Short Term Accommodation: What STA Covers

A short stay with the support included, not just a bed

Short Term Accommodation, almost always shortened to STA, funds a stay away from home for a few days at a time, and the funding covers the whole package rather than the room alone. Accommodation, meals, the support hours across the stay, and the activities that happen during it are all part of the same claim.

The older word for it is respite, and that word still does useful work, because two things are usually happening at once. The person having the stay gets to be somewhere else, with different people and a different routine. The family or carers who usually provide the support get a genuine break. Both are legitimate reasons for STA to be in a plan, and neither one has to be presented as a crisis to count.

Why it matters while SIL is being decided

SIL decisions are slow, and the slow part is rarely the house. It is the evidence and the funding decision, and those can sit with the NDIA for months while a family waits with nothing to do. STA is the thing that can be used in that gap, and it does two jobs at once.

First, it takes pressure off a household that has been holding a lot for a long time. Second, and less obvious, a few short stays generate exactly the kind of information a SIL evidence file needs: how the person copes overnight away from home, what support they actually needed at 2am rather than what everyone assumed, how they went sharing space with other people, what settled them and what did not. Support workers write shift notes during an STA stay, and those notes are real records of support needs.

That is not a promise about a funding outcome. Decisions sit with the NDIA and turn on the evidence in front of them. What STA does is turn a family's knowledge into documented observation, which is a stronger form of the same information.

Where STA sits in your plan

STA is funded from Core supports, and it is normally written into a plan as a set number of days across the year rather than as an open-ended amount, so the practical question is how many days you have and whether they are flexible. The NDIS Operational Guidelines set out how the NDIA approaches it, and the amount in any individual plan is a decision about that person's circumstances rather than a standard entitlement.

Because the days are finite, when you use them matters. School holidays, a carer's surgery, a family wedding interstate and the fortnight after a hospital discharge all compete for the same allocation. Families who plan the year roughly in advance get more out of STA than families who book it reactively, and a plan with funding periods adds a timing question on top: our piece on funding periods explains why a block of respite can land awkwardly inside a shorter budget window.

What STA is not

STA is not the same as Medium Term Accommodation, and mixing the two up wastes time. MTA is for someone who has a confirmed long-term home that is not ready yet, most often a person leaving hospital while a home is modified or a SIL vacancy is prepared. It is measured in weeks and months, not days, and it exists to prevent a person being stuck in hospital.

STA is also not a trial tenancy. A stay tells you something real about how a person goes in a shared house, and it is worth paying attention to that, but it is a short stay with its own staff and its own group, not a preview of a specific vacancy. If you are weighing up living arrangements more broadly, the housing options explainer sets SIL, SDA, ILO, MTA and STA side by side.

Making a stay actually work

The difference between a good stay and a wasted one is nearly always the handover. Send the routine in writing: what time the person wakes, what they eat, what they will not eat, how they communicate discomfort, which noise settles them, which sets them off, what their medication routine looks like and who to ring. A one page summary read by every worker on shift beats a thirty page file that nobody opens.

Then ask for the notes back afterwards. A short debrief and the shift notes from the stay are the part with lasting value, especially if a plan reassessment is coming. Ask specifically about nights, because overnight support is the hardest thing for a family to describe accurately from the inside.

Book earlier than feels necessary. School holidays and long weekends fill first, and the person who rings in November for January is choosing from what is left. If a SIL move is the direction you are heading, you can also register interest against real vacancies on our find a home page while you use STA for the wait.

Frequently asked questions

Is STA the same thing as respite?

Effectively yes, in everyday language. Respite is the older word and STA is what the NDIS calls it. The one real difference is emphasis: respite describes the break for the carer, while STA describes a funded stay that includes accommodation, meals, support hours and activities for the person having it. Both purposes are legitimate reasons for the funding to be in a plan, and you do not need to frame a request as a crisis.

Can STA be used in the same place I want to live permanently?

Sometimes, and it is worth asking a provider directly. Availability depends on whether that home has a room free and whether the existing household can accommodate a short-stay guest, which is a real constraint rather than a brush-off. Even where it is possible, treat it as a short stay with its own group and roster rather than as a trial of that specific vacancy.

Does using STA affect a SIL application?

It does not count for or against you, and funding decisions sit with the NDIA. What STA can do is produce documented observation of support needs, particularly overnight, because workers record shift notes during a stay. Evidence written by someone who was there tends to carry more weight than a family's recollection of the same nights, so ask for the notes after each stay and keep them with your other reports.

What happens if I run out of STA days?

Raise it with your support coordinator or plan manager early rather than at the point of crisis, because the options depend on what else is in your plan and on your circumstances. A genuine change in circumstances is the ground on which a plan reassessment is requested, which is different from having used the allocation faster than planned. Either way the conversation goes better with dates and figures than with a general sense of not coping.