The SIL Handbook Part 2: Eligibility and Evidence

There is no SIL application, and that trips everybody up

Families arrive expecting a SIL application form. There is not one. Supported Independent Living is not a separate program you qualify for and it has no eligibility test of its own. It is a category of funding that can go into an NDIS plan you already have, and the question the NDIA is answering is whether SIL is a reasonable and necessary support for you.

That reframes the whole task. You are not proving you deserve a place in supported housing. You are documenting, in ordinary detail, what help you need in a home on an ordinary day, and why the amount and pattern of that help means it has to be paid support rather than something a family member does. Part 1 of this handbook covered what SIL is and what it is not. This chapter is about the evidence.

One thing to be straight about before we start: decisions sit with the NDIA. Nobody, including us, can promise you SIL funding, and any provider who does is selling you something. What you can control is whether the picture in front of the decision-maker is accurate.

The question behind the question

The NDIS Act sets out that funded supports must be reasonable and necessary, and the NDIS Operational Guidelines set out how the Agency applies that to home and living supports. For SIL, the practical enquiry is about the type and intensity of support a person needs each day because of their disability.

Read that phrase carefully, because two words in it do most of the work. Type means which tasks. Intensity means how much, how often, and how predictable. A person who needs an hour of prompting spread across a morning and a person who needs someone within earshot for sixteen hours generate very different funding, and the difference between them lives in the description, not in the diagnosis.

This is also why the assessment usually comes from an allied health professional, most often an occupational therapist. What the Agency is looking for is a functional account of daily living, not a medical one.

What strong evidence actually contains

A file that gives a decision-maker what they need generally holds five things.

A recent functional capacity assessment, written by an allied health professional who has seen the person in their own environment rather than in a clinic room only. Recency matters. A report from four years ago describes a person who may no longer exist.

A task-level account of daily living. Showering, toileting, dressing, medication, meals, cleaning, money, transport, appointments, sleep. For each one: what the person does independently, what they need prompting for, what they need physical assistance for, and how long it takes. This is the section families most often skip and the section that carries the most weight.

Health and medication management detail where it applies, including any mealtime management, and behaviour support documentation where a behaviour support plan exists. If there is a plan, it should be current.

An honest picture of informal supports. The Agency is required to consider the role of family, carers and informal supports. Understating that is a mistake, but so is letting it go undescribed, because unsustainable informal support looks identical to sustainable informal support on paper unless somebody says otherwise.

And the person's own goals, in their own words where possible. Home and living funding is meant to serve a life, not just a risk profile.

The five mistakes that cost families months

Leading with diagnosis. A diagnosis explains why support is needed; it does not describe what support is needed. Reports that spend three pages on aetiology and half a page on function get read as thin.

Best-day reporting. Families understate need out of pride, habit, or a reluctance to describe a person at their worst. The result is funding built for the best week of the year. Describe the bad Tuesday, because the bad Tuesday is what support has to cover.

The phrase "needs 24/7 support" with nothing behind it. It reads as a claim rather than a finding. What lands instead is: awake and active support needed from 6am to 9am and 4pm to 9pm, someone on site and available overnight, and here is why each of those blocks exists.

Silence on what has already been tried. If in-home support has been attempted and has not held, say so and say why. A failed arrangement is evidence.

Leaving overnight undescribed. Active overnight support and a sleepover are different supports with different costs, and if nobody specifies which the person needs, the file cannot support either. Our explainer on how SIL support hours work covers how those blocks add up.

Who writes what

The occupational therapist or other allied health professional writes the functional assessment. You brief them properly, which means giving them the task-level detail and the bad Tuesday rather than expecting them to infer it from a two-hour visit.

A support coordinator, if you have one, helps assemble the file and knows what a complete submission looks like in your area. A treating doctor or specialist covers health and permanence questions. The person themselves, and the family, supply the daily reality and the goals.

A provider can describe the support a specific home would deliver, which is useful once you have a home in view. What a provider should not do is write your evidence for you. If the assessment is authored by the organisation that stands to be funded by it, its weight drops, and reasonably so.

Timing, and the thing worth doing this month

Home and living funding is usually decided at a plan reassessment or through a change of circumstances request, so the calendar matters. Work backwards from your scheduled reassessment date and allow real time for allied health appointments and report writing, which frequently take longer than families expect.

There is also a reason to move sooner rather than later at the moment. From 1 February 2027, as plans reach their scheduled reassessment dates, a renewed plan is created and unspent funds from the previous plan are not carried over, and from 1 April 2027 participants start transitioning to new framework planning. Neither of those changes what evidence is required, but both make knowing your own reassessment date more useful than it used to be.

If you are at the start of this, the most valuable hour you will spend this month is not researching providers. It is sitting down and writing the task-level account of one real, ordinary, difficult day, hour by hour, before anyone asks you for it. Everything else in the file gets built on that document.

When you are ready to look at what the support actually looks like in practice, our supported homes and the funding structure on our SIL in Sydney page are the next step. Part 3 of this handbook covers finding and touring homes.