Who the complaints are about
The scheme has a Quality and Safeguards Commission for complaints about providers, and a good deal of public debate concerns provider conduct. The agency’s own complaints ledger describes something else.
| Complaint is about | Complaints | Share |
|---|---|---|
| The Agency | 284,794 | 90.2% |
| Service providers | 19,375 | 6.1% |
| Local Area Coordination partner | 6,983 | 2.2% |
| Early Connections partner | 1,293 | 0.4% |
| Unclassified | 3,326 | 1.1% |
| All participant complaints | 315,771 | 100% |
Shares computed by us from the published counts. The same table records 155,323 unique complainants behind those 315,771 complaints, so the average complainant has lodged about two.
This is not evidence that providers behave well. It is evidence about where people take a complaint, and the two are different. A participant unhappy with a provider has somewhere else to go; a participant unhappy with a plan, a decision or a wait has only the agency that made it. The ledger measures the agency’s own front counter, and that is the honest reading of it.
What they are about
The agency classifies complaints about itself by subject. Of 309,272 unique complaints about the Agency, these are the largest categories.
| Subject | Complaints | Share |
|---|---|---|
| NDIA Timeliness | 90,443 | 29% |
| NDIA Plan | 68,652 | 22% |
| NDIA Process | 31,480 | 10% |
| NDIA Finance | 23,293 | 8% |
| NDIA Staff | 22,834 | 7% |
| Timeliness (separate category) | 17,837 | 6% |
| Other | 14,990 | 5% |
| NDIA Resources | 7,699 | 2% |
| NDIA Access | 7,442 | 2% |
Shares as published. The table carries two separate timeliness categories, NDIA Timeliness and a plain Timeliness, and we have listed both rather than merging them, because the supplement does not say how they differ. Together they are 108,280 complaints, 35 per cent. Smaller categories are omitted here and several are suppressed in the source, which withholds counts below 11.
Timeliness is the largest single subject on either reading. Not the adequacy of a plan, not staff conduct, not money. How long things take.
Which connects directly to the other half of the same release
We reported on 17 August that the agency’s Participant Service Guarantee performance splits cleanly: it meets its access deadlines 95 to 99 per cent of the time, and misses the ones attached to changing an existing plan. Deciding a participant-requested reassessment inside 21 days runs at 32.1 per cent, amending a plan at 44.3, completing an internal review at 48.5.
Our reading, offered as a view. Those two datasets sit in the same spreadsheet and describe the same thing from opposite ends. One counts the statutory deadlines the agency misses. The other counts what participants complain about most, and the answer is delay. That is not a coincidence worth being coy about, though it is also not proof that the missed deadlines caused those particular complaints, because nothing in the release joins a complaint to a task. What can be said is that the agency’s largest complaint category and its weakest performance measures are about the same thing.
The collapse, and the recovery
The handling data is the part that has moved most, and it moved twice.
| Quarter ending | Closed within 21 days | Open complaints | Open more than 21 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 June 2023 | 76.5% | 1,705 | 14.3% |
| 31 March 2024 | 39.1% | 8,432 | 50.9% |
| 30 June 2024 | 35.8% | 8,059 | 55.9% |
| 31 December 2024 | 74.4% | 1,957 | 26.7% |
| 30 June 2025 | 90.0% | 3,183 | 3.5% |
| 31 March 2026 | 85.6% | 1,411 | 4.2% |
| 30 June 2026 | 96.4% | 966 | 5.4% |
Selected quarters from a thirteen-quarter series beginning June 2023. The June 2026 quarter is the best on closure rate and the lowest on open complaints.
In the middle of 2024 the agency was closing roughly one complaint in three within 21 days, and more than half of everything still open had been open longer than that. Two years later it closes 96.4 per cent inside the window and has 966 complaints open. That is a large operational recovery and it deserves to be said as plainly as the failure does.
Participant Critical Incidents, a separate and more serious category, followed a shallower version of the same curve: 97.4 per cent closed within 21 days in the June 2023 quarter, a low of 80.6 per cent in June 2024, and 93.3 per cent in June 2026, with 282 open.
How complaints end
Of 343,510 recorded outcomes, 222,622, or 64.8 per cent, are logged as “Desired Action Completed”. A further 14,947 received a formal reply, and 8,517 are classified simply as “Complaint”. Two categories are worth noting because they are empty: referrals to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, and referrals to a state or territory authority, are both recorded as zero, in every quarter of the series.
We are not going to tell you what that means, because the supplement does not. A zero can mean no complaint was ever referred, or it can mean referrals are tracked somewhere other than this field. It is a reasonable thing to ask the agency, and we have not asked it.
Methodology
Every figure is read by us from the NDIA’s Supplement E (National) for Q4 2025-26, downloaded 17 August 2026, Tables E.71, E.72, E.73, E.80 and E.81. Counts are as published. Percentages are as published where the source gives them, and computed from published counts where marked, in which case they are rounded to one decimal place.
Two different denominators, deliberately not merged. The 90.2 per cent figure comes from E.73, which splits complaints by who made them, and its participant total is 315,771. The subject breakdown comes from E.80, which counts unique complaints by type and gives an Agency total of 309,272. Those totals are close but not the same measure, so a share from one table must not be applied to the other, and we have not done so.
On suppression. The NDIA withholds counts below 11 and publishes some cells only as a ceiling. Several small categories in E.80 and E.81 appear as fewer-than values; we have used published totals where available and have not estimated any suppressed cell.
What we have not established. Nothing in the release joins a complaint to a task, a plan or an outcome, so it cannot show whether a missed deadline produced a particular complaint. It also does not say how long a complaint takes beyond whether it beat 21 days. We have not put any of this to the NDIA, and we would publish a response.
Primary sources
- NDIA, Supplement E National 2025-26 Q4 (XLSX, downloaded 17 August 2026 from the quarterly report supplements page): Table E.71 (open and closed complaints over time), E.72 (Participant Critical Incidents over time), E.73 (complaints and PCIs by quarter, including the split by who the complaint is about and the unique complainant count), E.80 (unique complaints by type, the subject breakdown and the Agency total of 309,272) and E.81 (actual outcomes, including the two referral categories recorded as zero).
- The Scheme Brief, Two NDIS deadlines are both 21 days. The agency meets one 96 per cent of the time and the other 32 (17 August 2026): the Participant Service Guarantee figures used in the comparison above.
- The Scheme Brief, Of 29,991 closed NDIS tribunal cases, 892 reached a decision (18 August 2026): the tribunal end of the same dispute pathway.
Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us and we will check it against the sources above and log the outcome.