On 1 July 2026 the NDIS pricing document changed name, changed numbers, and changed structure. It is now the NDIS Pricing Schedule 2026-27 (previously "Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits"), psychology received the only therapy price increase (up $20.00 to $252.99 an hour nationally), several disciplines were cut, and every therapy profession's line items were restructured with new suffix codes for travel, cancellations, non-face-to-face time, reports and telehealth. If your practice software is still carrying last year's rates or item numbers, you are either underbilling funded work or lodging claims that will be rejected - and both fail quietly.
This is the annual July trap: fee schedules move on the first of the month, and practice-management systems keep billing whatever was typed into them last. In most years the trap is a rate or two. This year the NDIA moved more pieces than usual, which makes August exactly the right time to check what your system is actually charging. Here is what changed, from the official documents.
The document itself changed
The annual pricing release is no longer called the "Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits". The 2026-27 edition is the NDIS Pricing Schedule 2026-27, effective 1 July 2026, published alongside the NDIA's Annual Pricing Review report on 22 June 2026. It has already been through a correction cycle: version 1.1 (3 July) fixed the line item numbers for the new psychology and exercise physiology items, and version 1.2 (22 July) clarified claiming by provisionally registered psychologists. If someone at your practice downloaded the schedule in the last week of June, they may literally be holding item numbers the NDIA has since corrected - check you're on the current version at the NDIA pricing updates page.
What moved: one rise, several cuts, most rates frozen
For therapy supports, the national hourly price limits landed like this:
- Psychology: up $20.00 to $252.99 - the only therapy increase, benchmarked against private health and Medicare rates. The item keeps its number (15_054_0128_1_3) but is renamed "Therapy - Psychologist - Direct Service".
- Physiotherapy ($183.99), occupational therapy ($193.99), speech pathology ($193.99), podiatry ($188.99) and audiology ($193.99): unchanged from 2025-26.
- Dietetics: down $10.00 to $178.99 - the second consecutive annual cut.
- Exercise physiology: down $5.00 to $161.99.
- "Other Professional": down $37.83 to $156.16 - the largest single move in the schedule, a 19.5% reduction.
The quieter change that actually breaks billing setups
The rate moves make the headlines, but the structural change is the one that catches practice software. Following the Annual Pricing Review, each therapy discipline now has six line items instead of one: the base Direct Service item plus dedicated suffix items for cancellations (_CA), non-face-to-face work (_NF), provider travel (_PT), NDIA-requested reports (_RR) and telehealth (_TH). Cancellations, non-face-to-face, reports and telehealth are priced at 100% of the direct rate; provider travel is priced at 50% - for psychology that is $126.50 against the $252.99 direct rate.
What this means practically: work your practice used to lodge under the single therapy item against a claim type now has its own item numbers. A billing setup that hasn't been remapped can lodge travel or report-writing time in ways the current schedule no longer expects - and unlike an under-billed rate, this failure mode is loud on the funder's side and silent on yours until you reconcile.
What happens if you bill the old numbers
The two directions fail differently, and both matter:
- Billing below the new cap (the psychology case): every claim processes normally. No error, no warning, no report. The gap between your old rate and the new limit is simply money your practice chose not to collect, invisibly, every session, until a human updates a fee field.
- Billing above the cap (the dietetics, exercise physiology and "other professional" case): the claim is rejected, not paid down to the cap. The NDIA's own claims troubleshooting guidance lists "a unit price that is more than the maximum price" among the standard rejection reasons. A rejected claim then needs someone to notice it, correct it in the portal and resubmit - and as we covered in our research post on revenue leakage, a large share of rejected claims are simply never reworked at all.
One more thing the NDIA is explicit about: for existing service agreements, providers must discuss proposed price changes with participants, and participants must agree - so a rate update is a conversation and a document, not just a settings change.
Medicare moved on the same day
If your practice also bills privately with Medicare rebates, 1 July 2026 changed those numbers too: the MBS was indexed by 2.6%. For the common psychology items, the schedule fee for item 80010 (psychological therapy by a clinical psychologist, 50+ minutes) is now $175.30 with an 85% benefit of $149.05, and item 80110 (focussed psychological strategies, 50+ minutes) is $119.45 with a benefit of $101.55. If your invoices or gap-fee calculations carry hard-coded rebate amounts from last financial year, the same silent-drift problem applies.
The 20-minute check to run this week
- Open your practice software's fee schedule and compare every NDIS line item and rate against the current Pricing Schedule (version 1.2 or later).
- Check whether your travel, cancellation, report-writing and telehealth billing has been remapped to the new suffix items - especially travel, with its 50% rate.
- Pull the claims your practice lodged in July and August and reconcile them against remittances: anything lodged under superseded item numbers or old rates is worth re-checking now, while it is fresh enough to correct.
- Diarise the same check for the first week of every July - this happens every year.
This check is one item on the broader monthly routine in our practice billing audit guide, alongside uninvoiced appointments, unpaid balances and unreconciled claims.
It is also a check software can keep running after the week you remember to do it. RIFT reads the billing side of your Zanda or Cliniko data and, among its other cross-checks, flags line items and rates that look worth checking against the current published schedules - as estimates for a human to review, never as billing advice. The uninvoiced session it catches in the same pass is usually worth more than the rate drift.