The NDIS Labour Magnet: what’s really pulling workers (and prices) around the economy

There’s a story doing the rounds: blokes are downing tools and jumping into support work because “it’s easy money.” It’s tidy, it’s provocative—and it’s wrong in all the interesting ways.

Australia’s labour market has been tilting toward care for years. Health care and social assistance is now the country’s largest employer, with roughly one in six workers in the sector. Demand hasn’t popped up overnight; it’s been compounding with population growth, ageing, and the simple fact that unmet disability need was huge before the NDIS existed. The NDIS just made that demand visible—and billable.

Still, something is shifting. When a scheme of this size grows quickly, it becomes a labour magnet. Providers recruit hard. Casualised hours look flexible. And when the broader economy slows, people follow the hours.

Follow the Incentives, Not the Anecdotes

Price signals matter. The NDIA’s published price limits for common supports are a decent proxy for what hours are worth on paper. High-intensity self-care support can bill over $100 an hour on weekends and public holidays; even standard household assistance clears mid-$50s on weekdays. These aren’t take-home wages after provider margins, travel, cancellations and unpaid gaps—but they are signals that pull labour toward disability care shifts and away from marginal jobs elsewhere.

For small businesses, especially trades and construction, that magnetism shows up as tighter staff availability and higher call-out rates. It’s not because support work is cushy—it isn’t—but because the reliable availability of paid hours in care outcompetes patchy demand in some blue-collar segments. Jobs and Skills Australia’s updates keep pointing to persistent demand in health and education even as other parts of the market cool.

The Fiscal Backdrop

The NDIS has crossed the threshold where it’s discussed alongside Medicare, defence and education in budget lock-ups. Treasury’s latest Budget Papers and portfolio statements bake in reforms and an 8% growth track, with the scheme on course to exceed $50 billion a year mid-decade and north of $60 billion later in the 2020s absent stronger discipline. Whether you quote Budget Paper No. 1, departmental fact sheets or Parliamentary Budget Office projections, the through-line is the same: the NDIS is one of the budget’s big, structural lines—and small percentage changes translate to billions.

That size fuels the “distortion” narrative. But size is only half the story. The other half is mix: who’s in the scheme, how supports are priced, and how well the regulator polices quality, fraud and conflicts.

What the Data Shows About Participants and Providers

On the participant side, growth remains brisk: about 739,000 people had approved plans by June 2025, up from around 717,000 just three months earlier. That’s not a rounding error—it’s a mid-single-digit jump in one quarter. The Commission’s performance reports also show heavy complaint volumes and thousands of reportable incidents each quarter—not because “everything is broken,” but because the system’s scale and complexity invite both genuine need and opportunists.

On the provider side, price regulation is precise on items but messy in reality. The official schedule caps billable rates, but providers still stack travel, cancellations, complexity loadings and after-hours multipliers. A Tuesday mid-day shift is one thing; Saturday high-intensity care with transport and notes is another. The published rate card doesn’t reflect churn, unpaid time, cancellations, or the elevated risk profile in high-needs work—yet those are exactly the factors that push providers to chase particular rosters and, sometimes, to game them.

So—Is the NDIS “Distorting” Wages and Prices?

Yes and no.

• Yes, in the sense that when government underwrites demand at scale and sets relatively attractive billable ceilings for certain hours, labour will move. That’s a feature of any large public program—mining booms, school halls, renewables build-outs—not a moral failure.

• No, if “distortion” implies easy money and low effort. Care work is emotionally heavy, irregular, and physically risky. Burnout is high. Turnover is real. The magnetism is about hours and certainty more than a pay bonanza.

Where businesses feel the pain is at the margin: hiring an extra apprentice or keeping a mid-career tradie becomes harder when a competing sector offers steadier rosters—even if headline hourly pay looks similar.

The Fix Isn’t Culture-War; It’s Plumbing

If you want fewer perverse outcomes and better value per dollar, the boring bits matter.

1. Sharper pricing and procurement
   Tie higher price limits to demonstrable capability (training, continuity, complexity). Reduce opportunities to arbitrage by stacking loadings across the same hour. Move low-risk, low-skill supports toward market rates with simple safeguards, reserving premium pricing for verified high-intensity work.

2. Data that closes the loop
   Quarterly operational data is improving, but we still need consistent measures of cancellations, unattended shifts, travel kilometres, and outcomes by cohort. Publish provider-level dashboards (complaints closed, reportable incidents, worker continuity) to let participants vote with their feet—and funders to flag outliers early.

3. Channel the tsunami, don’t fight it
   Health and care will keep soaking up labour. Policy should plan around that: accelerate training pipelines, fast-track recognition of prior learning for career-switchers, and co-design dual-trade pathways (for example, home modifications where construction skill plus disability training is the whole point). Jobs and Skills Australia already signals where the pressure is; use it.

4. Guardrails with teeth
   Fraud and low-value billing erode social licence fast. Integrity funding has ramped up; keep it there, and align incentives so providers make more by delivering outcomes (independence wins) rather than hours. Publish more debt-recovery and enforcement stats so the honest majority doesn’t carry the reputational bag for the rogues.

A Quick Reality Check on Wages

Support workers don’t pocket the full price-limit hourly figure—providers take margins, and there’s unpaid time. But the rate card still anchors the market: it tells a 25-year-old whether a Thursday evening shift pencilling out at around $70 billable beats a rainy day waiting for ad-hoc labouring. When enough individuals make that perfectly rational choice, small businesses feel it as higher quotes and longer lead times.

That’s not the death of trades; it’s a re-pricing of scarce hours across a tight labour market. If we want more balance, we need to make entry, training and retention easier in both directions—not dunk on care work or pretend the demand will vanish.