At 31 March 2026 the scheme had 774,456 participants and 277,376 active providers — fewer than three participants per provider, on our arithmetic on the NDIA’s published totals. Nobody wins a market that fragmented by advertising nationally. You win it inside one catchment, against the handful of providers a coordinator can actually name. What that takes is different for every provider type, and this page is where you find yours.
The most expensive mistake in NDIS marketing is treating every support like a consumer purchase. It rarely is. The person receiving the support is often not the person choosing the provider, and who does the choosing changes completely with the service. Get that wrong and you buy attention from people who cannot hire you.
Sixty seconds of self-selection saves you reading four pages that do not apply. Find the sentence that sounds like your business.
| If this is the sentence you would say out loud | Read this |
|---|---|
| “I have beds sitting empty and I cannot get coordinators to look at them.” | SIL provider marketing |
| “My caseload is under capacity and nobody in my region knows I exist.” | Support coordinator marketing |
| “My clinicians have gaps in their diaries and referrals arrive at random.” | Allied health referral growth |
| “I want more participants on the book without adding staff at the same rate.” | Plan management marketing |
| “I am registered and audited and I have had zero enquiries.” | New and startup providers |
| “I deliver something else — SDA, respite, transport, community participation, cleaning, behaviour support.” | Tell us what you deliver |
Delivering more than one of these? Start with the service line that carries the most revenue — that is the constraint your marketing has to solve first.
Not five versions of the same campaign. Five genuinely different constraints, each with its own page.
Who: you run supported independent living homes or specialist disability accommodation, and revenue is decided by how many places are occupied.
The number that defines it: average SIL payments reached $447,100 per participant over the year to 31 March 2026 across 36,808 participants. SIL payments are growing about 11% a year while SIL participant numbers grow about 4%, so each place is worth more every year — and every empty day costs more.
What we do: catchment-level vacancy SEO, targeted vacancy ads, and direct outreach to the support coordinators and hospital discharge planners who actually place people. Measured on placements and time-to-fill.
Who: you coordinate supports for participants, usually at Level 2, and you are paid for billable hours delivered.
The number that defines it: your hourly rate is a fixed NDIA price limit. You cannot grow by charging more, only by holding more participants and losing fewer hours to admin — which makes visibility at the moment a planner or participant is choosing the whole game.
What we do: Google Business Profile and local search so you appear for “support coordinator near me”, specialisation pages that attract the referrals you actually want, and light, regular visibility with the LACs, planners and providers in your region.
Who: OT, physiotherapy, speech pathology, psychology and exercise physiology practices with NDIS caseload.
The number that defines it: clinician hours. Therapy price limits are set by the NDIS Pricing Schedule, so you cannot raise the fee — an unfilled hour on a diary is revenue that never comes back, and a new hire with a half-empty caseload drains the practice.
What we do: build the referrer pathways first — support coordinators, plan managers, GPs, paediatricians, schools — then discipline-and-suburb search for the families who look directly. Growth is pointed at the disciplines with capacity, not at a waitlist.
Who: you manage participants’ funding and pay their providers, on a fixed monthly fee per participant.
The number that defines it: 526,376 participants used a plan manager at 31 March 2026, served by only around 1,481 plan managers. Demand is compounding against a flat number of firms — but a fixed fee per participant puts a hard ceiling on what you can pay to win one.
What we do: referrer trust with coordinators and the providers you pay, decision-moment search at plan activation, reassessment and switching, and a signup that converts comparers. Every channel is run against a cost-per-signed-participant ceiling derived from your fee.
Who: you have just registered, or you are about to, and the certificate has not produced a single enquiry.
The number that defines it: zero. No reviews, no rankings, no referrer relationships and no history — you are one of 277,376 active providers with nothing yet to distinguish you. Everything has to be built before anything compounds.
What we do: the foundations in order — an accessible website that says what you do and where, Google Business Profile, the directories coordinators actually use, then introductions to coordinators in your region. Ads come after the foundations convert, not before.
Who: SDA on its own, respite and short-term accommodation, community participation, transport, cleaning and gardening, early childhood supports, behaviour support.
The pattern still holds: either a referrer places the participant with you, or the participant and their family choose you directly from a local search. Almost every registration group falls into one of those two.
What we do: work out which pattern applies to your supports, in your regions, and build for that one rather than selling you both.
This is the table nobody publishes: how participants actually arrive, what genuinely limits your growth, and where the marketing money should go first. Everything on the individual pages follows from its row here.
Swipe the table sideways to see all five columns.
| Provider type | How participants actually arrive | The binding constraint | Channel that carries the most weight | What to measure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SIL & SDA | Support coordinators shortlisting homes, hospital discharge planners, families researching for someone else | Compatible vacancies, not demand. A place suits only some participants, so the field narrows before price ever comes up | Direct coordinator and discharge-planner outreach, backed by suburb-level vacancy pages | Placements and time-to-fill |
| Support coordination | LACs and planners handing over options, participant word of mouth, one local search | Billable hours at a fixed NDIA price limit — no rate rise is available to you | Local search and Google Business Profile, plus specialisation pages that name what you handle | Enquiries by source, and how fast you reply |
| Allied health | Coordinators, plan managers, GPs, paediatricians and schools; families searching by discipline and suburb | Clinician capacity. Price limits are set by the Pricing Schedule, so growth is utilisation, not margin | Referrer pathways first; discipline-plus-suburb search second | Utilisation by discipline and clinic |
| Plan management | Coordinators asked “who do you suggest?”, providers you pay cleanly, participants comparing at activation or reassessment | A fixed monthly fee per participant caps acquisition cost; margin is participants per staff member | Referrer visibility and decision-moment search; paid search only under a cost-per-signup ceiling | Cost per signed participant against your fee |
| New & startup | Nobody, at first. There is no referrer relationship and no ranking to inherit | Standing start. Foundations have to exist before any channel can compound | Website, Google Business Profile and directories, then first coordinator introductions | Weeks to first genuine enquiry |
The pattern across the rows: for four of the five, a professional referrer is either the decision-maker or standing next to them. Only allied health and new providers get a meaningful share of participants who found them cold.
The arithmetic is the whole strategy. At 31 March 2026 there were 774,456 participants — up 13,014, or 1.7%, in that quarter alone — and 277,376 active providers (NDIA Quarterly Report Q3 2025-26). That is fewer than three participants per active provider, which is our arithmetic on those two published totals rather than a figure the NDIA publishes.
A ratio like that tells you something specific: there is no national NDIS market to win. There are hundreds of local ones. A participant in Blacktown will not travel to Geelong for a support worker, a coordinator in Ipswich shortlists homes in Ipswich, and a parent searching for paediatric speech therapy means within a reasonable drive.
Every provider on this page competes with the handful of alternatives inside a catchment — which is good news, because it means you are not fighting 277,375 providers. You are fighting the six a coordinator can name.
It also explains why referrers keep coming up. Broadcast advertising reaches large numbers of people who are not choosing a provider this month. Support coordinators, plan managers, LACs, GPs and discharge planners place participants every single week, and they do it from memory and a shortlist.
Being on that shortlist is worth more than any amount of impressions — which is why the four of five provider types with a professional gatekeeper get referrer work before ad spend. If you want the long version of how that works, our guide to getting referrals from support coordinators is the most-read thing we have published.
One live change worth planning around: registration is being reformed. Supported independent living and platform providers become registration-required supports from 1 July 2026 (NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission). Marketing cannot fix a registration problem, and we will never imply a registration you do not hold — but where your status is genuinely a strength, we make it impossible to miss.
| March 2026 quarter | Paid | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Plan-managed | $7.9b | 64% |
| NDIA-managed | $3.3b | 27% |
| Self-managed | $1.2b | 9% |
| Total to providers | $12.4b | 100% |
Source: NDIA Quarterly Report Q3 2025-26. Percentages are our arithmetic on the published totals.
Two things follow. Roughly 73% of provider payments run through plan-managed and self-managed funding — the two channels an unregistered provider can be paid from — so being unregistered narrows your market far less than most providers assume.
The plan-managed share, by far the largest, is administered by only around 1,481 plan management businesses serving 526,376 participants. A short list of firms sits between most providers and most of the money, which is exactly why plan managers appear as referrers on four of the five rows above.
Whatever your provider type, the programme is assembled from these. The row you sit in decides which ones get the budget.
Start with the one that carries the most revenue, because that is the constraint your marketing has to solve first. A provider running SIL homes and a small allied health team should read the SIL page: one placement is worth far more than a fuller therapy diary, so it deserves the first dollar. The growth plan then covers every service line you deliver.
Usually. SDA on its own, respite, community participation, transport, cleaning and gardening, early childhood supports and behaviour support are not on this page, but they follow one of the same patterns: either a referrer places the participant with you, or the participant and their family choose you directly from a local search. The comparison table above shows which pattern applies, and the growth plan maps the specifics for your registration groups.
Yes. An unregistered provider can be paid through a plan manager or directly by a self-managing participant. In the March 2026 quarter, $7.9b of the $12.4b paid to providers was plan-managed and $1.2b was self-managed, so roughly 73% of provider payments flowed through those two channels (our arithmetic on the NDIA’s published totals).
Registration rules are changing though: supported independent living and platform providers become registration-required supports from 1 July 2026, so check the NDIS Commission’s requirements for what you deliver.
Because the scheme is fragmented. At 31 March 2026 there were 774,456 participants and 277,376 active providers, which is fewer than three participants per provider on our arithmetic.
In a market that crowded, broadcast advertising buys attention from people who are not choosing a provider this month, while support coordinators, plan managers, LACs and GPs place participants every week. Search still matters — it is just a local game rather than a national one.
Not in the same region. We cap clients per region and service type so we are never running campaigns for two providers competing for the same participants, which occasionally means turning work down.
Tell us your registration groups and the regions you cover. A specialist maps who decides in your market, where they look and what your growth path looks like — written up and yours to keep.
A note on the figures: the scheme statistics on this page come from the NDIA Quarterly Report Q3 2025-26 and are current at 31 March 2026; ratios and percentages calculated from those totals are labelled as ours. Nothing on this page is a guarantee or prediction of results for your business, and individual results vary. See our Disclaimer.
A specialist reviews your visibility against the providers competing in your catchment, and sends a written growth plan within two business days. You keep it either way.