The $49B Question: What NDIS Transparency Data Shows

The NDIS now spends more than $50 billion a year delivering care and support to more than 660,000 Australians, with scheme expenditure reaching $53.8 billion in 2025-26. That money flows to 26,468 registered providers across every state and territory. But how much do we actually know about who is spending it, and how well are they running their services? Call it the $49 billion question, after the annual figure the scheme cost when we first scored the register.

The Big Picture

We scored every registered NDIS provider across five dimensions of transparency and legitimacy. Of the 26,468 records on the register, 10,965 carry the Commission's active flag and 15,503 (58.6 per cent) do not. The transparency bands below describe the 10,965 active providers; the records without the active flag are classified Not Operating and analysed separately in our register integrity analysis. Across the active providers, the results split between organisations that welcome scrutiny and those with little public footprint at all.

2,661 providers score in the Excellent band (95 and above), demonstrating strong transparency across every dimension. 3,213 reach Good standing (85 to 94.9), with solid credentials and minor gaps. 1,916 sit in the Fair range (58 to 84.9), showing mixed results across the pillars. 3,175 fall below 58, indicating serious gaps in public legitimacy or regulatory compliance. These counts are the 10,965 active providers; the shares in the chart above are of that active total.

The average Trust Index score across scored providers is 64.9 out of 100.

The Five Pillars

Our Trust Index scores each provider across five dimensions, each weighted to reflect their importance in participant protection:

Business Legitimacy (35 points) examines ABN status, business registration, entity type, and active trading records. Is this a real, operating business, or a shell entity? Sole traders receive automatic credit for structural components they cannot hold (ASIC registration, corporate entity type), ensuring the system measures transparency, not business structure.

Public Transparency (30 points) looks at website quality, online presence, and disability-related content. Can a participant reasonably find and understand what this provider does?

Regulatory Standing (20 points) checks compliance action history, QSC sanctions, and NDIA restrictions. Has this provider faced regulatory intervention?

Market Signals (15 points) captures operational independence, address type appropriateness, and contact uniqueness. Is this provider operating as a genuine standalone business?

Integrity Signals (35 points) is deduction-based. Every provider starts at 35 and loses points for specific red flags: co-location with many other providers at the same address, shared contacts across multiple ABNs, shell company indicators, and repeated name changes. Each signal is audited to trace directly to the individual provider, not to neighbours or proxies. Two earlier signals, phoenix address matches and registration group accumulation, were removed in our May 2026 defensibility audit because they could not be attributed to the individual provider with enough confidence. They are now shown as informational only.

Hard Penalties

Certain red flags override normal scoring. When a provider shows specific patterns, they are automatically penalised regardless of their other pillar scores:

• Ghost penalty: Providers without a working website with disability content receive graduated BL and PT caps. The harshest tier (no website at all) caps BL between 3 and 12 and zeros PT entirely, which in most cases leaves the overall score below the Fair threshold.
• Cancelled ABN: Business Legitimacy is immediately set to 0. The business is no longer officially operating.
• Phoenix pattern: If an ABN was cancelled then reinstated, BL is capped at 15 and a flat 25-point raw penalty is applied, which sharply reduces the resulting score.
• Compliance action: The Commission's most serious actions (a banning order, revocation, or suspension) force Regulatory Standing to 0 with a 10-point flat penalty. Lesser actions, such as enforceable undertakings and compliance notices, apply smaller graduated penalties rather than the full reduction.
• Young ABN: Providers registered for less than 12 months are capped at 57.9, below the Fair threshold. This is a temporary cap that lifts as the business matures.

What the Numbers Tell Us

15,563 providers in our database meet RefDat's definition of a ghost provider: no meaningful online presence. That is 58.8 per cent of the register, on our independent website assessment rather than any government finding. These providers are registered to deliver services, but have no public website we could find through which a participant could verify what they do.

1,731 providers have documented compliance actions or regulatory sanctions. That is 6.5 per cent of the register. Some are active disputes, some are historical, but all represent a point at which a regulator felt intervention was necessary.

Providers in the Poor band often share the same combination of characteristics: no website, an inactive ABN, and little discernible public business activity. We report this as an observed pattern in the public data. It does not, on its own, establish intent. Low transparency can reflect a dormant or very small operation as readily as deliberate opacity, which is why we describe the pattern rather than the motive behind it.

The Path Forward

A system of this scale should be transparent by default. Better data will not solve every problem, but it is the foundation for everything else: participant choice, regulator oversight, and market accountability.

Improving the Trust Index means getting better data from upstream sources. More frequent ABN updates. Standardised compliance reporting. Website content analysis. Participant experience data. NDIS-reported incident and complaint data. Each piece strengthens the picture.

For providers, the path is straightforward: register a functioning website with disability content, keep your business registration active, publish what you do and who you are, and comply with regulatory requirements. The providers scoring in the Excellent band are not doing anything special. They are just operating openly.

For the NDIS and regulators, the question is whether a participant-facing system can tolerate a register on which, by our independent website assessment, 58.8 per cent of providers have no meaningful online presence. The data is public. The question is what to do with it.

That question is now being answered in the federal budget. In May 2026, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Disability Minister Mark Butler announced the largest reset of the scheme since it launched: $37.8 billion in savings over four years, 160,000 fewer participants, plan budget cuts in social and community participation, and commissioned plan management. Our analysis of the package is at NDIS Reform 2026: Inside the $37.8B Budget Reset. The reforms reshape the demand side; the transparency data in the Trust Index reshapes how providers compete for what remains.

For more detail on how each provider is scored, see the Trust Index methodology page.

Right of reply: Any provider referenced in this article or elsewhere on the NDIS Trust Index is welcome to submit additional information or corrections via the right-of-reply form on their provider page. We publish all verified corrections and update scores accordingly. Our goal is accuracy, not accusation.