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NDIS supports are the services, items and equipment we fund or provide under the NDIS. An NDIS support is the practical description of how we help you under the NDIS.
There are two types of NDIS supports:
- the general supports we provide to you
- the reasonable and necessary supports we fund in your plan.
General supports
General supports are those we provide to you, like a local area coordinator or early childhood partner.
We help you develop your plan and connect with supports and activities in your area.
For example, we can help you connect with:
- informal supports, like your friends, family or other people you know in your community
- community supports that are open to everyone in the community, like sporting clubs, activity groups or libraries
- mainstream supports – other government services like the health or education systems.
General supports are not funded through your NDIS plan.
General supports can be provided by:
- an early childhood partner for children younger than 9 – learn more in Our Guideline – Early connections
- a local area coordinator for people aged 9 or older – learn more in Our Guideline - Community Connections
- Remote Community Connectors
- Aboriginal Disability Liaison Officers
- community organisations through the Department of Social Services' Information, Linkages and Capacity Building program .
We can provide these general supports to everyone with a disability, including people who are not NDIS participants.
Reasonable and necessary supports
Reasonable and necessary supports are the disability supports we fund in your plan. You can use this funding to buy supports from service providers.
All NDIS supports funded in your plan need to meet the NDIS funding criteria. For example, they need to directly relate to your disability, be value for money, and effective and beneficial.
We also consider how your supports will work together as a package to address your disability support needs, or to achieve an outcome.
The supports we fund must be reasonable and necessary individually, but they must also be reasonable and necessary as a package of supports.
If you need a new support, which now means your overall package of supports doesn’t meet the NDIS funding criteria anymore, we may either:
- not include the new support in your plan
- include the new support in your plan, but also reduce the other supports in your plan.
For example, a home modification may reduce your need for other supports. We’ll need to take any planned home modification into account when we think about what other supports you need. For example, you might need less supports for care at home.
We look at all the information we have when we decide what supports to include in your plan.
Check out Our Guideline - Reasonable and necessary supports to learn how we decide what supports to include in your plan, and how we describe them.
We also consider our Participant Service Charter and what you can expect from us when we create your plan.
We have detailed information on how we make decisions about different types of supports. Learn more about supports we can fund.