What an Empty SIL Bed Actually Costs

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The national number: $447,100 a year

Most providers we speak to underestimate what a vacancy costs them, usually by a factor of two or three. The reason is simple: an empty bed does not generate a bill, a complaint or a line in the accounts. It generates nothing, and nothing is easy to overlook.

The NDIA publishes the figure that settles the argument. In its Quarterly Report Q3 2025-26, Table 10 sets out SIL participants and payments for the years ending 31 March:

Source: NDIA Quarterly Report Q3 2025-26, Table 10. As at 31 March 2026 there were 36,808 participants receiving SIL, with $4.1 billion in SIL supports delivered in that quarter alone.

Two things in that table matter beyond the headline. First, the average has risen every year, up 5% annually over two years. Second, and more striking, total SIL payments are growing at 11% a year while SIL participant numbers grow at only 4%. The pool of SIL participants is barely expanding; the value attached to each one is climbing steadily. Whatever else that means for the scheme, for a provider it means each individual place is worth more every year — and so is each day it sits empty.

Why the average will mislead you if you use it carelessly

We should be honest about what $447,100 is and is not. It is the national mean across every SIL arrangement in Australia, and SIL arrangements vary enormously. A participant in a high-support one-to-one arrangement with overnight active support can sit well above it. A participant in a shared home with a one-to-three daytime ratio and sleepover support can sit well below.

So do not take the national average and treat it as your revenue per bed. Take your figure. The quickest way to get it: look at what you actually bill for a filled place across a full year, or take a typical week’s SIL claim for one participant and multiply by 52. If you have several homes with different support ratios, run the numbers per home rather than across the business, because a single blended figure will flatter your low-support houses and understate your high-support ones.

The calculator below defaults to the national average so you have a starting point, but it is designed to be overwritten. The weekly equivalent updates as you type, which is the fastest way to sanity-check whether the number you have entered resembles your actual business.

What your vacancy is costing you

Enter your own numbers. Nothing is sent anywhere — this runs entirely in your browser.

The last row is the one worth sitting with. It is not a saving in the accounting sense — it is revenue you would have earned anyway, brought forward. But it is the number that decides whether doing something about your vacancies is worth the effort, because speed is the only variable marketing can actually move. You cannot change what a place is worth. You can change how long it stays empty.

The costs that never make it into the spreadsheet

The calculator above measures foregone revenue. That is the largest cost but not the only one, and the others are the reason experienced operators treat vacancies as urgent rather than unfortunate.

• Your fixed costs do not pause. Rent or mortgage on the property, utilities, insurance, compliance and quality overheads all continue at the same rate whether the bed is filled or not. An empty place does not reduce them, it just removes the revenue that was covering them.
• Staffing rarely scales down cleanly. In a shared home with ratio-based support, losing one resident often does not remove a shift. You may still be rostering the same overnight cover and much of the same daytime support for one fewer person, which quietly pushes up your cost per remaining participant.
• It destabilises the household. A vacancy changes the dynamic for the residents who remain, and a home that is repeatedly half-full is harder to settle. That has a real effect on the quality of the placement you can offer the next person.
• It costs you staff. Support workers notice when a house is underfilled, because it usually means reduced or uncertain shifts. In a sector already competing hard for workers, an unstable roster is a retention problem, and replacing a support worker costs recruitment time you had not budgeted.
• It costs you referrals. This is the most under-appreciated one. Support coordinators refer to providers who respond and who have capacity when asked. If you are slow to fill, you are usually also slow to answer, and a coordinator who has a poor experience with you does not simply stop referring for this vacancy — they stop thinking of you for the next several.

We would not put numbers against those, because they vary too much by operation to state honestly. But they all point the same direction, and they all get worse the longer a place sits.

What actually determines how long a bed sits empty

Time to fill is not random, and it is mostly not about the quality of your service. It is about how many suitable people know the vacancy exists, and how quickly you respond when one appears.

• Compatibility, not just availability. SIL is shared living. The next participant has to suit the existing household as well as the home, which genuinely narrows the field and is the main reason SIL takes longer to fill than other supports. It is a real constraint, not an excuse — but it makes reaching a wider pool of referrers more important, not less.
• Whether coordinators know. Participants almost never self-refer into a SIL home. Support coordinators and hospital discharge planners drive placements, and they can only refer to vacancies they are aware of. A vacancy that exists only in your head is not on the market.
• How fast you reply. Coordinators are usually working several options at once. Same-day beats thorough-but-slow almost every time, and the provider who answers first is frequently the one who gets the placement.
• Whether the listing answers the real questions. Suburb and transport, support ratio and overnight arrangements, a respectful general description of the current household, accessibility features, real photographs, and a named person to contact. Missing any of these adds a round trip, and every round trip adds days.
• Registration status. From 1 July 2026 SIL became a registration-required support, and providers already delivering it need to have applied by 1 October 2026 to continue, per the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. Coordinators check. If your status is unclear you will quietly stop being shortlisted.

When does marketing a vacancy pay for itself?

Run your own figures above rather than ours, but the shape of the answer is usually the same. At the national average of $447,100, a single place generates roughly $1,225 a day. Filling one vacancy thirty days sooner is worth something in the order of $36,000.

Against that, a focused campaign to fill a specific vacancy — a proper vacancy page, catchment search visibility, targeted local advertising and direct outreach to the coordinators who actually place people — is a small number. It does not need to work brilliantly to be worth doing. It needs to shave a few weeks off one placement.

That asymmetry is why we tell SIL providers to treat vacancies as the most expensive problem in their business, and to spend accordingly. It is also why the maths rarely favours waiting to see whether the bed fills on its own. Every week you wait is roughly $8,600 per place that does not come back.

If you would rather keep the numbers to hand, our standalone SIL vacancy cost calculator does the same maths on a page you can bookmark, and how to fill SIL vacancies fast covers the nine channels that actually produce placements.