The 2026-27 NDIS Pricing Schedule: what changed, and what it means for your claims

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.

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 support: roughly $73.58, up about 4.8%
• Sleepover shifts: roughly $311.79, similarly up about 4.8%

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. 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 now priced per discipline — dietetics has its own line, exercise physiology has its own line, and so on. The old catch-all item, “Therapy — Other Professional”, still exists, but at $156.16 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.

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.

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 the old rate to roughly $311.79 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 are the old 2025-26 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 document released 22 June 2026, not an older PAPL file.
• 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.
• 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 — it doesn’t make the pricing schedule decisions for you, and it won’t catch a therapy claim routed to the wrong discipline unless someone’s set the item up correctly in the first place. The work above — matching your claims to the current national schedule — is still yours to do; a price book only helps if what’s loaded into it is right.

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.