Short-Term Winners: the three shifts coming for solo NDIS work

The pricing review was read the way these documents always get read. Everyone found their own line, checked the cap against last year's, swore at it or shrugged at it, and closed the tab. Almost nobody read the reasoning. Which is a pity, because the reasoning is about many of us.

The review found that years of capped prices have pushed the market toward the operators who carry the least overhead. Sole traders, in other words. It did not describe this as a triumph of nimble small business. It described it as a distortion, named sole traders as the short-term winners of that distortion, and expected the advantage to shrink as reforms roll through. That is worth reading twice. The scheme's own price-setters looked at the solo model's current edge and wrote it up as a fault to be engineered out. This is the first shift that is coming.

The second shift is about what work will be left to compete for. Thriving Kids moves mild to moderate paediatric support off the scheme, and the comforting assumption, the one most solo clinicians are quietly making, is that the work will simply re-form in a new funding bucket and follow the same clinicians it always has. Victoria has now answered that assumption, and the answer is no.

Its announcement puts the replacement workforce on the government payroll: allied health professionals employed by the state, based inside maternal and child health services, kindergartens and early parenting centres, rolling out in stages from October 2026, with NDIS access changes to follow from mid 2027. That work is not moving to a different market. It is leaving the market. And what stays on the scheme skews harder: complex presentations, multi-system cases, the work that consumes more hours than it bills.

The third shift is the quiet one. Ask a sole trader or small practice about their marketing budget and you will usually get a blank look, and fair enough. The model has never needed one. Support coordinators have been doing the distribution: dozens of individual relationships, built one good outcome at a time, routing clients to your calendar at no charge.

From 1 July 2028, support coordination stops being funded in individual plans altogether and becomes a commissioned service delivered by a deliberately small number of providers. What that does to referral behaviour is not yet determined, and I will not pretend it is. But the structure is announced. Dozens of personal coordinator relationships consolidate into a handful of commissioned organisations.

Line the dates up and the sequence is hard to miss. 2026, 2027, 2028. Three changes, each removing a different pillar, and none of them is the hourly rate. Nobody needs another piece about the rate; the travel change and the freezes have been absorbed and argued over already. What is changing is which work exists, how it finds you, and whether it can be sustainably held alone. The pricing question was always the loud one. These are the quiet ones, and they are the ones worth planning around.