TL;DR
- The Other Professional rate is cut to $156.16. Down from $193.99, a drop of $37.83 (-19.5 per cent). That is the single largest cut of any therapy line in the 2026-27 NDIS Pricing Schedule.
- The rate is now aligned to counselling and creative therapies. Counsellors and art therapists stay at $156.16, and Other Professionals now sits at the same anchor.
- Early Childhood supports are carved out. They remain at $193.99, so not everyone claiming under this category drops.
- Orientation and Mobility Specialists get their own line item. A new dedicated OMS item at $156.16, effective 1 July 2026, after the NDIS Commission recognised the registration in March 2025.
- Practitioner identification is now required at the point of claim. The unidentified-discipline category is being closed off, so you have to name the profession delivering the support.
If your practice claims under the NDIS Other Professional line, this is the change that matters most to you in 2026-27. The rate drops from $193.99 to $156.16 an hour. That is a cut of $37.83, or 19.5 per cent, and it is the largest single reduction applied to any therapy line in the new schedule. These figures come from the NDIA's Annual Pricing Review and are reflected in the published NDIS Pricing Schedule for 2026-27. Most changes take effect from 1 July 2026.
I read the price review so you do not have to. Here is what the change is, who it hits, who it spares, and what to do before July.
What the Other Professional category is, and why it was cut
Other Professional has long been a catch-all. It covered supports delivered by practitioners who did not fit one of the named therapy disciplines like physiotherapy, occupational therapy or speech pathology. In practice, a lot of counselling and creative therapy work was claimed here, alongside genuinely miscellaneous supports.
The NDIA's view is that the rate no longer reflects the work. Counsellors and art and creative therapists are priced at $156.16 an hour, and that rate held in this review. The Other Professional line was sitting at $193.99, well above the rate for the comparable disciplines that were actually being claimed under it. So the NDIA brought Other Professional down to the same anchor: $156.16.
For context, psychology was the only therapy profession to receive an increase this cycle, up $20.00 to $252.99. Everything else either held or fell. You can read the full picture in our 2026-27 NDIS price guide, and the detail on the dietitian and exercise physiology cuts in that companion piece.
Who is affected, and who is carved out
Not every line that touched the Other Professional category drops to $156.16. The carve-out matters.
| Support | 2025-26 rate | 2026-27 rate | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Other Professional | $193.99 | $156.16 | Down $37.83 (-19.5%) |
| Counsellor | $156.16 | $156.16 | Held (the anchor rate) |
| Art / creative therapies | $156.16 | $156.16 | Held |
| Orientation and Mobility Specialist | Claimed under Other Professional | $156.16 | New dedicated line item |
| Early Childhood supports | $193.99 | $193.99 | Carved out, held at $193.99 |
Read that last row carefully. Early Childhood supports are explicitly carved out of the cut. If your practice delivers Early Childhood supports that were claimed in this space, those stay at $193.99. They are not dropping to $156.16. So before you assume a revenue hit across the board, separate your Early Childhood work from your general Other Professional work. The two move in different directions.
If you are a counsellor or a creative therapist, your headline rate does not change. You stay at $156.16. The change for you is structural, not financial, and I will come to that below.
The new Orientation and Mobility Specialist line item
Orientation and Mobility Specialists (OMS) support people who are blind or have low vision to move safely and independently. Until now, that work was claimed under Other Professional because there was no dedicated item for it.
That changes from 1 July 2026. The NDIS Commission recognised the OMS registration in March 2025, and the 2026-27 schedule gives the discipline its own line item at $156.16 an hour. If you deliver orientation and mobility supports, you stop claiming under the generic Other Professional item and start claiming under the named OMS item. The dollar rate is the same $156.16, so this is a coding change rather than a price change for you, but it is one you have to get right from day one.
Practitioner identification at the point of claim
The second structural change applies to everyone who has been using the Other Professional category. From the 2026-27 schedule, the Other Professionals category requires practitioner identification at the point of claim. The unidentified-discipline category is being closed off.
In plain terms, you can no longer claim a support without naming the profession that delivered it. The NDIA wants to know which discipline is behind each claim, which is the same logic driving the OMS line item and the broader push to align rates to the actual work being done. If your billing has been routing a mix of disciplines through a single generic code, that approach stops working in the new year.
This sits alongside a wider restructure of how therapy is claimed. Provider travel, non-face-to-face time and NDIA-requested reports are now separate line items, distinct from direct service. Each profession has suffixed items for direct service, cancellation, non-face-to-face, provider travel, reports and telehealth. If you have not mapped your services to the new item structure yet, start with our breakdown of the travel and report-writing changes.
What this means for your revenue
For a practice claiming general Other Professional supports at the published price, the maths is direct. Every hour you used to bill at $193.99 now bills at $156.16. That is $37.83 less per hour. Over a full-time caseload, the difference compounds quickly, so model it against your actual delivered hours rather than guessing.
Worth knowing: 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. The NDIA treats the published price as the prevailing market rate. If you have been claiming at the maximum, this cut lands at full force. We unpack that pattern in our piece on providers charging the maximum price.
The counsellors and creative therapists reading this do not take a rate cut, but you do inherit more company at $156.16. Other Professional and OMS now sit at the same rate you do. That changes the competitive shape of the market you operate in, even though your number stays still.
What to do before 1 July 2026
Three jobs, in order.
- Identify your discipline correctly. Go through what you currently claim under Other Professional and sort it by the actual profession delivering each support. Counselling, creative therapy, orientation and mobility, Early Childhood, and anything genuinely miscellaneous all need to be separated out.
- Reclaim under the right item. Map each support to its correct 2026-27 line item. OMS work moves to the new OMS item. Early Childhood supports stay on the $193.99 line. General Other Professional work moves to $156.16. Make sure your practice management software and your claim templates reflect the named items, because the unidentified-discipline route is closing.
- Update participant communications. If a participant's plan budget assumed the old $193.99 rate for general Other Professional supports, the same budget now buys more hours at $156.16, or the same hours cost less. Be clear and proactive with participants and support coordinators about what the change means for their plan. Getting ahead of this protects your relationships and your bookings.
The bigger picture
This cut is part of a deliberate move by the NDIA to align therapy prices to the work actually being delivered and to close off vague, catch-all categories. The new Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill, introduced to Parliament on 14 May 2026, would give the Minister power to make binding pricing determinations informed by NDIA advice, so expect this direction of travel to continue rather than reverse.
For providers weighing up registration and category decisions more broadly, our guide to the register-or-stay-unregistered decision is a useful next read.
The practices that come out of this well are the ones that treat it as an operational task, not a shock. Sort your disciplines, fix your claim codes, brief your participants, and you keep delivering without a billing scramble in July. If you want a second set of eyes on how to position your practice through the change, talk to the team at MMG. We work with allied health and NDIS providers across Australia, and we are happy to walk through what this means for your business.
On the growth side of this change: a leaner catch-all rate makes it expensive to be found generically, so the aim is to show up for the discipline you actually practise rather than for NDIS therapy in the abstract. NDIS SEO builds that discipline-level visibility permanently, and NDIS Google Ads covers the gap by putting you in front of searching participants and coordinators from day one while the organic work matures.
