The short answer: fill SIL vacancies with a live vacancies page, catchment SEO and Google Business Profile, direct outreach to support coordinators and hospital discharge planners, NDIS vacancy platforms, targeted ads when you need to move fast, clear and honest home information, and same-day responses to every enquiry. A single SIL participant can represent six figures of funded support a year, so the maths on filling a bed quickly is rarely close.
An empty SIL bed costs you every day. The staffing roster, rent or mortgage, and overheads on the home do not pause while you wait for a participant. Yet vacancies routinely sit for months, sometimes a year. In our experience running vacancy campaigns for providers, the cause is almost never the home itself. It is that the people who actually fill placements cannot find you, or cannot tell quickly enough whether your home suits the person they are trying to house.
The market is real and it is sizeable. As at 30 June 2024 there were about 34,850 participants receiving SIL funding nationally, according to the NDIS Quarterly Report to disability ministers. SIL is funding for support workers to help a person in their home, often for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it is usually delivered in shared living where housemates with their own NDIS funding share supports, as the NDIA explains on its What is SIL page. That shared model is exactly why compatibility matters so much: a referrer is not just filling a room, they are placing someone into an existing household.
Participants rarely self-refer into a SIL home. The decision usually runs through other people, and your marketing has to reach them, not the participant directly.
Map your marketing to these four groups and most of the guesswork disappears. The rest of this guide is built around reaching them.
We run vacancy campaigns measured on placements, not clicks.
The single most useful asset you can build is a clean one-page profile for each vacancy. It is what a coordinator forwards to a colleague, what a discharge planner skims at a desk, and what your website listing mirrors. Keep it factual and easy to scan:
The provider who responds first usually wins. When a discharge planner has three homes to consider and one replies within the hour, that home moves to the top of the list. Make enquiring effortless, route enquiries to a real person, and reply the same day. A fast, human response often beats a better home that answers two days later.
Advertising vacancies is allowed, and you should do it. It just has to be honest and non-pressuring. Every claim about a home should be true and current, and your messaging should respect the NDIS Code of Conduct and the rules on using the NDIS name and logo. Two practical points worth flagging to your team:
This is where SIL differs from almost every other NDIS support. A single SIL participant in a 24/7 home can represent a very large amount of funded support over a year, frequently well into six figures once support ratios and overnight cover are included. Against that, the cost of a vacancy campaign is small. Even one extra placement, filled a few months earlier than it otherwise would have been, covers a serious marketing investment many times over. That is why moving quickly on vacancies matters more in SIL than anywhere else in the scheme: the cost of an empty bed is high, and the value of filling it is higher.
Use a live vacancies page on your site, catchment SEO and a complete Google Business Profile, direct outreach to support coordinators and hospital discharge planners, NDIS vacancy platforms, and targeted Google or Meta ads when you need to fill fast. Behind all of it, a clean one-page vacancy profile and a same-day response to every enquiry do most of the work.
With an active campaign, typically 2 to 5 months depending on the home, location and compatibility requirements. The shared-living nature of most SIL means the right person also has to suit the existing household, which adds time. Without any active marketing, vacancies often sit for a year or more.
Mostly through support coordinators and hospital discharge planners, with families and guardians researching online before they enquire. Participants rarely self-refer into a SIL home, so your marketing needs to reach those referrers rather than the participant directly.
Yes, when it is honest, non-pressuring and respectful of the NDIS Code of Conduct and the rules on using the NDIS name and logo. Keep every claim about a home true and current, and never identify a current resident: describe a household in general terms only.
From 1 July 2026 SIL becomes a registration-required support, and providers already delivering it must have applied to register by 1 October 2026 to keep operating, according to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. Coordinators increasingly check registration status, so get yours in order before scaling up outreach.
Suburb and proximity to transport, the vacancy type and support level, a respectful general profile of the current household and who the home suits, accessibility features, real photos of the room and shared spaces, and a named contact who replies the same day.
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.