NDIS Pricing Arrangements 2025-26: A Sydney Guide for Families

The NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits 2025-26 set the maximum prices, claiming rules, and regional loadings that every registered provider must follow, and understanding them helps you check that your own invoices in Sydney are actually within the rules.

What the Pricing Arrangements actually cover

The NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits document, published by the NDIA with Version 1.0 released in June 2025 and an updated Version 1.1 in October 2025, sets maximum prices for therapy, support worker rates, travel, and cancellation billing, along with loadings for metropolitan, regional, and remote areas. It is the single reference point that determines whether an NDIS provider's hourly rate is compliant or inflated.

Core Supports: the four categories

Core Supports are typically the largest part of a participant's plan, and the 2025-26 arrangements organise them into four categories:

• Assistance with Daily Life, covering personal care, household tasks, and meal preparation, with clearer guidance this year on exactly what is and is not included.
• Transport, with updated per-kilometre rates reflecting current vehicle running costs.
• Consumables, including an expanded list of eligible low-cost assistive technology and daily living items.
• Assistance with Social and Community Participation, with more flexibility around group support ratios and weekend community access.

If you are reviewing an invoice and a line item does not clearly map to one of these four categories, it is worth asking your provider to explain which category it falls under and why.

Capacity Building: building skills, not just delivering hours

Capacity Building supports are funded differently to Core Supports. Rather than paying for direct daily assistance, Capacity Building funds things like Support Coordination, Specialist Support Coordination, and allied health input aimed at building your independence over time. Support Coordination and Specialist Support Coordination sit under Capacity Building, and their rates are typically higher than Core Support rates because they require a different skill set and qualification level from the person delivering them.

What to check on your own plan and invoices

A few practical checks worth doing at your next plan review or when you receive an invoice:

• Does the hourly rate match the category the support sits under, weekday, Saturday, Sunday, or public holiday rates all differ, and providers should be applying the correct one for when the support was actually delivered.
• Are transport charges itemised separately from support worker time, rather than bundled into a single unclear figure?
• If you are using Support Coordination funding, is the invoice clearly distinguishing between standard Support Coordination and Specialist Support Coordination, since the rate difference is substantial?

At LYD NDIS, our own pricing is published in line with the current NDIS Pricing Arrangements and broken down by weekday, Saturday, Sunday, and public holiday rates so participants and Support Coordinators can check it against their own plan without needing to ask.

How to read the budget breakdown in your own plan

Every NDIS plan lists funded supports as a total dollar figure per category, not as a number of hours. This trips up a lot of families at first, since a Core Supports budget of, for example, 20,000 dollars a year does not translate to a fixed weekly hour allocation, it depends entirely on which rate applies to the support delivered. A participant using mostly weekday Assistance with Daily Life will get more total hours from the same budget than one relying heavily on weekend or public holiday support, simply because the per-hour rate is higher on weekends.

This is worth working through with your provider or Support Coordinator at the start of a plan, not partway through the year when funding runs low unexpectedly. Ask for a rough weekly or fortnightly hour estimate based on your actual support pattern, not just the total annual figure, so you can pace your usage across the full plan period.

For NDIS business owners: pricing transparency is a trust signal

If you operate an NDIS business in NSW, publishing a clear, itemised pricing page that mirrors the current NDIS Pricing Arrangements is one of the simplest ways to build trust with prospective participants and Support Coordinators before they ever call you. It also happens to be exactly the kind of page structure a search-optimised, AI-integrated website should include from day one, which is one reason a ready-built platform like VCPility bakes a compliant pricing page into every site it launches rather than treating it as an afterthought.

Frequently Asked Questions