What Is the NDIS, And What's Changing in 2026?

Unless you have a family member on the NDIS, or work in disability services, or follow Australian social policy closely, you could be forgiven for not knowing much about how it works. You probably know it exists. You may have heard debates about its cost or its scale. But the mechanics, how someone gets on it, what it pays for, how it is managed, are less widely understood than the scheme's footprint in Australian life would suggest they should be.

That matters right now, because the NDIS is changing significantly in 2026, and the changes affect not just the 600,000+ people currently on the scheme but the broader question of how Australia supports people with disability, one of the most fundamental tests of what kind of country we are.

What the NDIS is

The National Disability Insurance Scheme, the NDIS, is a federal government program that provides individualised funding to Australians with permanent and significant disability. Launched in 2013 and progressively rolled out nationally by 2020, it replaced a patchwork of state-based disability services with a single national scheme that gives people with disability the funding to choose their own supports.

The underlying idea is choice and control: rather than being assigned to a government-run service, participants receive a plan with funding they can spend on supports that meet their specific needs. Those supports might include therapy services, assistive technology, home modifications, community participation programs, support workers, and more. The specific supports are determined by what is 'reasonable and necessary' for the individual's disability.

What the scheme was designed to fix

Before the NDIS, disability support in Australia was delivered through a fragmented mix of state and territory services, charity-run organisations, and means-tested funding pools. Access depended heavily on where you lived, what was available locally, and how good your family was at navigating the system. People with disability and their families described a chronic experience of waiting lists, service gaps, and a fundamental lack of control over what support they received and from whom.

The NDIS addressed these problems significantly. Participants gained funded access to supports that simply hadn't existed for them before. Families gained flexibility and choice. The disability services sector grew enormously to meet the demand that had previously been suppressed. The scheme is, by most measures, transformative for those it has reached. The question being contested in the current reforms is how to make it financially sustainable at its current scale while maintaining that transformative effect.

What is changing in 2026

The NDIS is currently implementing the most significant changes since its establishment, driven by an Independent Review completed in 2023 and legislation passed in 2024. The changes are significant enough to affect both who is on the scheme and what the scheme pays for.

Thriving Kids: early intervention outside the NDIS

From October 2026, children aged 8 and under with autism or developmental delay who have low to moderate support needs will be redirected to a new program called Thriving Kids, a state-delivered early intervention service. The intention is that more children can access support earlier, without needing a formal diagnosis, and through community-based services rather than the full NDIS planning process.

Children with high support needs remain eligible for the NDIS. The concern raised by disability advocates is that the state-based services Thriving Kids relies on are not yet built, the program is being announced before the infrastructure exists to deliver it, which is a pattern that has created serious problems in Australian disability policy before. For a detailed breakdown of what the 2026 changes mean for families, see our NDIS Changes 2026 guide for parents.

Budget changes for existing participants

From October 2026, social, civic and community participation budgets are being reduced to 2023 spending levels, an average reduction of around $7,000 per affected participant. Capacity building daily activity budgets are being reduced by 10 per cent. These are not small numbers for people who depend on these supports.

New planning framework

The planning process is being redesigned. A Support Needs Assessment, using a structured tool called the I-CAN, will replace the current planning conversation. The assessment takes approximately three hours and focuses on a person's daily life and what they cannot do without support. New framework planning begins for adults from April 2027.

Why the reforms are contested

The government argues the reforms are necessary to make the scheme sustainable at its current scale. Disability advocates argue that some of the changes, particularly the budget cuts and the Thriving Kids redirect, will reduce access for people who genuinely need support, and that 'sustainability' is being used to justify cuts to individual plans that were based on assessed needs.

Both things can be true: the scheme faces genuine financial challenges, and some of the responses to those challenges will cause genuine harm to some of the most vulnerable people it was designed to serve. The quality of how the reforms are implemented, how the assessment tools work in practice, whether the state services actually exist when children are redirected to them, whether appeal mechanisms work, will determine how much harm is done.

Take-homes