TL;DR
- Dietitians drop $10.00. The national maximum falls from $188.99 to $178.99 per hour (down 5.3 per cent) from 1 July 2026, the second annual cut in a row.
- Exercise physiologists drop $5.00. The rate falls from $166.99 to $161.99 per hour (down 3.0 per cent), its first cut after the previous review left the rate unchanged.
- Why: both sat above the benchmarks. NDIS dietitian pricing ran 21.9 to 24.3 per cent above private health and Medicare reference rates; exercise physiology ran 9.9 to 26.5 per cent above. The NDIA moved part of the gap, not all of it, to limit disruption.
- Travel is now its own line. Provider travel is a separate item at 50 per cent of the service rate: $89.50 for dietitians, $81.00 for exercise physiologists.
- The fix is operational. Protect margin through utilisation, claim every legitimate item, communicate value, and widen referral sources so a few dollars of rate does not decide your year.
Two of the most common allied health disciplines on the NDIS just took a rate cut. From 1 July 2026, the national maximum price for a dietitian falls to $178.99 per hour, and exercise physiology falls to $161.99 per hour. Neither cut is large on its own. What matters is that dietitians are now down two years running, exercise physiology has joined them for the first time, and the direction of travel is now clear. If you run a practice that bills either line, your per-hour ceiling is lower again, and the way you build margin has to change with it.
These figures come from the NDIA's Annual Pricing Review and are reflected in the published NDIS Pricing Schedule for 2026-27. Here is what moved, why, and what to do about it.
What changed for dietitians and exercise physiologists
The dietitian rate is down for the second consecutive year. It was cut $5.00 in the prior review and drops another $10.00 now. Exercise physiology is a different story. The previous review made no change because the private health data was too thin at the time, so this $5.00 cut is its first, driven by better benchmarking data this year.
| Discipline | 2025-26 rate | 2026-27 rate | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dietitian | $188.99 | $178.99 | down $10.00 (-5.3%) |
| Exercise Physiologist | $166.99 | $161.99 | down $5.00 (-3.0%) |
For context, most other therapy lines held flat. Occupational therapy, speech pathology and audiology stayed at $193.99, podiatry held at $188.99, and physiotherapy held at $183.99. The only therapy profession to receive an increase was psychology, up $20.00 to $252.99. You can read the detail on that one in our piece on the psychology price rise for 2026-27. Dietitians and exercise physiologists are, alongside Other Professionals, the lines that went down.
Why the NDIA cut these two
The logic is benchmarking. The NDIA compares NDIS prices against external reference points, mainly Medicare (MBS) and private health insurance (PHI) rates at the 75th percentile, and where the NDIS sits well above those markets it pulls the price back toward them.
On that test, both lines were running hot:
- Dietitians. The NDIS price was 21.9 per cent above the PHI2 75th-percentile rate of $155.00, and 24.3 per cent above the MBS 75th-percentile rate of $152.00.
- Exercise physiologists. The NDIS price was 9.9 per cent above the MBS 75th-percentile rate of $152.00, and 26.5 per cent above the PHI1 rate of $132.00.
One detail is worth holding onto. The NDIA did not close the full gap. A dietitian rate fully aligned to the benchmarks would have landed near $152.00 to $155.00, not $178.99. The Review moved part of the distance and held the rest back to limit market disruption. That is a deliberate soft landing, and it tells you something about intent: the published rate is still above the comparable markets, which means further pressure in future reviews is plausible rather than guaranteed. Plan as if the floor has not been found yet.
What a few dollars an hour actually does to your business
It is easy to wave off $5.00 or $10.00 an hour. Do the arithmetic across a full caseload and it stops being trivial. A dietitian billing 25 NDIS hours a week loses $250.00 a week at the new ceiling, which is roughly $12,000 across a working year per full-time clinician. Run a team of four and you are looking at a five-figure hole that did not exist last June. The cut lands straight on the bottom line, because your wages, rent, software and supervision costs did not fall to match.
The pressure is sharper if you assume the maximum price is your price. For most providers it effectively is. In the six months to 31 December 2025, 69 per cent of all NDIS claims were made at the maximum published price, up from 66 per cent the year before, and the NDIA now treats the published price as the prevailing market rate. We unpack what that means for how you set fees in our piece on why nearly seven in ten providers charge the maximum. The short version: there is almost no room to absorb a cut by quietly lifting your rate, because you were already at the ceiling.
Don't leave the new travel line on the table
One change works in your favour if you claim it properly. The 2026-27 schedule unbundles therapy claiming, so provider travel, non-face-to-face time, and NDIA-requested reports are now separate line items rather than being folded into the service hour. Provider travel for therapy is priced at 50 per cent of the service rate, which means $89.50 for dietitians and $81.00 for exercise physiologists.
If your clinicians do home visits or community-based sessions, that travel time is now claimable as its own item instead of being eaten by the session. Practices that historically under-claimed travel will see real money here. The flip side is that the documentation and item structure are more involved, so your admin and billing process needs to keep up. We cover the full unbundling, including the report-writing items, in our guide to the travel and report-writing changes for 2026-27.
How to protect margin without cutting corners
You cannot control the ceiling. You can control how much of each clinical hour earns, and how reliably the chairs stay full. Four levers matter most.
1. Tighten utilisation
The single biggest driver of margin in an allied health practice is the proportion of paid clinical hours against available hours. Reducing cancellations and no-shows, smoothing scheduling gaps, and getting clinicians to their billable target does far more for the bottom line than a few dollars of rate ever did. A small lift in utilisation across a team outweighs the entire size of this cut.
2. Claim every legitimate item
With travel, non-face-to-face time and reports now separate, the providers who win are the ones whose billing captures the full, legitimate scope of work delivered. This is about claiming correctly for work you actually do, not about inflating anything. Make sure your team understands the new item structure so genuine effort is not absorbed into the service hour for free.
3. Communicate your value
When the funded rate tightens, the case for choosing your practice has to rest on outcomes and reliability, not price (you have no price lever anyway). Participants and their support coordinators refer to providers they trust to turn up, communicate, and get results. Sharpen how you present your clinicians' experience, your responsiveness, and the outcomes you help people reach. That positioning is what keeps your referral pipeline full when the numbers get tighter. If you want a sense of how that plays out in practice, our overview of marketing an NDIS provider business is a useful starting point.
4. Broaden your referral sources
Volume protects margin. A practice that depends on one or two referral channels is fragile to any rate movement, because it cannot easily replace lost hours. Diversifying where new participants come from (support coordinators, GPs and specialists, other allied health, and direct enquiry) gives you the volume to stay profitable at a lower per-hour rate. For mixed-discipline practices this is especially important: if your dietetics and exercise physiology lines are both down while your OT or speech caseload held flat, a steady flow of new referrals lets you balance the book across services rather than leaning on the squeezed lines.
The picture for mixed-discipline practices
If you run a multidisciplinary clinic, treat 2026-27 as a year of divergence rather than a single trend. Psychology is up. OT, speech, audiology and podiatry held. Dietetics and exercise physiology are down. That spread means your blended margin depends heavily on your service mix and your scheduling. Two practices with identical revenue can finish the year very differently depending on which lines carry their hours. It is worth modelling your own caseload against the new rates rather than assuming the cut washes out.
The wider context here is the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill, introduced into Parliament on 14 May 2026, which proposes to give the Minister power to make binding pricing determinations informed by the NDIA's advice. The annual review is becoming a more formal lever, so building a practice that does not live or die on a few dollars of rate is the durable play. For the full set of 2026-27 movements across every line, our NDIS price guide for 2026-27 pulls it all together in one place.
The takeaway
A second straight cut for dietetics, and a first for exercise physiology, is a signal, not a one-off. The benchmarks say the NDIS still pays above the comparable markets, so the smart response is to assume the rate is no longer the thing you compete on. Build the practice that wins on utilisation, clean claiming, clear value and a wide referral base, and a $5.00 or $10.00 movement stops dictating your year. If you want a second set of eyes on your positioning and referral pipeline heading into the new pricing year, have a chat with us. We work with allied health and NDIS providers on exactly this.
One practical next step: a discipline absorbing a rate cut cannot keep paying yesterday's price to win each new client, so acquisition cost is now a number to manage as closely as utilisation. Owned visibility beats rented clicks on that measure, and it is the thinking behind our marketing for dietitians and marketing for exercise physiologists programs.
