Start with the participants you want, not with a percentage of revenue. This works backwards from your growth goal, your cost per enquiry and your close rate to the monthly budget it actually implies, then shows what happens if those assumptions are wrong. Nothing is sent or stored.
Work forwards from a budget or backwards from a goal. Everything updates as you type.
About $15,000 over 12 months to win 12 new participants.
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Columns are your enquiry-to-participant rate, rows are cost per enquiry. The highlighted cell is what you entered; the others are those two numbers being out by about a third either way. Plan against the pessimistic corner, not the middle.
There is no published benchmark for what NDIS providers spend on marketing. The figures quoted around the web are borrowed from general small-business marketing and were never measured on NDIS providers, so treat any percentage you see, including the ones we used to publish on this page, as somebody’s opinion rather than data.
The bigger problem is that a percentage rule ignores what a participant is worth to you, and in this sector that varies by two orders of magnitude. The NDIA reported 36,808 participants receiving Supported Independent Living in the March 2026 quarter, averaging $447,100 each in annual SIL payments. A provider filling SIL vacancies and a provider taking on occasional therapy clients can run the same revenue and the same 5 percent rule, and one of them will be badly underspending. Cost per enquiry, close rate and what a participant bills are the only three numbers that determine a rational budget, which is why the calculator above asks for those and not for your turnover.
Cost per qualified enquiry. Add up everything you spent to win work in the last 90 days: ad spend, agency or contractor fees, listing fees, tools. Divide by the number of genuine enquiries it produced, after you have thrown out spam, recruitment emails and people wanting a service you do not offer. Use 90 days rather than 30, because a single quiet month will otherwise make the number look far worse than it is. If your marketing is one retainer covering everything, the whole retainer belongs in the total, otherwise the figure flatters you.
Enquiry-to-participant rate. Take the same 90 days and count how many of those enquiries are now billing. Count them against the month they enquired, not the month they started, or long onboarding will distort the rate. If you have never tracked it, run the calculator at a rate you would be disappointed by and again at one you would be pleased with, and look at the gap in the sensitivity grid before committing to anything.
At 31 March 2026 there were 774,456 NDIS participants and 277,376 active providers, which is fewer than three participants for every provider on the register. Attention is genuinely contested, and most catchments have more providers claiming the same suburb than the search results can hold.
Where the money flows also tells you who to spend the budget in front of. Of the $12.4 billion paid to providers in the March 2026 quarter, $7.9 billion (64 percent) was plan-managed, $3.3 billion (27 percent) NDIA-managed and $1.2 billion (9 percent) self-managed. Plan managers sit alongside support coordinators in the path most participants take to a new provider, and there are not many of them: 526,376 participants use a plan manager, served by roughly 1,481 plan managers. A small number of referral relationships covers a large share of the market, so relationship time is part of an acquisition budget, not a free extra on top of it.
Source: NDIA Quarterly Report to disability ministers, Q3 2025-26, covering the quarter to 31 March 2026. Download the report (PDF).
Measure first: Cost-per-Participant Calculator. Turns spend you have already made into what an enquiry and a participant actually cost you. Do that one first so the cost per enquiry and close rate you type above are your figures rather than guesses.
Plan second: this calculator. Converts a participant goal into the budget it implies, or a budget into the participants it should produce, and stress-tests both.
Sanity-check third: Marketing ROI Calculator. Takes the budget you land on and shows the return it needs to deliver against participant lifetime value.
There is no published benchmark for NDIS marketing spend, and percentage-of-revenue rules ignore how far participant values vary between services. Work backwards instead: decide how many participants you want in 12 months, divide by the share of enquiries that become participants, and multiply by what one qualified enquiry costs you. That gives a budget tied to your own economics.
Take everything you spent on marketing over the last 90 days, including ad spend, agency or contractor fees and any tools, and divide it by the number of genuine enquiries it produced. Exclude spam and wrong-service enquiries. Ninety days smooths out the month-to-month noise that makes a 30-day figure unreliable.
Use a range rather than a single guess. The sensitivity grid above shows the budget at a conversion rate roughly a third lower and a third higher than the one you entered, so you can plan against the pessimistic figure and treat the rest as upside.
Almost always conversion, because budget scales inversely with it. If your enquiry-to-participant rate moves from 25 percent to 35 percent, the budget needed for the same number of participants falls by about 29 percent, without spending another dollar on advertising.
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