NDIS Billing for Allied Health: What You Can Charge in 2026-27

Key Takeaways

• From 1 July 2026, each allied health discipline has six separate line items, not one. Direct service, cancellation (_CA), non-face-to-face (_NF), provider travel (_PT), NDIA requested reports (_RR) and telehealth (_TH). Claiming travel or report time against the direct-service item is now a rejected claim, not just bad practice.
• Non-face-to-face billing is allowed only for activities directly related to a specific participant's NDIS supports. Administrative tasks like booking appointments and processing invoices are never billable.
• Provider travel is still capped at 50% of your hourly rate, but it now flows through its own _PT item, so travel time is visible in claim data as a separate line.
• You do not get to choose the higher-paying item. Where a line item exists for your specific profession, you must use it, and you can only claim it if you hold the professional-body membership or registration the NDIA names for that profession.
• Your service agreement must explicitly describe and pre-authorise every type of non-face-to-face support you bill for; charging without an updated, signed agreement is a breach of the NDIS Terms of Business.
• Write progress notes at the end of each session and link them to the relevant NDIS goal. Treat every invoice as something that might need to be explained to an auditor.
• PRODA access to the NDIS Commission portal is removed on 30 September 2026. The myplace provider portal has already required myID and RAM since 10 November 2025.

Allied health providers working under the NDIS have always had to navigate complex billing rules, and 1 July 2026 brought the biggest structural change in years. Therapy billing was unbundled: what used to be one line item per discipline is now six. Travel, report writing, telehealth and cancellations each have their own item number, which means the NDIA can now see exactly how much of your billing is face-to-face. Add profession-specific claiming rules and tighter documentation standards, and many occupational therapists, physiotherapists, speech pathologists and psychologists are second-guessing their invoices.

This guide walks through exactly what you can bill for, what you cannot, which item to claim it against, and how to make sure your claiming practices hold up under scrutiny.

The 2026-27 changes that affect you most

The NDIS Pricing Schedule 2026-27 took effect on 1 July 2026 and changed the shape of allied health claiming more than it changed the rates. Full detail on the rate movements is in our NDIS pricing 2026-27 guide; this section covers what it means for your invoices.

Therapy is now six line items per discipline. Every allied health discipline has a base direct-service item plus five suffixed variants:

So an occupational therapist claiming a session uses 15_617_0128_1_3 at $193.99, and claiming the drive to that session uses 15_617_0128_1_3_PT at $97.00. Before 1 July 2026 both went against the same item number.

Telehealth is a claimable item in its own right for the first time. Under the old arrangements, therapy delivered by video was claimed against the standard item with a telehealth flag selected in the portal. From 2026-27 every discipline has a dedicated _TH item. The conditions have not changed (the support must be appropriate to deliver remotely, and the participant must have agreed in advance in the service agreement), but the claim is now separately identifiable.

The travel cap itself has not changed. Allied health professionals can still only claim 50% of their hourly rate for travel time to and from a participant's location. If your discipline's rate is $193.99 per hour, your travel rate is $97.00 per hour. What changed is that it goes through a distinct item rather than the same one as the session.

Support worker prices rose about 4.77% for 2026-27 (standard weekday daytime from $70.23 to $73.58), following the Fair Work Commission's 4.75% Annual Wage Review increase. If you employ support workers as part of a mixed-delivery model, check your rates and service agreements reflect the updated limits. Therapy rates themselves were mostly held: occupational therapy, speech pathology, physiotherapy and podiatry were all frozen, psychology rose to $252.99, and dietetics and exercise physiology were cut.

One thing that has not changed, despite what you may read elsewhere: there is no weekend or after-hours loading for allied health. Disability support worker items carry Saturday, Sunday, public holiday, evening and night rates. Therapy items do not. Every allied health item in the Support Catalogue is priced National, Remote and Very Remote and nothing else. If you have seen a "Saturday therapy rate" quoted anywhere, it does not exist in the Pricing Schedule, and putting one in a service agreement will not make it claimable.

Which item you claim is not a choice

The claiming rules are explicit: "where a line item exists for a specific type of professional, supports of that type need to be made against that item." An occupational therapist claims under the occupational therapy item, not under "Other Professional" and not under any other discipline's item.

This matters more in 2026-27 than it used to, because the disciplines are now priced differently. "Other Professional" fell from $193.99 to $156.16, while occupational therapy, speech pathology, social work, audiology and developmental education held at $193.99. Choosing the wrong item is now a pricing decision as well as a compliance one, and it runs in both directions: claiming a higher item you are not entitled to is an incorrect claim, and claiming a lower one leaves money on the table you were entitled to.

Non-Face-to-Face Billing: The Rules in Plain English

This is the area where the most confusion lives, and also where compliance issues are most likely to arise during an NDIS audit. (Most allied health providers registered only for therapeutic supports sit on the lighter verification pathway; our registration groups guide explains which audit your groups trigger.)

The NDIS does allow allied health providers to bill for non-face-to-face time, but only under specific conditions. The golden rule is that every billable non-face-to-face activity must be directly related to the delivery of a specific disability support to a named participant. General administration, business development, internal meetings, and training junior staff members do not qualify, even if those activities ultimately benefit your participants.

What can you actually bill for? Report writing is the clearest example. Writing an NDIA-required assessment report, a functional capacity assessment, or progress reports that update a participant's goals and support needs are all billable. Phone calls and emails with the participant, their family, support coordinators, or other treating providers are billable if they relate directly to that participant's NDIS supports. Case meetings with other providers, where the focus is on coordinating a specific participant's care, also qualify.

What cannot be billed? Booking and cancelling appointments, processing invoices, writing generic template policies, or attending sector-wide professional development are not NDIS-billable activities. Time spent on these things is real and important, but it falls under the cost of running your practice, not service delivery for a participant.

The line can feel blurry, and that is by design: the NDIS expects providers to use professional judgment about what is "reasonable and necessary." The practical test is to ask yourself whether a reasonable person looking at your time records would agree that the activity directly helped that specific participant receive a better service. If you can make that case clearly in your notes, you are on solid ground.

What Your Service Agreement Must Cover

Here is where many allied health providers trip up. Even if a non-face-to-face activity is legitimately billable, you cannot invoice for it unless your service agreement with the participant explicitly covers it.

Your service agreement needs to describe the types of non-face-to-face supports you may deliver and charge for, at what rate, and roughly how often you expect to provide them. If you want to bill for report writing at your standard hourly rate, that needs to be stated. If you intend to charge for care coordination calls with other providers, that needs to be included too.

This is also where the price changes bite: charging a new or updated rate without a signed, updated service agreement is a breach of the NDIS Terms of Business. The NDIA is explicit that providers must discuss proposed changes with the participant and that the participant must agree before the change is made. If you have not reviewed your service agreements since the 1 July 2026 changes, do it now. Participants also have the right to receive their service agreements in a format they can understand, so make sure your language is clear and accessible.

A compliant service agreement for an allied health provider in 2026-27 should include the specific supports you will deliver, the NDIS line item codes for each support type including the suffixed items for travel, non-face-to-face, reports and telehealth, your hourly rate or session rates, how you will handle non-face-to-face time (including report writing and care coordination), your travel arrangements and how you will charge for travel, your telehealth arrangements if you intend to claim the _TH item, and your cancellation policy with the relevant NDIS cancellation rule applied.

Which credential lets you claim which rate

This is the part most billing guides skip, and it is the part that turns a pricing question into a compliance one. The NDIS does not let you claim a therapy line item simply because you delivered therapy. Each discipline's item can only be claimed where the practitioner holds a specific registration or professional-body membership, and the NDIA names them individually:

Read the psychologist and counsellor rows together, because the gap between them is the single most expensive detail in allied health claiming. A paid provisionally registered psychologist working under supervision claims the psychologist item at $252.99 per hour. The same practitioner working unsupervised claims the counsellor item at $156.16. That is $96.83 an hour turning on supervision status alone.

The compliance consequence is straightforward and easy to miss: these are credentials with expiry dates. An AASW membership that lapses, a CPSP certification that is not renewed, an APD status that expires, or an AHPRA registration that goes to non-practising all have the same effect. Every claim made against that discipline's item during the lapsed period is an incorrect claim, recoverable as a debt, whether or not the practitioner is clinically competent and whether or not the participant was well served.

The same tests appear on the audit side. The NDIS Commission's verification module uses the same professional-body requirements to decide who can be registered against a support category, so a lapsed membership is simultaneously a claiming problem and a Human Resource Management non-conformity. Practically, that means one control fixes both: a credential register that records each practitioner's membership or registration, its number, and its expiry date, with a reminder before it runs out.

The myID and RAM Transition: What Allied Health Providers Need to Do

While it is not strictly a billing issue, the PRODA to myID and Relationship Authorisation Manager (RAM) transition affects how you access the NDIS portals to submit claims and manage your registration, so it belongs in any 2026-27 compliance conversation. There are two portals and two different dates, which is where practices get caught out.

The myplace provider portal has required myID and RAM since 10 November 2025. If you submit claims through myplace, you have already made this transition or you have not been claiming.

PRODA access to the NDIS Commission portal is removed on 30 September 2026. That is the portal you use for registration management, reportable incidents, complaints and audit documentation. If you or any authorised staff have not completed the transition, you have until the end of September. Business owners and sole traders require a "Strong" identity strength in myID, which means a valid Australian passport or one that expired within the last three years. Workers who access the portal on behalf of your practice need to be linked via RAM with appropriate authorisation levels.

Do not leave it to September. Reaching Strong identity strength depends on document verification that can fail for reasons outside your control, and the principal authority in RAM has to be set up before anyone else in the practice can be authorised. Contact Services Australia or the NDIS Commission directly if you are having trouble completing the transition.

Compliance Risks That Are Attracting Commission Attention

The NDIS Commission's published regulatory priorities include strengthened oversight of unregistered providers and sole traders, and a focus on restrictive practices compliance. But the Commission is also ramping up scrutiny of claiming practices across the board.

The Australian National Audit Office reviewed the NDIS Commission's effectiveness in 2025 and found that complaints received by the Commission have grown from 1,422 in 2018-19 to 29,054 in 2023-24. The Commission accepted all 10 of the ANAO's recommendations for improvement, including strengthening its compliance and enforcement processes. A new Risk-Based Regulation Prioritisation Model rolled out in October 2025 is now guiding which providers get scrutinised first.

What does this mean for your practice? Providers with inconsistent claiming patterns, high ratios of non-face-to-face billing, or documentation that does not support their invoices are more likely to attract attention. The Commission now has better data tools to identify anomalies across the sector, and it is using them.

The 2026-27 unbundling makes that considerably easier. Before 1 July 2026, a therapy claim was a therapy claim: travel, report writing, non-face-to-face time and the session itself all arrived under the same item number, so the mix was invisible in claim data. From 1 July 2026 each of those is a separate row. Your ratio of direct service to travel, reports and non-face-to-face time is now a number that can be calculated for your practice, compared against every other provider in your discipline, and sorted. Nobody has to audit you to see it.

That is not a reason to stop claiming non-face-to-face time you are entitled to. It is a reason to make sure each of those claims is against the right item and is backed by a note that explains it.

The safest approach is to treat every invoice as something that might need to be explained to an auditor. Your progress notes should substantiate the time you claimed. Your service agreements should pre-authorise every type of support you are billing for. Your line item mapping in your practice management software should use the correct suffixed items. And your internal policies should reflect the current NDIS Pricing Schedule 2026-27, alongside the claiming rules, which are still those in the 2025-26 Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits because the NDIA has not yet republished that document (see our note on the 2026-27 claiming rules gap).

Staying Compliant Without Drowning in Paperwork

Good compliance does not have to mean hours of extra admin. The key is building the right habits into your day-to-day clinical practice rather than treating compliance as something you prepare for separately.

Write your progress notes at the end of each session while the details are fresh. Link each note to the NDIS goal or support item it relates to. When you have a care coordination call, note the participant's name, the date, who you spoke to, what was discussed, and how it benefited the participant's NDIS supports. That takes two minutes and creates an audit-proof record. Update your service agreements whenever your rates change or you plan to add new types of billable activities.

For multi-site allied health practices, a compliance management platform can make a significant difference. Having your policies, evidence, and documentation in one place means you can respond quickly to a compliance inquiry rather than scrambling across filing systems and email threads.

ClinicComply: Compliance Made Simple for NDIS Allied Health Providers

ClinicComply is built for Australian healthcare providers who want to stay on top of their NDIS compliance obligations without it taking over their week. Track your compliance status against the NDIS Practice Standards, store your evidence in one place, manage deadlines, and generate an evidence pack when your audit rolls around.

Whether you are a solo occupational therapist or a multi-site allied health group, ClinicComply keeps your compliance current and your records audit-ready. Learn more at cliniccomply.com.au/ndis-compliance-accreditation.

Start your free 30-day trial at cliniccomply.com.au.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can NDIS allied health providers bill for report writing?

Yes, NDIS-registered allied health providers can bill for report writing when the report is participant-specific and required to deliver or plan the participant's NDIS supports. This includes functional capacity assessments, progress reports, and NDIA-requested assessments. From 1 July 2026, an NDIA requested report is claimed against the discipline's _RR item at the full hourly rate, and other participant-specific report writing is claimed against the _NF non-face-to-face item. The service agreement must pre-authorise this type of non-face-to-face billing.

What is the NDIS travel claiming rule for 2026-27?

Allied health professionals can only claim 50% of their standard hourly rate for travel time to and from a participant's location. From 1 July 2026 this is claimed through a separate provider travel item ending in _PT, not against the direct-service item. For a discipline priced at $193.99 per hour, the travel item is $97.00 per hour. Remote and very remote rates apply separately, and non-labour travel costs are claimed against the relevant _799_ item.

Do I need to update my service agreements for the 2026-27 price changes?

Yes. If your rates have changed or you have added new types of billable activities (such as telehealth), you must update your service agreements before charging at the new rates. The NDIA requires you to discuss proposed changes with the participant and for the participant to agree before the change is made. Charging a new rate without an updated and signed service agreement is a breach of the NDIS Terms of Business.

Which NDIS line item do I claim for telehealth in 2026-27?

Each allied health discipline now has a dedicated telehealth item ending in _TH, claimed at the full hourly rate for that discipline. This is new for 2026-27; previously telehealth was claimed against the standard item using the telehealth option in the provider portal. The underlying conditions are unchanged: the support must be appropriate to deliver remotely and the participant must have agreed to telehealth in advance in the service agreement.

Can I claim the occupational therapy rate if my therapist's registration has lapsed?

No. Each therapy line item can only be claimed where the practitioner holds the registration or professional-body membership the NDIA names for that discipline, such as current AHPRA registration for occupational therapists, CPSP certification for speech pathologists, or AASW membership for social workers. If that credential lapses, claims made against that item during the lapsed period are incorrect claims and may be recovered as a debt. The same requirements are assessed under the NDIS Commission's verification module at audit.

What happens if NDIS claims are audited and documentation is insufficient?

If the NDIS Commission or a compliance audit finds that your claims are not supported by adequate documentation, you may be required to repay the amounts claimed. In serious cases, the Commission can issue compliance notices, civil penalties, or banning orders. The Commission's risk-based regulation model introduced in October 2025 means providers with unusual claiming patterns are more likely to be selected for review.

Can unregistered NDIS providers bill for non-face-to-face allied health time?

Unregistered providers working with self-managed or plan-managed participants can deliver and invoice for non-face-to-face allied health supports, subject to the NDIS Code of Conduct and applicable pricing arrangements. However, they must still meet the same requirements around service agreements, documentation, and reasonable and necessary support. The NDIS Commission's continuing focus on unregistered providers means compliance obligations are the same even without formal registration.

Is booking and cancelling appointments billable under the NDIS?

No. Administrative tasks like booking appointments, processing invoices, and replying to general enquiries are not NDIS-billable activities. These fall under the operational costs of running your practice. Only time spent on activities that directly support a specific participant's NDIS goals and supports qualifies for non-face-to-face billing.