Eight years in this sector and I still get asked the same question at least once a week, usually by someone thinking about a career change: “Is disability support actually a stable job to get into?” My honest answer used to be an easy yes. Right now, it’s a yes with an asterisk — because we’re living through one of the strangest moments the NDIS workforce has ever seen. We’re short tens of thousands of workers and shedding jobs in the same breath, and if you’re a support worker, a family hiring your own team, or a provider like me trying to roster shifts, you need to understand both halves of that story.
The shortage is real, and it’s not new
Let’s start with the numbers, because they’re bigger than most people realise. The sector needs to grow by over 90,000 workers in the next five years just to keep pace with participant growth, and that’s on top of a workforce that’s already around 325,000 strong nationally. Go back to the original 2023 projections and the gap was even starker — 128,000 additional workers were flagged as needed just to meet demand by mid-2025, a target the sector never came close to hitting.
I’ve felt this personally, running my own business. Some weeks I’ve had shifts I simply couldn’t cover, not because the money wasn’t there, but because there weren’t enough trained, available people willing to take them. That’s not a “my business specifically” problem — it’s the whole sector’s problem, and it shows up as cancelled community access sessions, rushed personal care, and burnt-out staff picking up extra shifts to cover the gaps.
Why people keep leaving faster than we can replace them
This is the part that frustrates me most, because I don’t think it’s a mystery. Turnover in this sector runs somewhere between 14% and 25% a year, which means something like 45,900 to over 80,000 workers are walking out the door annually. Around two in five NDIS workers report feeling burned out at least half the time in their job. I’ve watched brilliant support workers — the kind who genuinely change a participant’s life — leave within eighteen months because the job was casual, inconsistent, and offered no real career path.
Coming from aged care, I saw the same pattern play out there years earlier, so none of this surprised me. Care work in this country has been chronically undervalued for as long as I’ve been in it. Short-term contracts, unpredictable hours, and a ceiling on how far you can progress without moving into management — that’s a recipe for losing good people, no matter how much they care about the work itself.
Now here’s the twist: jobs are also disappearing
This is the bit that makes right now genuinely unusual, and it’s the conversation I’m having with my own staff more than any other lately. At the same time as we’re short-staffed nationally, the NDIS reforms rolling out this year mean up to 140,000 disability sector jobs are considered at risk, largely because the funding category that’s been growing fastest — social and community participation — is the one being wound back from this year onward. That category alone grew from around $4 billion to $12 billion in annual spending over five years, and a meaningful chunk of that growth was support worker wages.
So if your income is heavily tied to community access shifts — group outings, social support, recreational programs — I’d be having an honest conversation with your employer or, if you run a business like mine, with your team, about what the next twelve months look like. It’s not that the whole workforce is shrinking. It’s that the shape of demand is shifting, away from community participation hours and toward core supports, SIL, and higher-skill categories like behaviour support.
What I’d tell someone thinking about getting into this work
Don’t let the reform headlines scare you off — the underlying shortage in personal care, daily living support, and SIL isn’t going anywhere, and honestly it’s likely to get more acute as eligibility rules tighten and providers face stricter registration requirements. Employers are actively hiring people with zero prior experience and providing on-the-job training, which tells you everything about how tight the market still is at the coalface. Base rates under the SCHADS Award sit around $26-$30.50 an hour, but with penalty rates for evenings, weekends, and public holidays, a full-time role with typical loading lands more like $60,000-$80,000 a year — and if you move into support coordination or a team leader role, that climbs further.
My honest advice: build skills that sit in the categories being protected and prioritised, not the ones being wound back. Personal care, complex daily living support, and behaviour support are where the demand is heading. Community access work is still needed and still valuable, but I wouldn’t build your entire income around it right now.
What I’d tell other providers
If you’re running a business like mine, this is the year to get serious about retention, not just recruitment. Losing people costs the sector more than $50 million a year just in replacement hiring, and that number doesn’t even count the disruption to participants when a familiar face disappears from their roster. A few things I’ve actually implemented in my own business that have made a difference: consistent rostering instead of last-minute shift scattering, real supervision and check-ins rather than a “call if there’s a problem” culture, and a visible path from support worker to team leader that people can actually see themselves walking.
I’d also do a genuine skills audit right now if a chunk of your team’s hours sit in community participation work. Which of those workers have skills that transfer cleanly into core supports or SIL, and which don’t? Enterprise agreements in this sector often require formal consultation before changing hours or roles, and starting that conversation early beats scrambling in November when the funding reset is already biting.
Some providers in staffing-tight regions are also looking overseas — aged care and disability support now sit on the Skills Priority List, opening up sponsored visa pathways that weren’t as accessible a few years ago. It’s not a fix for everyone, but for providers in regional or outer-metro areas struggling to fill overnight shifts, it’s worth understanding as an option.
Where I land on all this
I’ve never romanticised this job — it’s hard, it’s often thankless, and the pay has lagged what the work actually deserves for far too long. But I’ve also never doubted that it matters, and I don’t think that’s changed just because the funding lines are moving around this year. My honest view is that the sector’s real problem was never a lack of people willing to do this work — it’s that we’ve never built the career structure, pay progression, or stability to keep them. If the reforms end up forcing a genuine reckoning on how support work is valued and structured, rather than just where the money flows, something good might yet come out of a very disruptive year. If they don’t, we’ll keep losing good people to burnout while still being short-staffed — and that’s the outcome none of us can afford.
I’ll keep writing about how this plays out for my own team and the wider workforce as the reforms land properly over the back half of the year.