The new document set

The NDIA’s pricing arrangements page now states it plainly: “The NDIS pricing schedule sets out information about what we consider to be the appropriate and reasonable maximum prices for all NDIS supports. You can use the pricing schedule to inform your prices from 1 July 2026.” The schedule is a prices-only document. The old combined PAPL survives only as history: the 2025-26 edition sits under “other documents and addendums” as a reference, the last of its line.

Around the schedule, the agency now publishes:

  • The annual pricing review report, released separately for 2026-27, carrying the analysis and guidance that once travelled inside the PAPL. The pricing updates page: “We’ve released the annual pricing review (APR). It provides guidance on what we consider appropriate NDIS prices for 2026-27. We’ve also released a pricing schedule.”
  • A disability support worker cost model 2026-27, new for this cycle and separately published, which the agency describes as estimating “the cost for delivering a billable hour of support”: the workings under the price caps, now a citable document in its own right.
  • Standalone addenda: the SDA pricing arrangements, the bereavement addendum, and the assistive technology, home modifications and consumables code guide (effective 24 November 2025).

For providers the practical effect is that price checking, price justification and cost benchmarking now cite three different documents with three different update rhythms. That is more navigable than the old 100-plus-page hybrid once you know the split, and considerably easier to miss an update in if you do not.

The consultation behind the 2026-27 prices

Section 4.7 of the NDIA’s Q3 2025-26 Quarterly Report describes this year’s pricing review as “the most extensive engagement for an Annual Pricing Review (APR) to date”: 7,644 visits to the new NDIS Engage platform, 3,076 survey responses, of which 2,519 came from providers, “predominantly small and sole-trader businesses, primarily therapy providers”, plus 156 written submissions. The same section records consultation with states and territories on “modifications to the pricing rules to support thin markets… in regional Australia”, the problem our market-concentration analysis quantifies district by district.

Who the prices govern is worth restating from the same report: of the $12.4 billion paid in the March 2026 quarter, 64 per cent was managed by plan managers, 27 per cent by the NDIA and 9 per cent self-managed, and the report notes that unregistered providers “make up 92% of the service provider market and receive 41% of the $7.8 billion” overseen by plan managers. Price caps are, in practice, small-business economics: the 2,519 small-provider survey responses came from exactly the cohort with the least buffer against a mispriced line item.

The Bill’s quiet pricing clause

The pricing updates page carries the sentence with the longest shadow, quoted here in full: “On 14 May 2026 the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 (Bill) was introduced into Parliament. The Bill proposes to provide the Minister for the NDIS with the power to make a pricing determination. This year’s APR sets out guidance and views regarding appropriate NDIS prices. It is anticipated the APR will inform any advice provided by us to the Minister for the NDIS on pricing, if the Bill is subsequently passed.”

Read carefully, that is a change of constitutional texture for scheme pricing. Today, price caps are set by the NDIA as scheme administrator. Under the Bill, the binding instrument would be the Minister’s determination, with the agency’s review reduced to advice feeding it. Whether that is better discipline or more political pricing is a question the sector’s peaks are contesting as part of the wider Bill debate, which we cover, positions side by side, in the Bill, decoded. The Senate committee’s final report is due 14 August; if the Bill passes, the 2027-28 price cycle would be the first that could run under a ministerial determination.

The scale at stake, from the agency’s own quarterly report: $50.1 billion in support provided in the 12 months to 31 March 2026, with payments up 27 per cent over two years, and average payments per participant rising from $66,200 to $69,800 (5.4 per cent) in the year to March 2026. Every one of those dollars moves at a price this architecture sets.

Methodology

Document names, effective dates and quoted passages are from the NDIA’s pricing arrangements and pricing updates pages and the linked documents (the NDIS pricing schedule effective 1 July 2026, the annual pricing review for 2026-27, the disability support worker cost model 2026-27, and the AT, home modifications and consumables code guide effective 24 November 2025), read on 19 July 2026, with the pricing schedule PDF held on file. Consultation, payment-split and growth figures are from Section 4.7 and the financial-sustainability sections of the NDIA’s Quarterly Report to Disability Ministers Q3 2025-26 (covering 1 January to 31 March 2026), Summary Part A, downloaded and read in full. Nothing here is sourced from secondary reporting.

Primary sources

  1. NDIA, pricing arrangements (the NDIS pricing schedule, effective 1 July 2026)
  2. NDIA, pricing updates (APR release; the Bill’s proposed pricing determination power)
  3. NDIS pricing schedule 2026-27 (PDF)
  4. NDIA, Quarterly Report to Disability Ministers Q3 2025-26, Summary Part A (PDF)
  5. NDIA, assistive technology, home modifications and consumables code guide 2025-26 (PDF, effective 24 November 2025)
  6. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill 2026