ABN and the boring foundations

• Structure. Sole trader is free and simple. A Pty Ltd company through ASIC costs around $600 to register and gives you liability separation, which matters enormously in disability support. Most providers who plan to employ staff should be a company.
• ABN. Free through the Australian Business Register. Apply the same day.
• GST. Register once you expect to turn over $75,000. Note that many NDIS supports for participants are GST free, so your invoices to participants may carry no GST whilst your expenses do. That usually means you are in a refund position. Your bookkeeper will thank you for registering properly from the start.
• Business name. Around $44 for one year or $102 for three years through ASIC.
• Bank account and accounting software. Separate business account, always. Xero or MYOB, around $35 to $80 per month.

Insurance you actually need

Not optional, even when unregistered. Plan managers ask for certificates of currency before they pay you.

• Public liability, $20 million cover. Roughly $600 to $1,200 per year for a small provider.
• Professional indemnity, $5 million to $10 million. Roughly $700 to $1,500 per year.
• Personal accident or income protection if you are the one delivering the shifts.
• Workers compensation through your state scheme the moment you employ anyone. WorkSafe in Victoria, icare in New South Wales, WorkCover in Queensland.
• Vehicle insurance that covers transporting participants. Check your policy specifically mentions business use.

Budget $1,500 to $3,000 plus GST a year all up for a small provider. Use a broker who specialises in disability services, because standard small business policies often exclude the exact thing you do.

The registration process, step by step

1. Apply through the NDIS Commission portal

You create an account and complete an application that asks for your entity details, your key personnel, the registration groups you want, and a self assessment against the NDIS Practice Standards. The application itself is free. Set aside a full day. The self assessment is where you tell the Commission which policies and processes you have, and it is the part people underestimate badly.

2. Choose your registration groups

Registration groups define what you are allowed to deliver. Common ones for new providers include Assistance with Daily Life, Assistance with Social and Community Participation, Household Tasks, Group and Centre Based Activities, and Assistance with Travel and Transport.

Pick narrow. Every group you add expands the audit scope, the policies you need, and the cost. I would rather see a new provider approved for two groups in five months than seven groups in eleven. You can add groups later through a variation, which is a much smaller process than the initial application.

3. Get your audit

The Commission tells you which pathway applies based on the groups you chose. There are two.

You choose and pay an approved quality auditor yourself. Get three quotes. Prices vary far more than you would expect for the same scope, and the cheapest is not always the one that gets you through cleanly.

4. Commission decision

The auditor lodges the report, the Commission assesses it alongside suitability checks on your key personnel, and issues a decision. Allow 6 to 16 weeks here. It is not unusual to be asked for more information, which restarts the clock on that section.

End to end, a realistic timeline for verification is 3 to 5 months. For certification, 6 to 12 months. Anyone promising you six weeks is talking about the application form, not the outcome.

Practice Standards, policies and the paperwork that gets you through audit

The NDIS Practice Standards are the quality benchmark the auditor measures you against. The core module covers rights and responsibilities, governance and operational management, the provision of supports, and the support environment. Depending on your groups you may also need supplementary modules.

In practice this means a policy and procedure suite. At minimum you will need documented processes for incident management, complaints, risk management, participant intake and consent, service agreements, privacy and records, human resources including recruitment and screening, continuity of supports, conflict of interest, and restrictive practices if relevant.

You have two options. Buy a template pack, which runs $1,500 to $4,000 plus GST from consultants who specialise in NDIS. Or write them yourself, which is free and takes about 80 hours. Most people buy the pack and then spend two weeks making it actually describe their business, which is the right approach. An auditor can tell within ten minutes when a policy has been bought and never read. That is a finding.

Worker screening and training

Every worker in a risk assessed role needs an NDIS Worker Screening Check from their state or territory screening unit. Cost sits roughly between $110 and $150 per worker depending on the state, valid for five years, and free or discounted for volunteers in some jurisdictions. Processing takes anywhere from two weeks to three months, so start these early.

Also expect: the free NDIS Worker Orientation Module called Quality, Safety and You, a Working with Children Check where relevant, first aid and CPR, and manual handling and infection control training for personal care roles. Budget around $300 to $600 per worker for the training bundle.

Pricing: what you can actually charge

The NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits set the maximum you can charge for most supports. They are updated each year, usually effective 1 July, so always work from the current document rather than something you saved last year.

Standard weekday daytime assistance with self care activities has sat a little above $70 per hour in recent years, with higher limits for evenings, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. Cleaning and household tasks sit lower, around the mid $50s. Therapy supports are considerably higher, in the $190 to $215 range per hour depending on discipline.

Two things new providers routinely miss. First, those are limits, not entitlements, and you can charge less if you choose to. Second, provider travel and non face to face supports are claimable within defined rules, and if you are not claiming them you are quietly giving away 5 to 10 per cent of your revenue. Read the travel rules properly.

What it costs to start, all in

Certification pathway providers should add $6,000 to $14,000 on top. These are our own figures from working with Melbourne and regional Victorian providers over the past few years, so treat them as a planning range rather than a quote.

The digital side, which is where most people leave money on the table

Here is the pattern I see constantly. Someone spends eight months getting registered, gets the approval email, then realises they have no website, no Google presence and no referral relationships. Another four months of earning nothing follows.

Start the digital work in parallel with registration. Three things matter.

A website that answers the referrer's questions

Support coordinators are the people deciding whether to send you a participant, and they are checking your site on a phone between appointments. They want to know your service area suburbs, exactly which supports you deliver, whether you have capacity right now, your registration status, and how to refer in under a minute. A referral form that goes to a monitored inbox beats a contact page every time. Our work on NDIS website development is built around exactly that path.

Google Business Profile

Free, takes an hour, and the highest return hour a new provider will spend. Verify the listing, set your service areas, choose the right categories, add photos of real people rather than stock, and start collecting reviews from families. When someone searches for disability support providers in your suburb, the map results appear above everything else. That is what local SEO is for.

Provider Finder and directories

Registered providers appear in the NDIS Provider Finder automatically, but the entry is only as useful as the detail you maintain in the portal. Keep your contact details, service areas and registration groups current. Beyond that, list on the independent directories that support coordinators actually use, and keep your capacity status honest. Nothing burns a referral relationship faster than a coordinator sending three enquiries to a provider who has been full for two months.

How long until your first participant

For an unregistered provider starting with warm contacts, two to eight weeks. For a registered provider starting cold, expect three to five months after approval before you have a steady roster. That is what the pipeline looks like when coordinators need to meet you, trust you, and then wait for a matching participant.

You can compress it. Build the referral relationships during your registration wait rather than after it. Get the website live early. Attend the local network meetings. When your approval lands you want three coordinators who already know your name.

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