Updated 19 October 2026. We wrote that the publishing policy carries no revision history, and that is still true. We have now compared three copies of it the Commission has published since August 2025: all are headed Version 2.0 (July 2025), and two later copies changed the wording, one a section reference and one a contact address. We have added a paragraph on this, a line to the methodology note and a source. We still could not find version 1.0. The rest of this story is as published on 10 August.
If you are a participant choosing a provider, or a provider wondering how hard the regulator is pressing, the Commission's public register looks like the place to find out. It is worth knowing what it can and cannot answer before you rely on it.
What the register actually records
We queried the register year by year and then type by type. The type counts sum exactly to the year totals in both years, which is the check that makes the rest of this worth reading.
| Action type | 2024 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compliance notice | 46 | 1,105 | up 2,302 per cent |
| Banning order | 134 | 280 | up 109 per cent |
| Revocation of registration | 177 | 91 | down 49 per cent |
| Refusal to re-register | 0 | 48 | new |
| Suspension of registration | 4 | 8 | up 100 per cent |
| Enforceable undertaking | 1 | 1 | unchanged |
| Total | 362 | 1,533 | up 323 per cent |
Three things stand out, and only the first one matches the headline.
The rise is one instrument. Compliance notices account for 1,059 of the 1,171 additional actions. Every other category combined accounts for the rest.
The most serious sanction went backwards. Revocation of registration is the heavy end of this list: it removes a provider from the scheme. It fell from 177 to 91. Whatever happened in 2025, fewer providers were removed than the year before.
A category that recorded nothing began recording. Refusal to re-register went from zero to 48.
Why none of that proves enforcement increased
Here is the part that decides how much weight the numbers can carry. The register is not a
complete list of what the Commission does. It is a list of what the Commission decides to
publish, and the Commission says so plainly on its own page about publishing regulatory
activity: We assess each action to decide what should be published
.
That alone would make a trend reading shaky. What makes it untenable is the timing. The policy that governs those decisions, the Publishing Regulatory Activity policy, is version 2.0, dated July 2025. The rules about what appears on this register were rewritten in the same year that the count of one published category rose twenty-fourfold.
We cannot tell you what version 2.0 changed, because the published policy carries no revision history and we could not find version 1.0. So we are not asserting that the policy change caused the jump. We are saying something narrower and firmer: a rise in published actions is consistent with more enforcement, with more publishing, or with both, and nothing on the public record separates them.
The missing history matters beyond version 1.0. The Commission has served at least three different copies of version 2.0 since August 2025, created on 25 August 2025, 21 May 2026 and
18 August 2026 according to their file properties, and every one is headed Version 2.0 (July
2025)
. Their wording is not identical. The May 2026 copy replaced each reference to section
73ZS of the NDIS Act, the section it cites for the Provider Register, with section 73ZDA. The
August 2026 copy changed the address for asking to have an expired banning order taken off the
register from internalintegrity@ndiscommission.gov.au to review@ndiscommission.gov.au. Neither
change touches how the Commission decides what to publish, and both are small. They are also
exactly what a revision history is for: a reader holding one copy has no way to tell, from the document, that another exists. The policy page shows a last-updated date, 25 August 2026, but not what changed.
What this means if you are using the register
The register remains genuinely useful for the thing it was built for. If you want to know whether a particular provider or worker has had action taken against them, look them up. That is a factual question about a published record and the register answers it.
What it will not support is a comparison over time. "Enforcement has quadrupled" is the natural sentence to write from these totals and it is not a safe one. Neither is the opposite reading, that halving revocations shows a regulator going soft, since the same publishing caveat cuts both ways.
Our view, labelled as such
Publishing this register at all is the right instinct, and the Commission deserves credit for putting individual decisions in public where a participant can check them.
The gap is that a register presented as a public record invites exactly the trend reading it cannot bear, and nothing on the page warns you. Two small additions would fix it: a note stating that publication is discretionary and that counts across years are therefore not comparable, and a revision history on the publishing policy so a reader can see what changed and when. The second costs nothing. Regulators publish counts of their own activity in annual reports, and those are the numbers to compare over time. This register is a lookup tool, and it should say so.