Disclaimer: This article is general information only and reflects our views as at the date shown above. It is not professional, legal, financial, tax or clinical advice, and it is not a recommendation or endorsement of any product, service or provider. The calculator uses only the figures you enter and makes simplifying assumptions described in the text, so verify all pricing against the current NDIS Pricing Arrangements and take advice on your own situation before acting. To the extent permitted by law, NDIS Growth accepts no liability for any loss arising from reliance on this information. Read our full disclaimer.
The short answer: divide your weekly fixed overheads by the weekly margin one participant contributes (billable hours per week times the gap between what you bill and what an hour costs you to deliver), then round up. For many small support-work providers that lands between three and ten participants, but the honest version uses your numbers, not an average. The calculator below does the arithmetic in four inputs, and shows the number that matters even more: what one participant past break-even is worth a year.
Plenty of guides cover how to start an NDIS business. Almost none cover the arithmetic that decides whether it survives: how many participants you need before the business stops costing you money.
The market context makes this worth taking seriously. The NDIA’s quarterly data counts 277,376 active providers serving 774,456 participants: fewer than three participants per provider on average. Behind that average sits a long tail of providers who registered, won one or two clients, and stalled below the line where the business pays for itself.
Break-even is a simple equation with four inputs. What makes it useful is being honest about the inputs.
Enter your own numbers. The defaults are illustrative placeholders, not benchmarks. Overwrite all four. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Your blended hourly rate across the supports you deliver.
Wages plus super, leave, workers comp and other on-costs.
Insurance, software, registration, accounting, vehicle, admin.
Your realistic average across participants, not your best client.
The rate you bill. Use a blended average across your actual mix of supports, weekday and weekend, from the current NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits. Don’t use your best rate. Use the mix you really deliver.
The cost of a delivered hour. The wage is only the start. Superannuation, annual and personal leave, workers compensation, shift loadings and travel time all attach to that hour. If you pay yourself to deliver support, cost your own hours at the rate you’d pay someone else. A business that only works when your labour is free is borrowing from you, not breaking even.
Weekly overheads. This is the input most people get wrong, so it gets its own section below.
Hours per participant. Be conservative. A realistic average across all participants, including the two-hour-a-week ones, not the flagship client. If you serve different participant types at very different volumes, run the calculator separately for each.
Overheads fail quietly because each item is small: insurance here, rostering software there, an accountant quarterly, fuel weekly. Individually forgettable; together they are often the difference between “profitable at four participants” and “profitable at eight”.
The list worth writing down: insurance, registration and audit costs if you’re registered, rostering and claiming software, accounting, phone and internet, vehicle running costs, training and screening checks, and any rent. Then add the big hidden one: your unbillable time. Rostering, claiming, compliance and intake are real hours; if they eat fifteen hours of your week, that’s fifteen hours you are not delivering or being paid for.
Our cost-per-participant calculator approaches the same problem from the other direction if you want a cross-check.
Request a free growth plan. A specialist maps where your next enquiries will come from.
The calculator assumes every scheduled hour gets delivered and paid. Reality is leakier: cancellations, hospital stays, plan reviews that pause services, gaps between one participant leaving and the next starting.
You don’t need a complicated model for this. Just haircut your hours input. If you schedule ten hours a week per participant but reliably deliver and claim nine, enter nine. A break-even number built on perfect utilisation is a number you will miss.
This is also the mechanism behind the most expensive version of the problem: an empty SIL place, where utilisation drops to zero while costs continue. We’ve covered that arithmetic separately in what an empty SIL bed actually costs.
The last row of the calculator is the one that should change how you think about growth. Past break-even, an additional participant contributes their weekly margin roughly 52 times a year, and almost all of it falls through to profit because your overheads are already covered.
That number is the honest yardstick for marketing spend. If a participant past break-even is worth, say, $10,000 a year on your inputs, then the question about any channel (ads, SEO, directories, referrals) is not “what does it cost” but “what does it cost per participant gained, against what they’re worth”. Our marketing budget calculator runs exactly that comparison, and our guide to what NDIS marketing costs covers typical investment levels.
If the calculator gave you an uncomfortable number, there are only four levers, in rough order of how quickly they move:
It depends on four numbers: what you bill per hour, what an hour of delivered support actually costs you in wages and on-costs, your fixed weekly overheads, and how many billable hours the average participant generates each week. Divide your weekly overheads by the weekly margin each participant contributes and round up. For many small support-work providers the answer lands somewhere between three and ten participants, but your own inputs can move it a long way in either direction.
It can be, but the margin lives in the gap between what you bill and what delivery costs, multiplied by utilisation. Providers who lose money usually have not mispriced. They under-count overheads, carry unbillable hours, or sit below their break-even participant count for too long. The arithmetic is unforgiving but simple, which is why it is worth doing before you commit.
Typical fixed costs include insurance, registration and audit costs if registered, software for rostering and claims, accounting and bookkeeping, phone and internet, vehicle costs, office or co-working space, training, and the hours you spend on admin instead of billable delivery. Most new providers underestimate this line. A realistic weekly figure is the difference between a useful break-even number and a comforting one.
Once you are past break-even, an extra participant is worth their weekly contribution margin multiplied by roughly 52 weeks. For a participant generating ten billable hours a week at a $20 hourly margin, that is around $10,400 a year. That number is why marketing spend should be judged as cost per participant gained, not as an expense line.
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.