TL;DR
- Therapy claiming is now unbundled. From 1 July 2026, direct service, provider travel, non-face-to-face time, NDIA-requested reports and telehealth are each their own line item in the NDIS Pricing Schedule for 2026-27. This applies to every therapy discipline.
- Provider travel is priced at 50 per cent of the service rate. That works out to $89.50 an hour for a dietitian, $81.00 for an exercise physiologist and $78.08 for a counsellor.
- You record claims differently now. Time that used to sit inside one service entry has to be split across the correct items, which touches your practice software, templates, quoting and service agreements.
- Plan funding is the catch. Travel and non-face-to-face activities only get paid if the participant's plan actually funds them, so quoting and agreements need to reflect that before your first July session.
- Why the NDIA did it. Transparency and accuracy. Splitting the components shows where the money goes and stops travel and admin being hidden inside the hourly rate.
The headline therapy price changes for 2026-27 will get most of the attention, but the structural change buried in the schedule is the one that will reshape how your practice bills every single session. From 1 July 2026, the way you claim for a therapy appointment is being pulled apart. Direct service, provider travel, non-face-to-face time, NDIA-requested reports and telehealth are now separate line items, each with its own code and its own rules.
This is not a price cut or a price rise. It is a change to the plumbing of how you claim. Handled well, it is administrative. Handled badly, it costs you paid hours you used to take for granted. This article walks through what actually changes on the ground, and gives you a checklist to work through before July. For the full picture of the 2026-27 changes across every support category, start with our NDIS price guide for 2026-27.
What unbundling actually means
Until now, a chunk of what you did around an appointment could be folded into a single service entry. Travel to a participant's home, writing up notes afterward, drafting a report the NDIA asked for: a lot of that got claimed under the same banner as the face-to-face hour, or got absorbed and never claimed at all.
The 2026-27 schedule ends that. Each therapy profession now carries a suffixed set of items. In plain terms, every discipline has its own version of:
- Direct Service. The face-to-face (or genuine clinical) hour with the participant.
- Provider Travel. Your time getting to and from the participant, priced separately.
- Non-Face-to-Face. Clinical work done away from the participant, such as note write-ups, session planning and case conferencing.
- NDIA Requested Reports. Reports the agency specifically asks for, claimed as their own item.
- Telehealth. Sessions delivered remotely, separated out from in-person service.
- Cancellation. The short-notice cancellation item, also distinct.
The point is that the work has not changed. The way you record and claim it has. You are no longer logging one line for an appointment. You are logging the appointment plus the surrounding activity against the correct codes.
How provider travel is priced
Provider travel for therapy is set at 50 per cent of the service hourly rate. So the travel item tracks each profession's direct rate and lands at half of it. A few worked examples from the 2026-27 schedule:
| Profession | Direct service rate (per hour) | Provider travel (per hour) |
|---|---|---|
| Dietitian | $178.99 | $89.50 |
| Exercise Physiologist | $161.99 | $81.00 |
| Counsellor | $156.16 | $78.08 |
The same 50 per cent logic flows through to the other therapy disciplines against their own rates. Worth noting for dietitians and exercise physiologists: those two professions also took service-rate cuts this year, which sets the travel figures above. If you run either discipline, read the detail in our breakdown of the dietitian and exercise physiology price cuts, because the lower service rate and the new travel item land together.
Why the NDIA did this
The driver is transparency and accuracy. When travel and admin sit inside one hourly rate, nobody can see where the money actually goes, and the published price stops reflecting the cost of the clinical hour itself. Splitting the components out makes each cost visible: this much was face-to-face care, this much was travel, this much was a report the agency requested.
It also tightens the link between funding and activity. A participant's plan can now fund travel and non-face-to-face work as identifiable things, rather than those costs hiding inside a service line. That is good for accountability across the scheme. It is also why the change carries an operational sting, which we will come to: if the plan does not fund the component, you cannot claim it.
What changes operationally
This is where it gets real for your practice. The unbundling touches six areas, and most of them need attention before your first July appointment.
How claims are recorded
Every session now potentially generates multiple claim lines instead of one. Your clinicians need to log travel time, non-face-to-face time and any requested report separately, against the right code. That is a behaviour change for the people doing the work, not just a back-office tweak. If your team has been rolling travel and write-up time into the appointment out of habit, that habit now produces incorrect claims.
Practice management software and templates
Your booking and claiming system has to support the new item codes for each discipline you run. Check that the 2026-27 items are loaded, that the travel item is mapped to the correct 50 per cent rate, and that staff can select the right line without guessing. Note templates and invoice templates need the same update so the surrounding activity gets captured at the point of care, not reconstructed weeks later from memory.
Quoting and service agreements
If you quote for a block of therapy, your quote now has to itemise travel, non-face-to-face time and reports as distinct components, not a single blended hourly figure. Service agreements should spell out that these are separate, claimable items and set the participant's expectation up front. A vague agreement that just references an hourly rate will leave you arguing about travel after the fact.
Staff training
Clinicians and admin both need a short, clear brief on the new structure: which item covers what, how to log travel, what counts as non-face-to-face, and which reports are claimable. The professions that lean on home and community visits will feel this most, because travel is now a deliberate claim rather than an afterthought.
Making sure plans actually fund it
This is the one that bites. Travel and non-face-to-face activity only get paid if the participant's plan has the funding for them. An older plan written before the unbundling may not have anticipated separate travel and report items. Before you deliver, check the plan supports what you intend to claim, and flag any gaps to the participant or their support coordinator early. Delivering travel against a plan that does not fund it is unpaid work.
Telehealth and reports as their own decisions
Because telehealth and NDIA-requested reports are now distinct items, treat them as deliberate choices rather than variations of a normal session. A requested report is claimable as its own line when the agency asks for it. A telehealth session is logged as telehealth, not as in-person service. Small distinctions, but they add up across a caseload.
A before-1-July checklist
Run through this with your practice manager well ahead of the date, not on the day:
- Confirm your practice software has the 2026-27 line items loaded for every discipline you deliver, including the suffixed travel, non-face-to-face, report and telehealth items.
- Verify the provider travel item is mapped to 50 per cent of each profession's current service rate.
- Update note and invoice templates so travel, non-face-to-face time and reports are captured at the point of service.
- Rewrite quoting so it itemises the separate components instead of a single blended rate.
- Update service agreement wording to name travel, non-face-to-face work and reports as distinct claimable items.
- Brief clinicians and admin on which item covers what, and how to log travel correctly.
- Audit active participant plans for whether they fund travel and non-face-to-face activity, and raise gaps with coordinators before delivery.
- Decide how you will handle requested reports and telehealth as their own claim lines going forward.
Where this sits in the bigger picture
The unbundling is part of a wider tidy-up in the 2026-27 schedule. The same logic of making costs visible and separately claimable runs through the therapy changes generally, including the one profession that came out ahead this year. Psychology was the only therapy line to receive an increase, up to $252.99 an hour, and the new claiming structure applies to it exactly as it does to everyone else. The detail is in our piece on the psychology price increase.
These are NDIA recommendations reflected in the published NDIS Pricing Schedule for 2026-27. Most of the therapy changes, including this one, take effect from 1 July 2026. They sit alongside a broader reform agenda working through Parliament, which we cover separately in our article on the Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill.
The practices that handle this well will treat it as a systems job done in June, not a surprise discovered in their July remittance. Get the codes loaded, the templates updated, the agreements rewritten and the plans checked, and unbundling becomes a non-event. Leave it, and you will be doing unpaid travel and chasing funding gaps mid-quarter. If you want a hand turning the 2026-27 changes into clear messaging for your participants and referrers, or positioning your practice well through the shift, have a chat with our team.
A final note on catchments: capped travel quietly rewrites the economics of distance, because a participant ten minutes from your clinic now costs far less to serve than one forty minutes away. That shifts effort toward deep local visibility around each location you operate, which is bread-and-butter work in our NDIS marketing engagements and just as relevant for the allied health marketing clients who balance NDIS and private caseloads.
