TL;DR
- The monthly plan management fee is held at $104.45. No increase for 2026-27, despite provider calls for a rise and for the establishment fee to be brought back.
- The establishment fee and remote loadings stay gone. Both were removed in the prior review and are not returning.
- The bigger story is the review. The NDIA has flagged the whole plan management pricing approach for a rethink toward a transaction and administrative model rather than a flat monthly fee.
- This is a large, concentrated market. About 65 per cent of participants use a plan manager, $13.4 billion in payments were processed in the period, and $292 million of that was monthly fees.
- Margin pressure differs by scale. 64 per cent of plan managers already deliver other supports, which is exactly the hedge worth thinking about now.
If you run a plan management business, the headline from the 2026-27 NDIS Pricing Schedule is short. The monthly fee stays at $104.45. No increase. Providers asked for a rise. They also asked for the establishment fee to be reinstated. The NDIA said no to both. These figures are NDIA recommendations from the Annual Pricing Review, reflected in the published schedule for 2026-27.
That is the easy part to absorb. The part worth your attention is what sits underneath it: the NDIA has flagged the entire plan management pricing model for review. If you are planning the next two years of your business on the assumption that a flat monthly fee is permanent, read on.
What was held, and what stays gone
The recommendation keeps the monthly fee at its present level of $104.45 per participant per month. Nothing was added back. The establishment fee, which once covered the upfront work of setting a participant up, was removed in the prior review and is not returning. Remote loadings were stripped at the same time and also stay gone.
So the structure you are working with from 1 July 2026 is the same flat monthly fee you have now, with no front-loaded payment for onboarding and no geographic uplift. The table below sets it out plainly.
| Component | Status for 2026-27 | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly fee (per participant) | Held, no increase | $104.45 |
| Establishment fee | Removed in prior review, not reinstated | Nil |
| Remote loadings | Removed in prior review, not reinstated | Nil |
Hold the fee flat against rising wage and software costs and the real value of that $104.45 erodes a little each year. That is the quiet squeeze. It is not dramatic in any single month, but it compounds, and it lands hardest on operators who run thin.
The market you are competing in
Plan management is one of the largest and most concentrated corners of the scheme. In the period the NDIA reviewed, about 65 per cent of all active participants used a plan manager. The numbers attached to that are big.
- $13.4 billion in participant payments processed through plan managers.
- $292 million of that was plan management monthly fees.
- 64 per cent of plan managers also claim fees for other supports.
That last figure matters more than it first looks. Two in three plan managers are not pure-play plan managers. They sit inside broader provider businesses, which tells you the market has already worked out that a single flat fee is a fragile thing to build a whole company on. The operators who diversified did so for a reason.
The real story: the model is under review
Here is the line that should shape your planning. The NDIA has flagged the whole plan management pricing approach for review, to better reflect what the service actually is.
Plan management costs are driven by transaction volume and the systems that process them, not by labour movements. The current flat monthly fee does not reflect that, and the NDIA has signalled it wants the pricing to.
Read that carefully. Most NDIS supports are priced off labour. Wages move, prices follow. Plan management is different. Your cost base is software, automation, payment processing and the volume of claims you handle, not the hours a worker spends face to face. The current fee treats plan management as if it were a labour service. The NDIA has acknowledged it is really an administrative and transactional one.
A shift toward a transaction model could change the economics in several directions at once. A per-transaction component would reward high-volume, automated operators and pressure low-volume ones. A tiered or capped structure could compress margins at the top end, where a handful of large players process enormous claim volumes on the same flat fee. Nothing is decided. But the direction of travel is clear, and a flat monthly fee per participant is unlikely to survive a review framed this way unchanged.
What it means for your business
Three things follow from this, and they differ depending on your scale.
If you run at volume
A move to transaction-based pricing could go either way for you. High automation and low cost per claim is exactly the profile that benefits if pricing starts to reward processing efficiency. But if the review caps or tiers fees to rein in the largest operators, your per-participant economics could tighten. Now is the time to understand your true cost per transaction, not just your revenue per participant.
If you run a smaller book
A flat fee held against rising costs squeezes you first, because you have less scale to absorb it. A transaction model could squeeze further if your volumes are modest. This is the moment to look hard at whether plan management alone carries your business, or whether it works better as one service inside a wider offer.
Whatever your scale
The strategic case for diversifying is now backed by the data. 64 per cent of plan managers already deliver other supports. If your revenue rests entirely on a single fee that is held flat and flagged for review, you are carrying concentration risk. Pairing plan management with support coordination, or with allied health, or with another complementary line, spreads that risk and deepens the relationship you have with each participant.
Watch the review, and position now
None of this means panic. The fee is held, not cut, and 1 July 2026 changes nothing about the dollar figure. What changes is the certainty around it. A pricing review has been openly flagged, and reviews of this kind tend to arrive with real structural change rather than a tweak.
The providers who come through this well will be the ones who understand their own transaction economics before the NDIA reprices around them, and who have built a second or third revenue line so that no single fee decision can wobble the whole business. If you want to see how the rest of the 2026-27 changes fit together, our overview of the 2026-27 NDIS price changes walks through the therapy cuts, the SCCP differential and the rest of the schedule.
Positioning a plan management business so it reads as more than a commodity fee is a marketing problem as much as an operational one. If you are thinking about how to present a diversified offer, or how to win participants in a crowded market where most providers look the same, our piece on marketing an NDIS provider business in 2026 is a good starting point. And if you want to talk through where your business sits and how to message the change, book a free strategy call and we will give you a straight read.
Winning a fixed-fee market
When every plan manager works under the same $104.45 cap, price cannot differentiate you, so participants choose on what they can see: clarity of offer, speed of response and how credible you look at first click. Your NDIS provider website is the one competitive surface the pricing review cannot touch, and it deserves attention before the model changes underneath you. Sharpening that first impression is the heart of our marketing for plan managers, because commodity-priced categories are won on communication.
