The NDIS Virtual Assistant Australia Keeps Selling You Is A Contractor

An NDIS virtual assistant in Australia is almost always a contractor: engaged by the hour, shared across several providers, employed by nobody. That is fine for overflow typing. It is the wrong shape for claiming, rostering and audit evidence, which is the first work most providers hand across.

And the revenue line paying for it has just been given an expiry date.

On 7 September the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing opened consultation on a new NDIS support coordination and connection service. Submissions close at 11.59pm on 2 October. The consultation paper says the NDIA will directly contract organisations to deliver those services, with procurement in 2027 and the new service commencing 1 July 2028. It puts the workforce at roughly 11,000 support coordinators and is blunt about the rest of them: "Other current providers will no longer deliver these services from 1 July 2028."

Read that as a date, not a consultation. If you deliver support coordination today, you have until 2027 to become the kind of organisation the NDIA contracts, and you take your current cost base into that tender. Outstaffer's own published pricing is part of how we would answer that, which is disclosure rather than pitch.

An NDIS virtual assistant is a contractor with a better noun

The sector has been sold hourly help as the fix for administrative load. Plan tracking, service agreements, claim rejections, incident reporting, rosters. Real work, handed to someone whose contract says contractor.

Who actually employs an NDIS virtual assistant?

Usually a third party, sometimes nobody. The person works your hours, follows your process and cannot send a substitute, which is the pattern the ATO and Fair Work look at rather than the label. We wrote about the way a second client gets mistaken for genuine independence last week. Get advice on your own arrangement before you assume it holds.

There is a second problem, unrelated to classification. Audit evidence needs continuity, and a person rotating across four providers does not build the institutional memory an audit rewards.

The number sitting underneath your support coordination margin

Here is the arithmetic most providers have never run.

What does a back-office head cost in health and social assistance?

Australian Bureau of Statistics figures for May 2026 put average weekly ordinary time earnings for a full-time adult in health care and social assistance at $2,037.20. Annualised, that is $105,934. Superannuation runs at 12 per cent of ordinary time earnings for 2026-27, adding $12,712. So one back-office person costs $118,646 before payroll tax, leave loading, workers compensation, a desk or a licence.

Count your own back office. Three of those people is $355,940 a year, and none of it is billable.

Against that, the employment layer for someone employed overseas on your team is published at $250 a month per head. Nine thousand dollars a year for three. The salary sits on top and varies by market, so treat the $250 as the price of being a compliant employer, not the price of the person. Still a different order of number.

What Australia's NDIS providers can control before 2027

Not the price limits. Not whether the commissioned model proceeds. The administrative layer, which is the only line on the page that moves when you decide it moves.

The honest counter is that 1 July 2028 is thirty-three months away, consultations get reversed, and an hourly contractor genuinely is cheaper this quarter than a salaried employee. All true. Procurement still starts in 2027, tenders are still won on demonstrated operating discipline, and nobody demonstrates that with a roster of hourly strangers.

The roles that move first are where demand is already straining you, a question we worked through in choosing which roles to move. For most NDIS providers that is claiming and scheduling, then an offshore bookkeeper for reconciliation.

Related reading

• Two of your thirty staff already work somewhere else
• Wages up, output per hour flat: what the June quarter cost you

Between now and 2 October you can tell the department what a commissioned service should look like. Between now and 2027 you decide whether your administration is held by employees or by invoices. If you want that costed properly, sign up and run one role through it.

So, the question worth arguing about: if support coordination is contracted centrally from 2028, does an NDIS virtual assistant in Australia still make sense, or does it only survive while the revenue does?