NDIS Community Participation and Capacity Building Cuts

The short version

The reduction that families have been hearing about is limited by law to two parts of a plan: social, community and civic participation, and the daily activities part of Capacity Building. It cannot touch daily living, transport, consumables, assistive technology or home modifications. That limit is now written into the legislation rather than left to policy.

The date attached to it is 1 October 2026. The Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee's report on the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill records Coalition senators describing the most significant savings measure in the bill as the reset of these two support groups from that date. The same report notes that of everything in the bill, this is the measure that caused the most anxiety in the disability community.

How the reduction actually works

It is not a line in the Act that says a number. The bill gives the Minister a power to make what the legislation calls a support determination: an instrument that reduces funding for a specified group of supports. The size of any reduction, and when it applies, comes from that instrument, not from the bill itself.

That is why nobody can tell you today what your plan will look like in November. The determination has to be made and published first. What can be said now, with the amended bill, is the boundary of what the power can reach, and that boundary is narrower than it was when the bill was introduced in May.

The committee's own summary is on the Parliament of Australia website, and it confirms the government's position that support determinations will apply only to social, community and civic participation funding and to Capacity Building daily activities.

What the government has said it intends to protect

Three carve-outs were put on the record during the inquiry, and the committee noted them in its report. The government signalled it intends to exclude employment supports from a reduction. It signalled the same for disability related health supports. And it said that 24 hour supports will remain in place for participants who need them.

Those are stated intentions rather than clauses, which is an honest distinction worth holding onto. The instrument is what will settle them. The committee's interim report had specifically asked the government to clarify which critical supports would not be affected and how employment support budgets would be preserved.

Why community participation funding is the sore point

Because for a lot of people it is the part of the plan that gets them out of the house. Senator David Pocock's dissenting report described these supports as a safety measure that reduces social isolation and exclusion from community life, and one that feeds directly into employment and economic participation. He also argued the effects would fall unevenly on women, given how disability support and caring responsibilities interact with paid work.

In practical terms this is the funding behind a Saturday swim, a TAFE course with a worker alongside you, a weekly group at the local library, travel training on the train line, and the slow work of learning to cook for yourself. If you want the detail of how that budget is normally used, we wrote about getting the most from community access funding earlier this year.

What is worth doing between now and October

Find out which budget each of your supports is paid from. Plans do not always make this obvious, and people are often surprised to learn that a support they think of as essential is drawn from Capacity Building rather than Core. Our breakdown of the main types of NDIS support explains how the three budgets divide up.

Then write down what each of those supports actually prevents. Not the activity, the consequence: the hospital admission, the crisis call, the carer who would otherwise stop working. That is the evidence that carries weight in a plan conversation, and it is far easier to write calmly in August than urgently in October.

If a support you rely on falls inside the two groups named above, raise it now with whoever helps you plan, rather than waiting for a letter. Funding decisions sit with the NDIA, and nothing here changes that, but a clear record of what a support does is the part you control.