Work out what one new participant costs to win from each channel separately — SEO, ads, referrals, social — then compare those costs against what a participant is worth to you. Built to answer one question: where should the next dollar go? Runs in your browser; nothing is sent or stored.
A cost per participant only means something next to a value. Use margin, not revenue: the funding you keep after paying support workers, supervision and admin.
Fill in a typical month for each channel you use. Set a channel to 0 if you do not use it. Count an enquiry as qualified only if they are in your area, need a support you deliver, and have or will have funding.
This is the decision the tool exists for: move the next dollar to the channel with the lowest cost per participant, not the one with the most enquiries.
Spend, enquiries and conversion are held constant here. The only thing changing is how long a participant stays.
Nothing you type here leaves your browser. Market figures on this page come from the NDIA Quarterly Report to Disability Ministers, Q3 2025-26. Judgement calls about what counts as a good number are our opinion and are labelled as such.
Most cost per participant tools divide total spend by total participants and stop. That gives you one blended number, which tells you whether marketing is working overall but nothing about what to change. The decision a provider actually faces is narrower and more useful: given a fixed budget, which channel should the next dollar go to?
So this page runs the maths four times, once per channel, and then blends them. It works out what one participant is worth to you in margin over their whole time with you. It works out cost per enquiry and cost per participant for SEO, paid ads, referrals and social separately, so the cheapest and dearest are named rather than averaged away. It shows payback in months, which is the number that matters when cash is tight. And it lets you move retention on its own, so you can see how much of your result is really about marketing and how much is about service delivery.
If you want a single whole-of-funnel return figure rather than a channel comparison, that lives on the NDIS Marketing ROI Calculator. This page is the allocation tool.
Two mistakes make this figure misleading more often than anything else.
The first is comparing acquisition cost to revenue rather than margin. A participant on $45,000 of annual funding does not put $45,000 in your pocket. After support worker wages, on-costs, supervision, rostering, no-show gaps and admin, what is left is usually a modest percentage. That percentage is what pays back your marketing. Use it here, even if you have to estimate it, because a ratio built on revenue will tell you everything is fine right up until it is not.
The second is ignoring how long people stay. Acquisition cost is paid once. Margin arrives monthly. The value of a participant is therefore monthly margin multiplied by the number of months they stay, and that second number is entirely inside your control through service quality, roster consistency and worker continuity. A provider with 30-month average tenure can afford to pay five times more per participant than a provider with six-month tenure, and will beat them in an auction for the same enquiry every time.
A blended cost per participant tells you whether marketing is working. A channel-level cost per participant tells you what to do on Monday. They are not the same information.
Channels also fail in different ways, and the split shows you which failure you have:
One warning on attribution. Search often gets credit for enquiries that a coordinator sent, because the person Googled your name before calling. If you never ask “how did you hear about us”, your channel numbers are guesses. Ask the question at intake and record the answer in the same field every time.
From the NDIA’s quarterly reporting to 31 March 2026, both directly relevant to where you put the money:
The market is crowded. There were 774,456 participants and 277,376 active providers — an average of fewer than three participants per active provider. Crowding pushes up the cost of the channels where everyone competes for the same attention, which is usually paid search, faster than it pushes up the cost of channels built on relationships. If your paid cost per participant has drifted upward year on year without anything changing in the account, this is the backdrop.
Referrals are concentrated. Of the $12.4 billion paid to providers in the March 2026 quarter, 64% was plan-managed, 27% NDIA-managed and 9% self-managed. 526,376 participants use a plan manager, served by around 1,481 plan managers — roughly 355 participants behind each plan manager relationship on average. Very few doors sit in front of very many participants. That concentration is why a referral channel can show an implausibly low cost per participant in the table above, and exactly why you should cost those hours honestly instead of entering zero.
Value varies enormously by support type, which is why the tool asks rather than assumes. The clearest published example is SIL: 36,808 participants received Supported Independent Living, with average annual SIL payments of $447,100 each. A SIL provider and a community-access provider looking at the same enquiry should be willing to pay very different amounts for it.
Source for the figures in this section: NDIA Quarterly Report to Disability Ministers, Q3 2025-26. The per-provider and per-plan-manager averages are our own arithmetic on those published totals, and are crude — “active provider” counts anyone paid in the quarter.
There is no published NDIS benchmark for cost per participant, and you should be sceptical of anyone who quotes one, including us. What exists is a widely used cross-industry rule of thumb from David Skok’s SaaS Metrics 2.0: the best businesses have a lifetime value to acquisition cost ratio above 3, and recover acquisition cost in roughly 5 to 7 months. It comes from software, not disability services, so treat it as a sanity check rather than a target.
Here is the honest part, and it is our opinion rather than a benchmark. Because NDIS plans are funded for years, most providers who fill in this calculator will see a very healthy ratio — often 10x or more. That does not mean marketing is finished. It means the ratio is not your binding constraint, and two other things are:
If your ratio comes out below about 3, treat it as a red flag worth investigating the same week. Usually it means one of three things: margin is thinner than you assumed, tenure is shorter than you assumed, or one channel is quietly consuming the budget without producing participants.
You do not need a data project for this. Spend comes from your ad accounts and invoices. Qualified enquiries come from counting calls and form submissions for one month and marking each one qualified or not. Conversion comes from how many of those became participants, allowing a lag if your intake takes weeks. Margin comes from your accountant or a reasonable estimate. Average tenure comes from a list of participants who left in the last year and how long each one was with you.
If those numbers do not exist yet, use estimates and mark the date you did it. An honest estimate reviewed each quarter is worth more than a precise number you never produce.
The three marketing calculators answer three different questions, in this order:
They share inputs on purpose. If you have already filled in the ROI calculator, the funding, margin and retention figures carry straight across. If you are a SIL provider, the SIL Vacancy Cost Calculator covers the other half of the equation: what an unfilled bed costs while you decide.
There is no published NDIS benchmark, so judge it against what a participant is worth to you rather than against another provider. The widely used cross-industry rule of thumb, from David Skok’s SaaS Metrics 2.0, is that lifetime value should be at least three times acquisition cost and that acquisition cost should be recovered quickly. Because NDIS participants are usually funded for years, most providers clear that bar easily, which means the more useful questions are which channel is cheapest and whether you can actually deliver the supports you have sold.
Yes. If you only count ad spend you will conclude that referrals and coordinator outreach are free, when in reality they consume some of the most expensive hours in the business. Add intake and business development wages, CRM and call tracking subscriptions, event costs and any referral fees to the internal cost field so the blended figure reflects what winning a participant actually costs.
It differs by provider and catchment, which is why this calculator splits the result by channel instead of quoting an average. In our experience, and this is agency opinion rather than a published benchmark, referral and coordinator relationships usually show the lowest cost per participant and the highest conversion rate, search sits in the middle and gets cheaper as rankings compound, and paid ads cost the same on the last day as the first. Your own numbers override all of that.
It does not change the cost itself, but it changes whether that cost was worth paying. A participant who stays six months returns a sixth of the value of one who stays three years, for exactly the same acquisition cost. The retention panel above holds your spend and conversion constant and varies only how long a participant stays, so you can see that effect in isolation.
Divide what you spent on a channel in a month by the number of qualified enquiries that channel produced in the same month. Count an enquiry as qualified only if the person is in your service area, needs a support you actually deliver, and has funding or is likely to get it. Counting unqualified enquiries flatters your cost per enquiry and hides the real problem.
Because NDIS plans are ongoing and often large, so participant lifetime value is high relative to what it costs to reach one person in a local catchment. A high ratio is not a reason to relax. It usually means your real constraint is delivery capacity, workforce or retention rather than lead volume, and that spending more on marketing would win participants you cannot properly support.
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