Model your whole funnel — enquiries, qualification, close rate, participant value, retention and margin — to see your real return, how long it takes to pay back, and how many participants you need just to break even. Runs in your browser; nothing is sent or stored.
The fields start with placeholder figures, not benchmarks — replace every one with your own. Results update as you type.
Return on marketing spend if your close rate shifted by five percentage points, or your average retention by six months. Your current position is highlighted.
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Most “marketing ROI” maths falls over because it compares a year of spend against a year of revenue. In the NDIS that understates the return badly, because a participant you win in March is still being supported two years later. It also overstates it, because plan funding is not profit — most of it pays the support workers who deliver the service.
This tool fixes both. It runs your funnel end to end and compares the lifetime gross profit of the participants marketing wins in a year against the total marketing cost for that year:
Everything is calculated in your browser. Nothing is transmitted, logged or saved.
A high return multiple is easy to produce on paper: stretch retention, ignore margin, count every enquiry as qualified. Treat it as a sanity check, not a target. The three numbers underneath it carry the real information.
Payback is how many months a new participant takes to repay what it cost to win them. It is a cash-flow number, not a profit number. A twelve-month payback with a five-month wage cycle means growth eats your working capital before it feeds it. And if payback is longer than your average retention, the ratio is irrelevant — every participant you win loses money, and marketing harder makes the loss bigger.
If break-even says you need eleven participants a year and your intake has never placed more than six, the problem is not the campaign. Either the spend is too high for your capacity, or your service mix is too low-value to carry it.
Lifetime gross profit divided by acquisition cost. Anything near 1:1 means you are working for free once overheads, admin and rostering are counted — and this tool deliberately stops at gross margin, so your real position is thinner than the number shown. NDIS Growth treats anything under 3:1 as too tight to scale on. That is our own rule of thumb, not a published industry standard.
In this model, return moves in direct proportion to both close rate and retention. A 25% lift in either produces exactly the same lift in ROI — and both are cheaper than increasing the budget, which does nothing to the ratio at all.
Some published figures from the NDIA’s quarterly report to 31 March 2026 that shape what a realistic model looks like:
Everything else on this page is arithmetic on numbers you supply. We have not published an “average NDIS marketing ROI” figure because no credible one exists — the range between a support-coordination provider and a SIL provider is too wide for an average to mean anything.
Work out how many participants marketing wins in a year (enquiries × qualification rate × close rate), multiply by the gross profit one participant generates across their whole time with you (monthly billings × retention months × gross margin), then divide by total marketing cost for the year including one-off spend. That gives a return per dollar — but payback period and break-even volume are the numbers that determine whether you can act on it.
It depends entirely on support type. The NDIA reported 36,808 participants receiving Supported Independent Living at 31 March 2026, with average annual SIL payments of $447,100 each — about $37,300 a month. Community access, support coordination and allied health bill far less. Whatever your figure, it is revenue, not profit: apply your gross margin before comparing it to marketing costs.
There is no published NDIS benchmark, and we will not invent one. The only hard rule is arithmetic: if payback takes longer than a participant stays with you, every new participant loses money. NDIS Growth’s own preference is payback inside three to six months so growth funds itself instead of draining working capital — that is our opinion, not an industry statistic.
Almost always the funnel, not the spend. The usual causes are enquiries that were never qualified, a slow or inconsistent intake process, and short retention. Since return moves in direct proportion to both close rate and retention, a 25% improvement in either gives the same lift — and neither costs another dollar of budget.
Yes, if a real person spends real hours on it. If your intake coordinator spends a day a week on social media and directory listings, that day is a marketing cost. Leaving it out makes the return look better and the decision worse.
Model it backwards. Put in the spend you are considering, your best estimate of participant value, retention and margin, then read the break-even figure: that is how many participants the spend has to produce to be worth doing. If that number looks implausible for your intake capacity, the answer is already there.
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