NDIS Support Item Codes Explained

By Kim Matthews · Founder, Sparks Scribe

Where these numbers come from. The code structure, the registration groups, the support categories and the claiming rules on this page are taken from the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits, and the item numbers and prices from the NDIS Pricing Schedule 2026-27, effective 1 July 2026, both published by the NDIA at ndis.gov.au and read on 10 August 2026. NDIS pricing is under reform, so check the current documents before you rely on a figure. This page is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice.

The first time somebody asks you for "the code" on an invoice, it is a strange feeling. You know exactly what you did on the shift. You can describe it in a sentence. And what is wanted instead is a string of eleven digits and four underscores that looks like a part number for a dishwasher.

It is not arbitrary, though, and it is not as long a job to learn as it looks. Every one of those digits is doing something, and once you can read them you stop copying a code off an old invoice and hoping it still fits.

What do the five parts of an NDIS support item number mean?

The NDIA publishes the structure directly. Each support item has a unique reference number made of five parts, in this order:

That code is Assistance With Self-Care Activities, Standard, Saturday. Read part by part it says: a Core support (purpose 1), under the Daily Living outcome domain (1), sitting in the Assistance with Daily Life support category (01), delivered by a provider registered for Daily Personal Activities (0107), and the Saturday version of the item (013).

Test it on another one. 09_009_0117_6_3 is Skills Development and Training: support category 09, registration group 0117 (Development of Daily Living and Life Skills), outcome domain 6 (Social and Community Participation), support purpose 3 (Capacity Building). The parts hold.

Why does the same support have five or six different codes?

This is the single most useful thing to understand, because it is where most coding mistakes are actually made. The day of the week and the time of day are not a loading added on top of a base rate. They are baked into a separate support item, with its own number and its own maximum price.

Here is one support, assistance with self-care activities, at Disability Support Worker Level 1, as published in the pricing schedule effective 1 July 2026. Same work, six numbers.

National prices from the NDIS Pricing Schedule 2026-27, effective 1 July 2026. The schedule also publishes higher remote and very remote prices for each of these items. Notice the sequence numbers are not in day order: the weekday daytime item is 011 and the weekday night item is 002. There is no pattern to guess from, which is exactly why the catalogue exists.

What the time bands actually mean

The pricing rules define the bands, and the boundaries are more specific than most people assume:

• Weekday daytime: starts at or after 6:00 am and ends before or at 8:00 pm on a single weekday.
• Weekday evening: starts at or after 8:00 pm and finishes at or before midnight on a single weekday.
• Weekday night: commences at or before midnight on a weekday and finishes after midnight, or commences before 6:00 am and finishes that day.
• Saturday or Sunday: starts at or after midnight on the night before and ends before or at midnight of that day.
• Public holiday: starts at or after midnight on the night before the public holiday and ends before or at midnight of it.
• Night-time sleepover: crosses midnight, runs for a continuous period of eight hours or more, and the worker is allowed to sleep when not providing support. It has its own items and is claimed as "Each", not per hour.

Weekday means Monday to Friday. A sleepover overrides the others, and a public holiday overrides Saturday and Sunday.

Whose clock does the code follow, yours or the participant's?

The participant's. This is the rule I would put in front of every new independent worker, because it quietly contradicts how people think about being paid.

The pricing rules put it plainly: in deciding which price limit applies, the important consideration is when the support is provided to the participant, not the shift of the worker used to deliver it as determined by an applicable award or enterprise agreement.

So the order of operations for any shift is: first the day of the week the support was delivered on, then the time of day it was delivered in. Not when your working day started, not what your roster calls the shift, not what an award would pay you for it. If a support runs from 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm on a Tuesday, it has crossed the 8:00 pm boundary, and you are not looking at one clean line.

Where do you look a code up?

Two documents, both free, both at ndis.gov.au, and it is worth downloading them fresh rather than trusting a copy saved last year.

• The NDIS support catalogue. The full list of supports that can be claimed. It carries registration group numbers, names, support category numbers and names, whether a quote is required, the claim period, the maximum prices, and the remote and very remote prices. It also flags which claim types (travel, non-face-to-face and so on) apply to each item.
• The NDIS pricing schedule. The support item number, support item name, unit, and the national, remote and very remote recommended maximum prices for each item. The current one is effective 1 July 2026.

The practical move is to look up the codes for the two or three supports you actually deliver, in all their day and time versions, and keep that short list somewhere you can reach on a Sunday night. Nobody needs the whole catalogue. Most independent workers live inside about a dozen numbers.

Is the published price what I charge?

No, and this trips people in both directions. Where a support item has a price limit, a provider cannot agree a price with the participant that is greater than that limit, and claims are made at the agreed unit price. It is a ceiling. Charging under it is entirely allowed and very common.

Two more claiming details worth knowing, because they are the ones that produce odd-looking invoice lines:

• Claim the time you actually spent. Where you deliver less than a full unit of support, you claim according to the time spent. Twenty minutes is a quantity of 0.33 hours, not a rounded-up hour.
• Units or hours, not both. Claims are made either as a quantity of units or of hours, and the payment is the unit price multiplied by the quantity claimed. Each item has its own unit of measure: each, hour, daily, week, month or annual. Sleepovers are "Each". Personal care is "Hour".

If you are still working out where your own rate should sit under that ceiling, that is a separate question with a longer answer, and it is the subject of what to charge as an independent support worker.

Do you have to be registered to use these codes?

The registration group inside the number is about registered providers specifically. The pricing rules say each support item specifies the registration group for which a registered provider delivering that support must be registered with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission.

Whether you need to be registered at all depends on the supports you deliver and how your participants' plans are managed, and it is genuinely changing, so it is not something to take from a blog post including this one. Check your own position against the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission at ndiscommission.gov.au. What is true either way is that the support item number is the shared language of the claim, so a plan manager or a self managing participant paying your invoice still wants to see it on the line.

What gets a coded invoice line queried

• The daytime code on an evening shift. A support that ran past 8:00 pm claimed as weekday daytime. The commonest one, and the easiest to fix at the point of booking rather than at the point of invoicing.
• A public holiday billed as a Saturday. Public holidays override the weekend items, and the state-by-state ones catch people who work across a border.
• A code copied from an old invoice. Item numbers and prices are reissued, most recently effective 1 July 2026. A number that worked last financial year is not automatically the number for this one.
• A rate above the price limit for that item. Where the item has a limit, the agreed price cannot exceed it.
• Rounded hours. A 50 minute support claimed as an hour.
• The wrong support category entirely. Community access work claimed under a personal care item because that is the code you had handy. Different category, different part of the plan budget, and a participant can run out of the wrong one.
• Travel bundled into the support line rather than claimed as travel, where the item allows a travel claim at all.

Keeping it straight without thinking about it

The reliable version of this job is not memorising codes. It is capturing the day and the time of the support when you book it, so the right item is already decided before you ever open an invoice. Reconstructing a fortnight of start and finish times from memory on a Sunday night is where the daytime code ends up on the evening shift.

Sparks Scribe is my own app, so weigh that accordingly. It is built for one person rather than a team, and the reason it is relevant here is the ordering: the shifts you book sit in the Calendar and feed the invoice builder, where you pick a client and a date range, add the shifts, and each line carries the NDIS support item code and the rate for the day and time worked, for example NDIS Code: 01_011_0107_1_1, Rate: Weekday. You can create custom support codes for services outside standard NDIS pricing, and they appear in the invoice dropdown alongside the official ones. NDIS coded invoicing is included from the $15 a month Essentials plan.

The honest limit, and it matters on this page more than most: you set your own rates, and Scribe does not apply NDIS price limits on your behalf. The app puts the right code and your rate on the line. Checking your rate sits under the current maximum for that item is still your job, and the catalogue is where you check it.

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