NDIS SIL price guide 2026‑27

The SIL funding gap explained

There is one comparison on this page that rests entirely on published figures, and it is the one worth understanding. Both sides of it are documents you can download: the NDIS price limit for each shift type, and the SCHADS base rate and penalty multiplier for the same period. Everything below is those two numbers and division.

Gross margin compresses across penalty shifts

The NDIS and the SCHADS Award both price a Sunday above a Tuesday, but they do not price it above by the same amount, and the award moves further. Set each shift type’s price limit as a multiple of the weekday daytime limit, and set each shift type’s award rate as a multiple of the base rate, and the two ladders separate as you climb them.

Showing the working, so you can check it. NDIS multiple = that row’s price limit divided by the weekday daytime limit ($73.58). For a public holiday, $163.46 ÷ $73.58 = 2.22. Award multiple is the SCHADS penalty itself, published in the pay guide. Award ahead by = award multiple ÷ NDIS multiple, so 2.500 ÷ 2.22 = 1.126, about 13%. Gross margin = (price limit − base wage) ÷ price limit, so ($163.46 − $101.23) ÷ $163.46 = 38.1%. Level 3, Pay Point 1 permanent benchmark, 1:1 ratio, non-remote.

The result is the most useful figure on this page: gross margin compresses from about 45% on a weekday daytime hour to about 38% on a public holiday hour, because the award multipliers run roughly 6% to 13% ahead of the NDIS ones across the penalty rows. That is not a modelling assumption. It is two published rate cards divided by each other, and it holds regardless of what any individual provider’s cost base looks like.

One caveat on reading those percentages: they are struck against a Level 3, Pay Point 1 base. At a Level 2 base the gross margin percentages would be wider, though the compression pattern between shift types is unchanged, because it is driven by the multipliers rather than the pay point.

What a provider actually nets, this page cannot tell you

Gross margin is not profit. What is left after the true cost of employing the worker depends on that provider’s own employment on-cost, and that figure varies too materially between providers for any published number to be meaningful. It moves with permanent-to-casual mix, with whether the provider is over its state’s payroll tax threshold, with accrued leave liability and the five weeks that SCHADS gives seven-day shift workers, with workers compensation claims history, and with how much training, supervision, and quality overhead sits behind each rostered hour.

So apply your own on-cost figure, taken from your own payroll and general ledger, rather than a sector rule of thumb. The rules of thumb in circulation disagree with each other by a wide margin, and a single multiplier applied uniformly across a roster will misstate some shifts in one direction and some in the other. This page deliberately stops at the published numbers.

It is worth being clear about where the real risk sits in any case, because it is not the rate card. The forces that actually determine whether a SIL house makes money are operational: fill cost and agency backfill on the shifts nobody wants, vacancy, ratio drift between what is delivered and what is quoted, and stale SIL quotes that were never re-submitted when a participant’s needs escalated. Those are covered below, and they dwarf the difference between a 45% and a 38% gross margin.

Sleepover economics: what the $311.79 actually funds

The sleepover item is the most commonly misread line in SIL. Set the $311.79 price limit against the $62.87 SCHADS allowance and it looks like roughly $249 a night of profit. It is not. The two figures are not comparable, because the NDIS item price is not funding the allowance alone. It is priced to cover the SCHADS sleepover allowance, on-costs on that allowance, up to two hours of active support during the night, and the after-hours infrastructure that sits behind an occupied house - on-call management, supervision, sleeping accommodation, rostering, and the quality and compliance obligations that do not stop at 10pm.

The two included hours are the part most often missed. The sleepover item covers an overnight period of up to eight hours and includes up to two hours of active support within it. The third and subsequent hours are claimable separately - at Saturday rates where the sleepover falls on a weekday, or at the applicable rate on other days. The Saturday reference is not a typo: the NDIS pricing arrangements use the Saturday item as the proxy price for unsociable overnight time on a weekday, rather than the weekday night item. So revenue is fixed for the first two hours of work and only starts moving after that, while wage cost starts moving from the first disturbance.

That wage cost is the other half of the picture, and it is much higher than most margin models assume. Under SCHADS clause 25.7(e), work performed during a sleepover is paid at the prescribed overtime rate - not the ordinary penalty rate for that time of day - with a minimum payment as for one hour worked. Overtime under clause 28.1 is 150% for the first two hours on a weekday, 200% on a Sunday, and 250% on a public holiday. A twenty-minute 3am call-out is therefore not twenty minutes of wage: it is a full hour, at overtime.

Put the two rules side by side and the structure of the sleepover item becomes clear, without needing to model anyone’s cost base:

• --Revenue is fixed for the first two hours of active support. Those hours are already inside the $311.79. However many disturbances fall within them, the claim does not move
• --Wage cost starts moving from the very first disturbance, and it moves at overtime rates, with a full hour paid even for a few minutes of work
• --Revenue only starts moving from the third hour onward, and by then the wage cost has been accruing at overtime for two hours already

That asymmetry is the thing to understand about sleepovers, and it is entirely a consequence of the two published rules. A settled participant and a participant with three disturbances a night attract exactly the same claim, while costing very different amounts to support.

So the position on any given sleepover turns on the participant’s disturbance profile, which is a clinical fact about that person rather than a rostering choice. A participant with three disturbances a night, several nights a week, is very likely telling you the Roster of Care needs to be reviewed for an active night arrangement - and that review is the correct response, not absorbing the cost quietly.

Sleepover or active night: the test is about the worker

A sleepover is a period where the worker is required to be available at the premises but is permitted to sleep. That is the whole test, and it is a test about the worker’s obligation, not about the participant’s diagnosis. A sleepover is not the same as “no overnight support”. A participant who needs help to the toilet twice a week at 3am is a textbook sleepover; that support is delivered and paid for through disturbance payments.

An active night is required where the worker must be awake and working throughout the period. That points to specific, assessable needs:

• --Continuous seizure monitoring
• --Two-hourly repositioning
• --Overnight PEG or enteral feeding regimes
• --Suctioning or other airway management
• --Wandering with a falls or absconding risk
• --Overnight behaviours of concern requiring active response
• --A behaviour support plan or restrictive practice authorisation requiring line-of-sight observation

“Frequent” is not a test. Neither is provider preference. Whether a night is rostered as a sleepover or an active night is set in the participant’s Roster of Care and their agreed SIL quote, informed by assessed need from an occupational therapist, behaviour support practitioner, or nurse, and reviewed when the participant’s needs change. A provider does not make that call unilaterally - and if the overnight pattern has changed in practice, the correct response is to re-submit the quote, not to absorb it or to keep claiming the old arrangement.

Getting it wrong: three failure modes, three regulators

A wrongly classified overnight is often described as one risk. It is three, and they are answerable to three different bodies. A provider can be exposed on one, two, or all three at once, and remedying one does not remedy the others.

• --Wage underpayment. If the worker was in fact working rather than sleeping, they have been underpaid, and back-pay is owed with interest. This is a Fair Work matter - the Fair Work Ombudsman, or a claim brought by the worker or their union. It is a wage debt, not a billing correction.
• --Incorrect claiming. Claiming a sleepover item while delivering active support is a claiming error against the NDIA. It is handled through NDIA payment assurance and recovery of the overclaimed amount, and where it is systematic or knowing it can be treated as fraud.
• --Adequacy of support. Whether the overnight arrangement actually meets the participant's assessed need is a quality and safeguarding question, and it belongs to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. Paying the worker correctly and claiming correctly does not answer it.

Where SCHADS and NDIS boundaries do not line up

The NDIS time bands are defined by the clock hour. Weekday daytime runs 6:00am to 8:00pm, weekday evening runs 8:00pm to midnight, and night runs midnight to 6:00am. Each hour is claimed against the band it falls in.

SCHADS afternoon shift is defined by the shift. A shift that finishes after 8:00pm and at or before midnight attracts the 112.5% afternoon penalty across every hour of that shift, including the hours worked in the afternoon. These are not the same kind of rule, and they do not resolve to the same answer.

A 2:00pm to 10:00pm shift makes the mismatch concrete. Under SCHADS the worker is paid 112.5% for all eight hours. Under NDIS the provider claims six hours at the weekday daytime limit and two hours at the weekday evening limit. Cost is uplifted across the whole shift; revenue is uplifted across a quarter of it. That is a real and recurring margin leak, and it compounds across every evening-finishing shift in a 24/7 roster.

SCHADS night shift is defined the same way - by the shift, not the hour - and this is the case a SIL house runs every single night. A 10:00pm to 6:00am active night attracts the 115% night penalty across all eight hours under SCHADS, a wage cost of $372.48 at this benchmark. Under NDIS it does not claim as eight night hours: the first two fall before midnight and claim at the weekday evening limit, and only the remaining six claim at the night limit. That is 2 × $81.07 plus 6 × $82.57, or $657.56, against the $660.56 a uniform eight-hour night claim would suggest - a $3.00 shortfall per shift.

Three dollars a night is small, and it is worth saying so rather than dressing it up: the NDIS evening and night limits happen to sit close together, so this particular mismatch is mild. The afternoon case is the expensive one. But the structural point holds for both, and it is the point that matters operationally - one SCHADS rule covers the whole shift, two NDIS prices cover its hours, and no single rate lookup gives you the answer. It only surfaces when the roster is costed shift by shift at the point it is built, which is exactly the problem a rostering system exists to solve.

The 6:00am start is a cliff, not a slope

Here is the expensive version of the same mismatch, and it is the one most likely to be quietly costing a SIL house money right now. Under SCHADS clause 29.3(b), a night shift is one that finishes after midnight or commences before 6:00am Monday to Friday - and the 15% night loading then applies to the whole shift, not merely the minutes worked before 6:00am. NDIS still prices by the clock hour: night up to 6:00am, weekday daytime from 6:00am to 8:00pm.

Compare two morning shifts at this page’s benchmark, using published wage and limit figures only:

• --6:00am - 2:00pm: wages 8 x $40.49 = $323.92. Claimable 8 x $73.58 = $588.64
• --5:30am - 1:30pm: wages 8 x $46.56 = $372.48, because the night loading now attaches to all eight hours. Claimable 0.5 x $82.57 + 7.5 x $73.58 = $593.14

Starting thirty minutes earlier costs $48.56 more in wages and returns $4.50 more in revenue - a swing of about $44 per shift, per house, every weekday morning. Nothing about the support delivered has changed. The roster crossed a boundary.

This matters more than it first appears because SIL morning routines cluster exactly on that boundary: showers, medication rounds, breakfast, and getting residents out to day programs and supported employment. Coordinators routinely set a 5:30am or 5:45am start for convenience, or because that is how the roster has always run, without ever seeing what the half hour costs. The practical rule is to start at 6:00am unless the participant’s assessed need genuinely requires earlier - and where it does, that requirement belongs in the Roster of Care and the SIL quote, where it can be funded rather than absorbed.

What this actually means for a SIL operation

Gross margin percentage does compress across the roster. At this benchmark, a weekday daytime hour returns 45% of the price limit before on-costs and a public holiday hour returns 38%. (Both percentages would be wider at a Level 2 base - the “floor rather than forecast” caveat applies to these figures too.) The compression is real and it has a clean cause: the SCHADS multipliers run ahead of the NDIS ones. SCHADS pays 1.50 on a Saturday against an NDIS uplift of 1.41, 2.00 on a Sunday against 1.81, and 2.50 on a public holiday against 2.22 - the award multiplier sits roughly 6% to 13% ahead across the penalty rows. This is the single most useful figure on the page for anyone modelling a 24/7 roster, and it is the one that needs no assumptions to stand up.

What that compression leaves a provider with, in net terms, is a question this page cannot answer for you: it depends on your own employment on-cost, which varies materially with permanent-to-casual mix, payroll tax threshold, and leave liability. Apply your own figure. But it is worth being clear that gross margin compression is not, by itself, the reason SIL houses lose money. The things that actually decide it are operational, and they sit further up the chain than the rate card.

The squeeze on Sunday and public holiday cover is not the rate. It is fill cost. Nobody wants the Christmas Day sleepover or the 6:00am Sunday start. The shifts that go unfilled are filled at a premium: overtime, incentives, or agency. Agency backfill on a public holiday routinely exceeds the NDIS price limit outright - the provider pays more for the hour than it can ever claim for it, the difference is unrecoverable, and the house has to be staffed regardless. That is the mechanism that turns penalty shifts into losses, and it is a workforce and rostering problem, not a pricing one.

Public holidays are also disproportionately casual-staffed, and the casual position is frequently miscalculated in both directions. Under SCHADS, casual penalty rates are calculated on the ordinary hourly rate with the 25% casual loading added, not compounded on top of the penalty multiplier: the casual public holiday rate is 275%, that is base × (2.50 + 0.25), not 250% × 1.25. Getting that one wrong overstates the cost of every casual public holiday hour in the roster.

The genuine margin killers in a SIL operation sit further up the chain than the penalty rate:

• --Vacancy - an empty bed in a four-bed house dwarfs any penalty rate on this page. The offset is that the remaining residents are effectively supported at a richer ratio, which claims at a higher per-participant rate, so the loss is not simply a quarter of revenue. The real damage is the lag: the ratio has to be re-assessed and the SIL quotes re-agreed before any of that is claimable, and the house is fully staffed throughout
• --Ratio drift - delivering 1:1 while quoting and claiming 1:2 is under-recovery, and you simply lose the money. Delivering 1:2 while claiming 1:1 is overclaiming, and that is the audit finding
• --Agency dependency - premium hourly cost, no leave accrual benefit, and a rate that can sit above the claimable limit
• --Permanent-to-casual mix - casuals carry a lower on-cost but a higher hourly rate, and the balance point moves with your roster stability
• --Unclaimable time - handover, medication rounds, incident documentation, and team meetings are real hours that mostly do not appear on a claim
• --A stale SIL quote - failing to re-submit when a participant's needs escalate means delivering an increased level of support against funding set for the old one

All of which is determined at the rostering stage, not at the billing stage. Providers who cost a shift when they build it - against the right award level, the right ratio, and the participant’s actual Roster of Care - can see a loss-making pattern while it is still a draft roster. Providers who review margin at the claim stage find out a month later, after the money is already spent.