SIL vs ILO: Which NDIS Living Support Fits Your Life?

The one-line difference

SIL funds a staffed household. ILO funds an arrangement built around one person. In SIL, the support already exists in a house and you move into it. In ILO, you decide how and where you want to live and the support is assembled around that decision, often stitched together from paid workers, a housemate, a host family and your own network.

Both are NDIS home and living supports. Both pay for support rather than rent. Beyond that they work so differently that comparing them on price or hours misses the point entirely.

How SIL works

A provider runs a home with a roster of care in it. Usually two to five residents share that home and share the support across the day, with one-to-one time carved out for the parts that cannot be shared. The NDIA prices the roster and funds each resident's share.

The strength of SIL is that it is ready. The house exists, the staff exist, the overnight arrangement exists, and someone can move in within weeks rather than after a year of design work. For a family in a crisis, or a person whose support needs are high enough that continuous staffing is the only workable answer, that matters more than almost anything else.

The cost is flexibility. You are joining a household with its own rhythms, and you do not choose the people already in it. We wrote about how much say you actually have in choosing your housemates in SIL.

How ILO works

ILO starts from the opposite end. Instead of asking which vacancy suits you, it asks how you want to live, then designs a support package to make that possible. The arrangements it funds tend to look like one of these:

• Living in your own place with support workers dropping in at agreed times
• Living with a housemate you chose, where part of the arrangement is what that person contributes
• A host arrangement, where you live in someone else's home and they provide day to day support
• A blend, where paid support, an informal network and a co-resident all carry part of the week

ILO deliberately counts what your own network already does. That is a real advantage where someone has a strong circle of family, friends and neighbours, and a real limitation where they do not.

The two stages nobody warns you about

ILO is funded in two steps, and the first one surprises people. Stage 1 is Exploration and Design: funded hours, usually delivered with a support coordinator, spent working out what arrangement would suit, weighing the options, mapping what your informal network can realistically hold, and writing it up as a Service Proposal. The NDIS Operational Guidelines describe Stage 1 as typically falling somewhere between 30 and 100 hours depending on how much support a person needs.

Stage 2 is the ongoing support itself, split into primary supports, which are the core of the arrangement, and supplementary supports that fill the gaps around it. Stage 1 has to be finished before Stage 2 can go into a plan.

So ILO is not a thing you request and receive. It is a design process first, and the design has to be funded and completed before the living arrangement can be. The NDIS guidelines on individualised living options set out both stages in detail. Plan for that timeline honestly, because a family expecting a move in six weeks will be badly disappointed.

Who each one suits

ILO tends to suit someone who has a clear picture of the life they want, a network with capacity in it, and support needs that do not require staff awake in the house all night. It is often the better answer for a person who would find a group home genuinely difficult, and for anyone whose main goal is living alone.

SIL tends to suit someone whose support needs are high or continuous, someone who wants company rather than solitude, and any situation where a place is needed sooner than a design process allows. It also suits people for whom the reliability of a rostered team matters more than the freedom to shape it.

There is no ranking here, and it is worth resisting the framing that ILO is the progressive option and SIL the old one. A well run shared home can give someone a fuller week than an isolated flat with two drop-in visits, and the reverse is equally true. The question is which one fits this person.

What both share, and the trap in it

Neither pays your rent. Both fund support only, and housing costs come out of your own income, which is the single most common misunderstanding in this whole area. Both also sit alongside Specialist Disability Accommodation rather than replacing it, since SDA pays for the building itself. If those three payments are still tangled, our overview of NDIS housing options untangles them.

The trap is treating the choice as permanent. People move between these arrangements as their lives change, and a first arrangement that turns out to be wrong is information rather than failure. What is worth getting right up front is the evidence: funding decisions sit with the NDIA and turn on what your assessed support needs actually are, in either model.

If you are weighing a shared home as one of your options, our current vacancies are the honest place to start, and a visit will tell you more in an hour than a comparison table will.

Frequently asked questions

Can you have SIL and ILO at the same time?

No. They are alternative home and living supports, and a plan funds one arrangement rather than both. You can move from one to the other as circumstances change, but that means a new request and new evidence rather than a simple switch. Your support coordinator is the person to plan that transition with.

Does ILO mean living alone?

Not necessarily. ILO covers living alone with drop-in support, living with a housemate you chose, and host arrangements where you live in someone else's home. What makes it ILO is that the support is designed around you rather than around an existing staffed household.

How long does an ILO arrangement take to set up?

Longer than most families expect, because Stage 1 Exploration and Design has to be funded and completed before the ongoing supports can be added to a plan. The guidelines describe that first stage as typically 30 to 100 hours of work. If someone needs a home within weeks, SIL is usually the more realistic path.