The 2026-27 NDIS price guide: every official file, and what changed

What people still call the NDIS price guide is now two documents: the NDIS Pricing Schedule 2026-27, which sets the prices, and the Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits, which set the claiming rules — its 2025-26 edition is still the latest, and the NDIA says updated claiming guidance is coming shortly. These are the 8 files a provider reaches for, each linked to the NDIA’s own copy, so you always open the version the NDIA is serving (checked 15 October 2026).

On 24 September 2026 the first pricing determination made by the Minister for Disability and the NDIS took effect: the National Disability Insurance Scheme (Pricing Arrangements) Determination 2026, made under the new section 45C of the NDIS Act. It was made on 16 September, registered on 23 September and commenced the day after. It adopts two NDIA documents as they stand from time to time — the NDIS Pricing Schedule 2026-27 and a separate schedule for Specialist Disability Accommodation — and both are marked “effective 24 September 2026”.

The prices didn’t change. Line for line, every support item that appears in both the 1 July and the 24 September schedules carries the same national, remote and very remote figure — including every 2026-27 price in this guide. The NDIA’s own summary is that the maximum prices reflect the guidance it published in June, and that participants and providers don’t need to do anything.

The legal footing did. The 1 July schedule was published as the NDIA’s view of appropriate maximum prices while the law giving the Minister this power was still before Parliament. From 24 September the same figures are legal maximums wherever a participant’s funding is managed by the NDIA or a registered plan manager; self-managed funding isn’t covered. A provider must not charge more than the maximum, the NDIA can refuse a claim above it or pay only up to it, and an overpayment can become a debt. The maximum is a ceiling, not an entitlement — a provider and participant can agree a lower price.

Which schedule applies to which service dates. Going by the NDIA’s own effective dates, services delivered from 1 July to 23 September 2026 sit under the 1 July schedule (now in the NDIA’s pricing archive), and services delivered on or after 24 September sit under the schedule effective 24 September. The determination itself commences on 24 September and says nothing about earlier service dates — and because the figures are identical, the same support delivered on 23 September and on 24 September carries the same limit. There is nothing to re-price either side of the date. Services delivered before 1 July 2026 still belong to the 2025-26 Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits.

The document changed shape again. The 24 September schedule is laid out as a legal instrument, and its Part 1 states the rules that decide which amount applies:

• where the support is actually delivered, not the participant’s home address;
• the time of day and day of week — and a support that crosses from one time band or day into another, delivered by a single worker, takes the higher of the two amounts for the whole support;
• a group support’s maximum is divided by the number of people in the group;
• every maximum already includes GST.

It lists only supports with a set dollar maximum. The lines without one in the 1 July version — the $1 notional-unit items such as non-labour provider travel and activity-based transport, items listed without a price, quotable supports, and the assistive technology, home modification and consumable lines — aren’t in it. The NDIA’s 2026-27 support catalogue still lists them, and the NDIA says updated pricing and claiming guidance is coming shortly.

What it means for your price book and claims:

• If your price book already carries the 1 July figures, it doesn’t need new numbers — but check, line by line, that it really does, because those figures are now the legal ceiling.
• Keep a copy of the 24 September schedule with your pricing records, and note which version you priced from. The determination adopts the schedule as in force from time to time, so the NDIA can re-issue it — after a Fair Work Commission wage decision, for example — without a new determination. The effective date on the front page is the thing to check.
• Don’t delete lines from your price book because they’re missing from the new schedule. Wait for the NDIA’s updated claiming guidance before you change how you claim non-labour travel, activity-based transport, quotable supports or assistive technology.

The next annual pricing review, for 2027-28 prices, is already open for consultation — until 1 November 2026.

The NDIA renamed its pricing document. What used to be the Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits (PAPL) is now the NDIS Pricing Schedule, effective 1 July 2026 and released on 22 June 2026. It’s not a rebrand for its own sake — the release also carried real cap movements, and the structure of the document itself changed. If your team is still calling it “the PAPL” and working from a file downloaded before 22 June, you’re working from the wrong document.

That schedule has since been re-issued: the version effective 24 September 2026 is the one the Minister’s determination adopts. Its prices are the same — see the update above.

This is the headline nobody wants to say plainly, so here it is: some prices went down.

• Dietetics: down from $188.99 to $178.99
• Exercise physiology: down from $166.99 to $161.99
• The old catch-all line, “Therapy — Other Professional”, dropped roughly 19.5% — from $193.99 to $156.16

At the same time, support work went up, not down:

• Standard weekday daytime support: $73.58 an hour, up from $70.23 — about 4.8%
• Sleepover shifts: $311.79, up from $297.60 — also about 4.8%

And not all of allied health fell: psychology rose, from $232.99 to $252.99 an hour.

Support Coordination Level 2 didn’t move at all — it held at $100.14.

So the honest answer to “did rates go down” is: it depends which line item you’re looking at. Support work rose, and so did psychology. A chunk of allied health fell. Anyone giving you a single yes/no answer hasn’t read the schedule.

This is the change most likely to cost a provider money without anyone noticing.

Therapy is priced per discipline — dietetics has its own line, exercise physiology has its own line, and so on. That was already true in 2025-26; what changed on 1 July is where the old catch-all item sits. “Therapy — Other Professional” still exists, but it fell from $193.99 to $156.16, so it now sits below most of the named discipline lines, and it’s meant to be the exception rather than the default.

The trap is simple, and it runs in the direction most people don’t expect. If your invoicing still routes every therapy claim through that one catch-all code because that’s how your spreadsheet or your habits were set up in 2025-26, you are now under-claiming on any session that should have gone to a named discipline — a dietetics hour billed as “Other Professional” is $22.83 you were entitled to and didn’t ask for. And it’s a claiming problem in its own right: using the general item where a specific one exists is the kind of mismatch the NDIA can query later, regardless of which way the money went.

One carve-out worth knowing before you go changing codes: the Other Professional reduction does not apply to early childhood supports — the Other Early Childhood Professional line holds at $193.99. If you deliver early childhood supports and someone “helpfully” drops your rate to $156.16 to match the news coverage, that’s a real loss for no reason.

One more therapy change from 1 July that a 2025-26 price book won’t have: each therapy line now comes as a set of six item numbers — the direct service line, plus separate cancellation, non-face-to-face, provider travel, NDIA-requested report and telehealth lines, marked by _CA, _NF, _PT, _RR or _TH on the end of the item number. In 2025-26 all of that was claimed against the discipline’s own item number. The travel line carries half the direct rate: Speech Pathologist provider travel is $97.00 an hour against $193.99 for direct service. A price book that holds only the direct service line is missing five of the six.

The fix isn’t complicated, but it requires someone to actually go through your active therapy claims and match each one to the discipline-specific line, not the general one. If a practitioner’s work doesn’t map cleanly to one of the named disciplines, that’s worth a conversation with the participant’s plan manager before you bill anything, not after.

Running an allied health practice? What this means for the admin — pricing each discipline against its own line, recording travel and non-face-to-face time, and running therapy and support work from one price book — is in allied health in an NDIS practice.

The roughly 4.8% lift to weekday and sleepover rates isn’t just a payroll line — it changes what a shift costs against a participant’s plan. If your budget utilisation tracking was set up using 2025-26 caps, every hour of support work booked from 1 July 2026 onward is now costing slightly more against the same plan total. That’s not a crisis, but it does mean a participant’s plan can burn faster than your dashboards assume if those dashboards are still running last year’s numbers.

Sleepover shifts are worth flagging specifically. A jump from $297.60 to $311.79 a sleepover is material across a roster with several sleepovers a week — check that your rostered sleepover count and your budget projections are using the new figure, not the old one.

Support Coordination Level 2 sitting at $100.14 with no movement is genuinely simple — there’s nothing here to reconcile. If you noticed a difference in what you’re being paid for coordination, the schedule isn’t the cause; look elsewhere first (hours claimed, travel, or a billing error).

Here’s the detail that trips people up, because it’s easy to get backwards: the 2026-27 schedule uses a single national price column. The per-state/territory columns you might remember from the 2025-26 support catalogue are the old shape, not the current one.

Practically, that means:

1. Open whatever price book, spreadsheet or system table your organisation actually bills from.
2. Check the column headers. If you see separate columns for different states or territories, you are looking at a 2025-26 file, not the current schedule.
3. If your system or spreadsheet has been updated correctly, you should see one national price per line item, not a state-by-state breakdown.
4. Remote and very remote are the exception, and they still exist. A single national column does not mean a single price for everyone — the schedule still carries higher limits for remote and very remote delivery, and they sit above the national figure rather than in a state column. If you deliver in those areas, check those lines separately.
5. Cross-check three or four line items you bill often — a common support work line, a therapy line, sleepover — against the published 2026-27 figures. If any of them still show the pre-1 July number, don’t assume it’s close enough; fix it before it goes into an invoice run.

This sounds like a small administrative check. It isn’t, because a price book still shaped like 2025-26 will silently misprice every claim that runs through it, and nobody notices until a plan manager or the NDIA queries a batch.

• Confirm your organisation is working from the NDIS Pricing Schedule 2026-27 marked “effective 24 September 2026” for services from that date, not an older PAPL file. The 1 July version (first released 22 June) has the same prices and covers services from 1 July to 23 September.
• Walk through your active therapy claims and re-map anything sitting on the old catch-all code to its correct discipline line — and leave early childhood supports on $193.99.
• Check your therapy lines include the cancellation, non-face-to-face, provider travel, report and telehealth items, not just direct service.
• Update budget utilisation tracking to the new support-worker rates, particularly for sleepover-heavy rosters.
• Check your price book’s column structure — one national price per item, not a state grid — before your next invoice run.

None of this requires new software. It requires someone sitting down with the current schedule and your live price book side by side, for an afternoon, before the next billing cycle goes out.

Corella’s price book holds per-band NDIS items with cap figures your organisation controls and can check line by line, so the matching above — each claim to the right line of the current national schedule — lives in one place, and every invoice run prices from it. Before a claim batch is built, Corella checks every NDIS number against the NDIA’s format and every support item against the Pricing Schedule for the day it was delivered, and names each line to fix first.

If your price book lives in Corella, the NDIS price-update screen is built for that check. Before anything changes, it audits your price book against the current limits — lines over and under the cap, a stored limit that is stale, participant overrides sitting above the cap, and lines you have already billed above it, separated into invoiced and actually claimed — and applying a change is a separate, deliberate step with nothing pre-ticked.

If you want the mechanics of turning delivered shifts into a clean bulk claim, the NDIS claiming guide covers the file format and where the hours disappear.