The NDIS 90-day claim rule: what changes and what providers need in place

What the official source says

Everything in these blocks is the responsible agency’s own position, with a link to check it. Everything outside them is ShiftNote’s operational reading, which is a different kind of statement.

What actually changes

The claiming window is the period between delivering a support and submitting the payment request for it. Until now that has been two years, which is long enough that most reconciliation problems resolve themselves: a missing note gets written, a disputed shift gets sorted out, a rostering mismatch gets found in a quarterly review and fixed with months to spare.

Ninety days removes that slack. The same problems still occur at the same rate, but the time available to notice and fix them collapses by a factor of eight.

• A support delivered on 1 March must be claimed by roughly 30 May.
• A note that is never written is no longer a paperwork problem you find at audit — it is revenue with a deadline on it.
• Anything that delays a claim (a query, a disputed shift, a worker on leave) now eats a meaningful share of the whole window.

Both windows are live at the same time, and that is the part people get wrong

Supports delivered before the commencement date keep the window that applied when they were delivered. That means for most of 2027 a provider is running two rules at once, and which one applies depends on the delivery date of each individual support — not on when the claim is submitted, and not on the plan.

The practical consequence: any spreadsheet or dashboard that applies one deadline rule to a whole claims export will be wrong for part of it. If you are importing several months of history, the boundary sits in the middle of your data.

What has to change operationally

The honest summary is that claiming stops being a monthly finance task and becomes a weekly operational one, with an escalation path.

• Reconcile delivered supports against submitted claims on a weekly cycle, not a monthly or quarterly one.
• Know, at any point, which delivered supports have no record behind them yet — before the record becomes hard to write because nobody remembers the shift.
• Give someone ownership of claims approaching the end of their window, with authority to chase the worker or the record.
• Treat a query or a hold as starting a clock, not pausing one.
• Decide in advance what happens when the window is about to close on a claim you cannot substantiate. Claiming it anyway is a decision, and it should be a deliberate one.

The failure this creates that did not exist before

Under a two-year window, a support delivered and never claimed was an accounting problem. Under a 90-day window it is unrecoverable revenue, and the amount is invisible unless somebody is specifically looking for delivered supports with no matching claim.

That is a different question from the one most systems answer. Claiming software tells you about claims. This question is about the absence of one.

Common questions

Does the 90 days run from the delivery date or the invoice date?

From the date the support was delivered. This matters most for supports delivered over several days and for anything invoiced in arrears — the clock has usually already been running for some time when the invoice is raised.

What happens to supports delivered before the change?

They keep the window that applied when they were delivered. Both rules operate at once for as long as pre-commencement supports remain claimable, which is why a single deadline rule applied across a whole claims export will be wrong for part of it.

Is there any discretion for late claims?

We are not going to tell you there is or is not, because that is a question for the NDIA about your specific circumstances. Plan on the basis that the deadline is the deadline.

Change history

• 9 September 2026 — First published, verified against the Department’s explanation of the 2026 amendments.

ShiftNote provides software and operational information, not legal advice. Providers remain responsible for understanding the requirements that apply to their own circumstances.