The 2025/26 Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits is here

It's official - the new 2025-26 NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits (PAPL) has landed. After the Annual Pricing Review was released last week, the sector has been waiting to see the final prices and now we have them.

The verdict? The PAPL follows the recommendations in the APR to a tee, heralding cuts for some providers and a persistent lack of change for others. Here are the key facts and figures to get you across our new PAPL.

Disability Support Worker (DSW) Cost Model Supports

Prices have increased in line with the 3.5% increase to wages and 0.5% increase to superannuation, which means that most core supports, Support Coordination Level 1 and Psychosocial Recovery Coaching have seen a price increase of around 3.95%.

Nursing and other domestic supports

The following price limits have increased by 3.2%

Health supports delivered by nurses
Assistance with Personal Domestic Activities
Specialised Home Based Assistance For A Child
House Cleaning And Other Household Activities
House or Yard Maintenance

Medium Term Accommodation (MTA) and Centre Capital Cost

Keeping pace with inflation, MTA and Centre Capital Cost have increased by 2.37% and 2.4% respectively.

Therapy

Differential pricing between states and territories has been removed, equating to a reduction in remote and very remote prices for some therapies. In practice this means:

Psychology: The new national price limit is a $10 increase for QLD, NSW & VIC, but a $11.23 reduction for the rest of the country. The remote and very remote price limits have reduced by 4.6%
Physiotherapy: The new national price limit is a $10 reduction on the previous East Coast limit but prices in the rest of the country have reduced by 18%
Podiatry & Dietetics: Prices have reduced across the board by 2.6%

The other major shift introduced for therapists in this PAPL is the restriction on the rules around billable travel. While the APR left us with some ambiguity, the PAPL makes it clear: therapists can only bill their travel time at 50% the hourly limit of the relevant line item. This is in addition to the existing restriction on the maximum amount of travel time billable - 30 minutes in metro areas or 60 minutes for remote.

The PAPL also clarifies that Personal Trainers are not considered therapy providers.

Intermediaries

Unfortunately the PAPL does not deliver the relief that many intermediaries were seeking.

For Plan Managers there are blows on three fronts:

The monthly management fee remains the same for the sixth year in a row
The set up fee has been removed, representing a 15.6% reduction in the fees payable to a Plan Manager in the first year of a plan
The loadings for delivering supports in remote and very remote locations have been removed.

It’s a similar story for Support Coordinators who have seen no price cap increase yet again.

Early Childhood Early Intervention (ECEI) supports

Since July 2023, the NDIA have been progressively shifting the age group for ECEI supports from children under 7 to children under 9. The PAPL now reflects the shift to this new age bracket.

To say many providers and participants are concerned about the latest changes to pricing is an understatement. There are a number of petitions and calls to action underway and we expect to see some before Parliament at some stage (we will update as this develops). If you want to learn more, visit:

And we have an upcoming webinar to dive deeper into the PAPL and APR changes in more detail. It’s free for On-Demand subscribers.