July 2025 – Funding Period Changes
Starting Monday, 19 May 2025, the NDIS introduced a major change to how funding is released in new or reassessed participant plans. Instead of receiving your full plan budget upfront, funding will now be distributed in smaller chunks over the life of the plan — these are called funding periods.
In October 2024 new legislation was put into place for the NDIS and included a number of different changes to how funding can be used and managed. Many of these changes were implemented immediately and most participants and service providers are now aware of the impact of the legislation.
However some of the changes were not able to be started immediately as the NDIA needed time to put their own systems in place to manage this. One example of this is Funding periods.
The legislation stated that funding periods would be introduced to allow the NDIA to change and monitor how often a participant can access part of their funding. This is documented in Section 33 of the new legislation however the NDIS online platform called PACE did not have the tools needed to be able to do this straight away.
From mid May 2025, a new update to PACE has been released to allow the NDIA to introduce these changes. It is now possible for the NDIA to create longer plans and use a system where the funding is released in blocks of time which are called ‘Funding Periods.’
Participants can only access the funding period once the timeframe has been reached.
For participants with plans created before 19th of May 2025, this process will not impact your plan until a new plan is created (via a plan review/reassessment).
If you have a new plan created from mid May, your plan will be broken down into three parts:
- Your total funding amount: this is the total amount that has been approved for the whole plan duration.
- Your funding components: these are the categories of your plan, such as Core Supports, Capacity Building and Capital funding.
- Funding periods: this is the breakdown of how much funding can be used based on a period of time.
How do Funding Periods work?
Many plans will have some categories of their plans broken down into 3 month funding periods. If the budget for the core funding is $40,000 this will be released in four blocks of $10,000 each.
- Funding period 1 January – March: Core funding: $10,000
- Funding period 2 April – June: Core funding: $10,000
- Funding period 3 July – September: Core funding: $10,000
- Funding period 4 October – December: Core funding: $10,000.
Using the example above, if between January and March, the participant spends $12,000 of Core funding, they will not be able to access the additional $2,000 as this exceeds the amount available for this period of time.
However if the participant only spends $8,000 for the same period, the leftover amount will be added into the next funding period and they will have $12,000 available.
What does this mean for me?
Each different funding component (or support category) in your plan will have its own funding period.
The amount of time for each funding period depends on what has been approved in your NDIS plan.
Participants can only spend within the amounts available for the period however funds that are not used can be rolled over into the next period. If the plan ends, no funding can be rolled over and a new total funding amount will be provided. This may mean that service providers are unable to claim for supports if the funding period has been exhausted, even if there is money available in the total budget.
Where can I go for more information?
The following links can be used to learn more about these changes and Section 33:
The P2P Plan management team is always working on improvements to ensure that we can communicate effectively with all of our participants and their families.
We would love to hear suggestions from our participants, you can get in touch with the Plan management team by calling 1800 777 723, or by email at ndisfinance@p2pqld.org.au.