SIL Shared or Solo: Which Setting Suits You?

The trade is company and hours against quiet and control

Shared Supported Independent Living usually delivers more support hours per person, because the cost of a worker in the house is spread across the people living there. Solo SIL delivers control over your own space, and it costs more per hour of support because nobody is sharing it.

That is the whole trade, and almost every other consideration is a version of it. What follows is how it plays out in practice, because the arithmetic and the lived experience do not always point the same way.

What sharing actually buys you

Sharing means someone is in the house when you are not expecting anything in particular. That matters more than most brochures admit. The person who notices you have not come out of your room, who puts the kettle on, who is there on a Sunday afternoon in July: shared support pays for that presence in a way that a solo arrangement with the same budget cannot.

It also buys shift depth. Overnight support in a shared home is one worker awake or on call for several people, and the same is true of the evening shift. In a solo arrangement the whole cost of that overnight falls on one plan, which the NDIA assesses against your individual needs. If your needs are moderate rather than high, a solo overnight is often the thing the funding will not stretch to.

The third thing it buys is a social life you did not have to arrange. Not friendship, necessarily, which is not something a roster can deliver. But a household. People who have lived alone for years often underestimate how much of their week was spent waiting for a scheduled visit.

What sharing costs you

You do not choose the other people, or not entirely. Providers try to match, and the good ones take it seriously, but a vacancy is a vacancy and the person who moves in next year is not somebody you interviewed. Our piece on choosing housemates in SIL is honest about how much influence you have.

The bathroom is shared, the kitchen is shared, and the television schedule is negotiated. Noise is the complaint we hear most. Someone who is sound-sensitive, or who works nights, or who needs a predictable quiet space to regulate, can find a shared house genuinely hard in a way that has nothing to do with liking the people in it.

There is also the compounding effect: when one person in a house is having a difficult month, everybody's week changes. That cuts both ways, but it is worth naming before you sign.

What solo living actually gives you

Control over the environment, which for some people is not a preference but a support need. Your own bathroom on your own timetable. Visitors when you want them. Sensory conditions you set. For autistic adults in particular this is often the deciding factor, and it belongs in the evidence going to the NDIA rather than in the wish list.

It also gives you a clean relationship with your own supports. There is nobody else's roster interacting with yours, and a change to your hours does not have to be negotiated across a household.

What solo living costs you

Money, in the sense that the same funding buys fewer hours. And exposure: the hours when nobody is rostered are hours when nobody is there. That is fine for one person and unsafe for another, and the honest version of this decision starts with which one you are.

It is also harder to find. Solo SIL is a smaller part of the market than shared, so the search takes longer and may mean a different suburb than you hoped for.

One thing worth knowing is that solo does not have to mean SIL. An Individualised Living Option is built around a specific household arrangement rather than a place in a supported home, and it is frequently the better structure for someone who wants to live alone with support dropping in. Our SIL and ILO comparison sets out where the line is.

Four questions that decide it

What happens in the unrostered hours? Answer this first. If the honest answer is that you would be at risk, the shared question is settled.

Is quiet a preference or a support need? If a professional would write that a shared sensory environment undermines your functional capacity, that is evidence, not taste.

How much of your social contact currently comes from paid staff? A high proportion is an argument for a household, because it is the cheapest and most durable fix available.

What can you try before you commit? Short term accommodation, a few nights in a home with a vacancy, or a weekend stay tells you more than any tour. Ask a provider what a trial looks like, and treat reluctance to offer one as information.

You can see how our homes are set up, room types and shared spaces included, on the accommodation page.