About NDIS Trust Index

Why this exists

The NDIS is one of the most important social programs Australia has ever built. It gives people with disabilities the funding and the choice to live the lives they want. That matters. We support it completely.

But the program spends $49 billion a year across more than 26,000 registered providers, and the transparency around who those providers are, and what they actually do, is not where it should be. Thousands of providers have no website. Hundreds have cancelled ABNs. Some share the same phone number with a dozen other registered entities. A few have compliance actions on record that most participants would never know about unless they went digging through government databases.

The NDIS Trust Index exists because we think participants deserve better visibility. Not suspicion, not accusations. Just data. Publicly available data, pulled together in one place, scored consistently, and presented in a way that helps people make more informed decisions about who they trust with their support.

What the Trust Index actually is

Every registered NDIS provider gets a score out of 100. That score is built from five components: how legitimate the business looks on paper, how transparent they are to the public, whether they have any regulatory actions on record, how they operate in the market, and whether any integrity red flags are present. Each component draws on real, verifiable data from government registries, business databases, and web analysis.

Providers scoring 95 or above land in the Excellent band. Between 85 and 94 is Good. Between 58 and 84 is Fair. Below 58 is Poor. Certain serious issues (a cancelled ABN, no website at all, active compliance actions) trigger automatic penalties that pull the score down hard, regardless of how the other numbers look. That's by design. If your business doesn't legally exist anymore, a nice Google listing shouldn't save your score.

What it is not

This is not a government website. We're not the NDIS Commission, and we don't have the power to sanction or deregister anyone. The Trust Index is an independent project built by RefDat, a data platform that builds transparency tools for Australian public services.

A low score does not mean a provider is committing fraud. It means something about their public profile raised a flag: maybe they're new and haven't built a web presence yet, maybe their ABN details are messy, maybe they just haven't thought about what they look like from the outside. There are legitimate explanations for plenty of low scores.

A high score doesn't guarantee great care either. It means the provider's public-facing data checks out. Their business is registered, their website exists and talks about disability services, they don't have compliance actions on record, and they show up where you'd expect a real provider to show up. That's a good start, but it's not the whole picture.

The Trust Index is one tool. Use it alongside your own research, your support coordinator, and the official NDIS participant portal.

Our approach

Transparency is the point, not punishment. We're not trying to tear down the NDIS or the providers working within it. The vast majority of providers are doing real work for real people. But the system is only as strong as its weakest links, and right now, some of those weak links are very hard to spot.

Every score on this site is calculated from publicly available data. No insider information, no anonymous tips, no opinions. If a provider thinks their score is wrong, we want to hear about it. Data gets messy, records change, and we'd rather fix an error than leave a bad number sitting there. You can contact us here.

Where to go from here