Three things decide whether an NDIS participant can use your practice at all: which plan management types you accept, whether you are an NDIS-registered provider, and when you can realistically see someone. Most allied health websites answer none of the three. They offer “we accept NDIS referrals” and leave the participant to ring and find out. That sentence is not an answer. It is the reason a plan-managed participant with a four-week window moves on to the next provider on their list, and you never learn they visited.

This post is general guidance, not legal, funding, or regulatory advice. NDIS pricing and registration rules change, sometimes mid-year. For current figures check the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits directly, and for registration questions the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission.

The question your site probably does not answer

Before a participant cares whether you are any good, they need to know whether they are allowed to spend their funding with you. That depends on how their plan is managed, and there are three answers.

Agency-managed (also called NDIA-managed) means the NDIA pays providers directly. These participants can only use NDIS-registered providers. If you are not registered, an agency-managed participant cannot engage you, no matter how well your site is written.

Plan-managed means a third-party plan manager receives and pays your invoices. These participants can use registered and unregistered providers.

Self-managed means the participant holds the funding and pays you themselves. They can use any provider at any rate.

“We accept NDIS” is ambiguous to all three groups. The registered practice loses nothing by being specific. The unregistered practice loses agency-managed participants either way, so vagueness only wastes the time of people it briefly strings along, which is a poor first impression to make on someone who then has to start their search again.

What to publish is one plain sentence, in the participant’s language rather than the sector’s:

We work with plan-managed and self-managed NDIS participants. We are not an NDIS-registered provider, so we are unable to work with agency-managed (NDIA-managed) plans.

Put that line on your service pages, not only on a single NDIS page. Participants arrive on the page about the thing they need, not on your funding explainer.

On registration itself, state your status plainly and without apology. Registered providers appear in the NDIS Provider Finder, which is a real discovery channel worth having. Operating unregistered is entirely legal and remains common in allied health therapy. Mandatory registration has been expanding, reaching supported independent living and digital platform providers from 1 July 2026, with further expansion to personal care and daily living supports announced in April 2026, but it has not reached allied health therapy. Do not write copy implying registration is a quality marker you happen to be missing, and do not imply the reverse either.

Publish your availability, not just your services

Waitlists are the defining friction of the sector. Therapy waits run to weeks or months across much of the country, participants know it, and they now research providers online and compare before making contact rather than ringing around.

This makes a dated availability statement the single highest-value line most practice sites are missing:

Taking new clients as at 1 September 2026. Current wait for a first appointment is about three weeks.

Or, just as usefully:

Our books are closed until November. You are welcome to join the waitlist below.

The date matters. An undated “now accepting new clients” is assumed to be stale, because it usually is, and a participant who has been burned by two of them stops believing the third.

Saying you are closed is not a lost booking. It saves someone a phone call they have to work up to making, and it earns the return visit. The provider who was honest in September is the one they check first in November. Set a calendar reminder to review the line monthly and it stays an asset rather than becoming a liability.

While you are there, state who you are not the right fit for: age ranges you do not see, presentations outside your scope, whether you offer home or school visits. Ruling yourself out early is a service to everyone, and it is the same clarity that makes a booking page convert.

What changed on 1 July, and what it means for your pages

On 1 July 2026 the NDIS pricing schedule restructured how therapy supports are claimed. Each discipline now carries six separate line items rather than one item with modifiers attached: direct service, cancellation, non-face-to-face work, provider travel, NDIA requested reports, and telehealth.

That is a billing change, but four of the six are things participants and plan managers ask about before booking, which makes them website content.

Telehealth is now its own claimable item. It did not exist as a separate item in the 2025-26 schedule, and it is claimed at the full hourly rate for the discipline. If you offer telehealth, it has earned a plain statement of its own rather than a clause inside a paragraph about flexibility: what it suits, what it does not, how the session works, and what a participant needs at their end. Our guide to telehealth-friendly website design covers the structure.

Travel is a separate item, claimed at half your hourly rate. If you do home, school, or community visits, say so, say how far you travel, and say how travel is charged. Mobile providers who leave this vague lose participants who simply assume they are out of area.

Non-face-to-face work and NDIA requested reports are separate items. Participants and plan managers now see these as distinct lines on an invoice, so the questions follow: do you charge for report writing, how long does a report take, what does a functional capacity assessment cost. Answer them on the page instead of in a first phone call.

Cancellation is a separate item. Publish your policy in plain words: the notice period, what is charged, and what happens if someone is unwell. Participants ask this before they book, not after.

These are also, not coincidentally, exactly the questions an AI assistant now tries to answer on a participant’s behalf. Facts published as ordinary text are the ones that get cited in AI search results. Facts locked inside a downloadable fee schedule are not.

Fees, and the rule that catches providers out

Rates moved unevenly on 1 July. Psychology rose to $252.99 an hour, an increase of roughly 8.6%. Occupational therapy, speech pathology, physiotherapy, and podiatry were held. Dietetics fell to $178.99 and exercise physiology to $161.99.

These are price limits rather than fixed prices, and they apply to NDIS-funded work. They are also public, participants read them, and plan managers check invoices against them.

The website implication is straightforward. If you publish fees, and you should, review them against the current schedule and put a date on the page. A fee page still showing last year’s figures tells a careful reader that nothing else on the site is current either.

One rule is worth knowing because it catches providers out: a price increase cannot be applied by simply invoicing more. The change has to be discussed with the participant and agreed, ordinarily through a varied service agreement, before the new rate is charged. That is a practice-management obligation rather than a web one, but it has a web consequence. Your published fees and your service agreement need to say the same thing, which means the page and the paperwork get updated together or not at all.

Your second audience: plan managers and support coordinators

Participants are not your only readers. Support coordinators and plan managers shortlist providers on a participant’s behalf, often several at once, and they read a site differently. They are not browsing. They are checking whether you clear a set of gates.

What they scan for: capacity right now, the areas you cover, which plan management types you accept, whether you will write the report the plan needs, your ABN and invoicing details, and who to send a referral to.

Give them a referrals section or page that answers all of it: how to refer, what information you need from them, your expected response time, and an email address that goes somewhere genuinely monitored. It is a low-glamour page that quietly generates a lot of work, because a coordinator who can complete a referral without ringing you will come back with the next one.

A 20-minute audit

Everything below is text on a page. None of it is a redesign, and all of it is information you already hold.

Plan management types you accept, stated on your service pages as well as your NDIS page.
Registration status stated plainly, with no apology and no implication either way.
A dated availability line with a real wait estimate, reviewed monthly.
Who you do not see: age ranges, presentations, settings.
Telehealth as its own clearly stated option, now that it is its own claimable item.
Travel and home or school visits: whether you do them, how far, how charged.
Reports: whether you write them, typical turnaround, indicative cost.
Cancellation policy in plain words, with notice period and charge.
Fees checked against the current schedule, with the page dated.
A referrals path for coordinators and plan managers, with a monitored contact.

If you have already done the schema markup groundwork, these facts will also be the ones machines read back correctly. If you have not, publish the plain text first. Structure can follow.

A participant researching providers is spending real energy, frequently while managing the very thing they need help with. Every question your site leaves unanswered is a phone call you are asking them to make simply to find out whether they can use you at all. Answering those questions in plain text is not marketing. It is the same courtesy as a clearly signed waiting room, and it happens to be what gets you shortlisted.

At ABCS we build allied health sites where this information has a designed home rather than being appended to whichever page had room, and where keeping it current takes minutes rather than a support ticket.

NDIS-friendly allied health websites: what participants actually need to see