Put your own numbers in and see what an empty SIL place costs per day, what it will have cost by the time it fills, and what bringing that date forward is worth. Everything updates as you type and nothing leaves your browser. For the analysis behind the figures, read what an empty SIL bed actually costs.
Six fields. The defaults are a starting point, not an answer — overwrite them with your own figures for one home.
The annual figure is the one people quote and the daily figure is the one that changes behaviour. A vacancy described as “we are still looking” sounds like admin. The same vacancy described as costing four figures a day is a standing item on the Monday meeting. Four things to do with the numbers above.
This page used to default to $120,000 a year per place. That was far too low, and it made vacancies look like a manageable annoyance rather than the largest controllable cost in a SIL business, so we changed it.
The default is now $447,100, which is the average SIL payment per participant for the year to 31 March 2026, published by the NDIA in its Quarterly Report Q3 2025-26. That report also records 36,808 participants receiving SIL supports as at 31 March 2026 and $16.4 billion in SIL payments over the year.
Two cautions. It is a national mean across every support level in Australia, so a high-support one-to-one arrangement sits well above it and a shared home on a lower daytime ratio sits below it. And it is a payment figure for a participant, not a revenue figure for your business. Use it to sanity-check the number you enter, not as a substitute for it.
The tool measures revenue that does not arrive. That is the biggest cost of a vacancy but not the only one, and the rest are real even though we will not put invented numbers against them.
Those are covered properly in what an empty SIL bed actually costs, along with the three-year NDIA trend behind the default figure.
Everything in the first panel is fixed by your funding and your calendar. The second panel is the only part you can influence, and in practice it comes down to three things.
If your listing is the weak point, the SIL vacancy ad builder produces a coordinator-ready version in a couple of minutes. If you want to size the return across your whole marketing spend rather than one bed, use the marketing ROI calculator. For the channels that actually produce placements, see how to fill SIL vacancies fast.
Use what you actually bill for one filled place in that home over twelve months. The quickest shortcut is to take a typical week’s SIL claim for one participant and multiply it by 52. Run each home separately rather than blending the whole business, because a blended figure flatters your low-ratio homes and understates your high-support ones.
Only as a starting point. $447,100 is the national mean SIL payment per participant for the year to 31 March 2026, published by the NDIA. It covers every support level in Australia, so high-support one-to-one arrangements sit well above it and lower-ratio shared homes sit below. The calculator defaults to it so the page is useful before you have your own number, but you should overwrite it.
Look at your last three placements and count from the day the place became empty to the day the new resident moved in, not from the day the referral arrived. Use the average of those three. If you have never measured it, that is itself the finding, and it is the first thing to start tracking.
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is transmitted, stored or logged, and the figures disappear when you close the tab.
The arithmetic works for any accommodation place with a known annual revenue, so yes, as long as you replace the default. The default figure is a SIL average and does not apply to SDA, respite or short term accommodation, which are funded differently.
Source for the default figure and the SIL totals quoted above: NDIA Quarterly Report Q3 2025-26. This tool is general information, not financial advice. See our disclaimer.
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