NDIS Jargon: 25 Terms in Plain English

Read this next to your plan

The NDIS runs on about forty words that nobody uses anywhere else, and a plan meeting moves too fast to ask what each one means. Below are twenty-five of them, in the order you tend to meet them, written as the sentence a person would actually say.

Keep it beside the plan document rather than reading it end to end. Most people need four or five of these at any one time, and which four changes as circumstances do.

The money words

Everything in a plan sits in one of three budgets, and the differences decide what can be moved.

• Core supports. The everyday budget: support workers, help at home, community access, some transport. The most flexible part of most plans.
• Capacity Building. Money for building skills or independence: therapy, support coordination, employment supports. Split into categories that generally cannot be moved between each other.
• Capital supports. Money for things rather than hours: assistive technology, home modifications, and SDA where it applies. Almost always tied to a specific quote.
• Stated support. A line the NDIA has fixed. It can only be spent on that support, at that amount, and often only with a named provider.
• Flexible funding. The opposite: money inside a budget category that you can spend across the supports in it, in whatever mix works.
• Price limit. The most a registered provider may charge for a given support, set in the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits. It is a ceiling, not a fixed price.
• Funding period. The instalment a plan is released in. A plan can hold a year of funding but release it in tranches, so the balance you can see is not always the balance you have.

If the three budgets are still a blur, the plain-English version of the support types works through them one at a time.

The people words

• NDIA. The National Disability Insurance Agency. It runs the scheme, decides access, and approves plans.
• NDIS Commission. A separate body, the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. It regulates providers and workers, handles complaints about them, and has nothing to do with your funding.
• LAC. Local Area Coordinator. A person from a partner organisation who helps with access, planning and connecting to community services, mostly for people with less complex needs.
• Support coordinator. Funded in Capacity Building. Helps you find and set up services, and sort out problems between them. Not the same as a plan manager.
• Plan manager. Handles the money: receives provider invoices, pays them from your plan, keeps the books. Funded on top of your other supports, not out of them.
• Nominee. A person formally appointed to act or make decisions for a participant. A legal arrangement, not a helpful relative by default.
• Informal supports. The unpaid help already in someone's life, usually family. The NDIA counts it when deciding what is reasonable and necessary, which is why it gets written down.

The two roles people mix up most are the coordinator and the plan manager: the difference between them is worth five minutes before your next meeting.

The housing words

• SIL. Supported Independent Living. Funding for the support staff in a shared home, priced from a roster of care.
• SDA. Specialist Disability Accommodation. A payment for the dwelling itself, made to whoever owns it, for housing built or modified for very high needs.
• ILO. Individualised Living Options. A funded arrangement for living in a home of your own with a mix of paid and unpaid support, rather than in a group home.
• STA. Short Term Accommodation, which most people still call respite. A short stay away from home, including the support during it.
• MTA. Medium Term Accommodation. A place to stay when a long-term home is not ready yet, typically after hospital.
• Roster of care. A table of one typical week in a supported home: who is on shift, at what ratio, and what happens overnight. It is how a SIL amount is worked out.

SIL and SDA are the pair that causes the most trouble, because a house can have one, both, or neither. Which of the two fits untangles them properly.

The paperwork words

• Reasonable and necessary. The legal test a support has to pass to be funded, set out in the NDIS Act. It is about the disability-related need, the evidence, and value for money, not about whether something would be nice to have.
• Functional capacity assessment. A report describing what a person can and cannot do in daily life, usually by an occupational therapist. The main evidence document for support needs.
• Plan reassessment. What used to be called a plan review: the scheduled meeting where a plan is remade. A different thing from asking the NDIA to look again at a decision.
• Plan management type. Whether your plan is agency-managed, plan-managed or self-managed. It changes which providers you can use and who pays them.
• Service agreement. The contract between you and a provider. Says what will be delivered, at what price, and how either side ends it.

If a term you are stuck on is not here, our NDIS help page covers the process end to end, and the person to ask is whoever wrote the document you are holding.