The Commission states that The new NDIS Commission portal launches on 12 October 2026. Ten days from today. It also states that What changes is the system you use to complete that work.

The deadline that has already gone

The checklist sets out three things to do. The third is headed Step 3: Check your user list before 1 October 2026, and the reason the date matters is stated immediately after it: Any changes made in the existing portal after 1 October may not be reflected in the new portal when it launches.

So a provider acting on this checklist today, which is the first day a reader could find it after that date, is already outside the window for the one step with the earlier deadline. Anything done to staff accounts in the existing portal from now until launch may simply not arrive. The page carries a last-updated date of 1 October 2026, the same day that window closed.

This is not a criticism of the Commission for publishing a date. It is the practical position a provider is in, and it is not obvious from a page that presents three steps as a sequence a reader can still work through.

The one with a consequence you cannot undo

Under behaviour support, the instruction is to submit anything in draft, because Drafts will be removed on 12 October and cannot be recovered.

That is the hardest sentence on the page. A behaviour support plan in draft represents clinical work, and in some cases it is the document standing between a restrictive practice and an unauthorised one. Ten days is enough time, but only for a provider who reads this. Monthly reporting on plans that are already active or partially active continues in the existing portal, so the draft deletion is the only part of behaviour support that is destructive.

Roles do not carry across, and that is a safeguarding problem rather than an IT one

Every active account transfers: the Commission says Only active accounts will be transferred to the new portal. What does not transfer cleanly is what those accounts can do. Roles do not map one-to-one between the two portals.

The roles named include Worker Screening Officer, Behaviour Support Lodgement Officer, Restrictive Practice Reporting Officer and Reportable Incidents Officer, and the Commission asks providers to Make sure at least one active staff member is assigned to each role your organisation needs. Read against the role names, that is the real content of the warning: on 12 October an organisation can find nobody holds the role that lodges a reportable incident, and discover it at the moment it needs to lodge one.

The trap that outlasts the cutover

The sentence with the longest tail is about neither date: User accounts are managed separately in each portal. And then: From 12 October, if you create or deactivate a user in one portal, you must also make the same change in the other.

During the dual-running period, deactivating a departed worker in one portal leaves that worker active in the other. For a regulator whose statutory purpose is participant safety, that is a notable thing for a provider to have to remember twice, and it persists for as long as both portals are open, which the checklist does not put an end date on. It is stated once, in the user-accounts section, rather than anywhere a provider offboarding a worker would be looking.

What stays where, for the period both are open

The division is by whether work had started, not by type. Re-registration applications, both submitted and draft, stay in the existing portal until finalised. Reportable incidents lodged before 12 October stay there until closed. Audits started before 12 October stay there until complete, while Periodic audits due from 12 October that are not yet scheduled must be booked in the new portal. Worker screening moves wholesale from 12 October, with the same rule that anything begun earlier is finished where it began.

The useful summary is that the existing portal becomes a place to finish things and the new one a place to start them, with the exception that already-active behaviour support reporting stays behind.

How we read this. Every quotation above is from the Commission’s own checklist page for registered providers, read on 2 October 2026, and the page states it was last updated 1 October 2026. The dates in our own copy were calculated against 2 October 2026 rather than carried over from the source, so ten days means ten days from the day this was published. We have not tested either portal and make no claim about how they behave; everything here is what the regulator says will happen. The readings that are ours rather than the Commission’s, namely that the role mapping is a safeguarding exposure and that dual user management is easy to forget while offboarding, are flagged as ours in the text.

Sources

  • NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, Checklist of what to do before 12 October. Read 2 October 2026; the page states it was last updated 1 October 2026. Source of every quotation in this story, including the launch date, the three steps, the draft deletion, the role mapping, the account separation and the audit and worker screening arrangements.