SIL Roster of Care: What It Is, and How to Build One That Matches Funding

What the roster of care actually is

A roster of care is the document that sets out the type and amount of supported independent living support a participant needs across a typical week. The NDIA provides a roster of care tool for this — a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that, in the NDIA's own description, combines the hourly breakdown of supports and the roster of care into one spreadsheet and automatically calculates a weekly support summary.

A provider fills it in to outline the supports they propose to deliver to meet a participant's needs and goals. The NDIA then uses that overview to help understand whether the cost of the participant's home and living supports is reasonable and necessary. In other words, the roster of care is primarily a funding tool. It sits alongside other information the NDIA needs — including assessments of the participant's support and accommodation needs — to decide what supports meet the person's needs and the amount of support that is reasonable and necessary.

There is one statement from the NDIA that resolves most of the confusion small providers have, and it is worth quoting plainly. The NDIA says the roster of care is not the exact schedule of supports that will be provided to the person, nor an agreement with the NDIA. The actual supports are agreed with the participant, and any nominee, once the NDIA approves their plan funding. That single point reshapes how you should think about the document: it is the basis for the budget, not a contract that dictates your weekly roster down to the shift.

Funded roster vs delivered roster: the distinction that matters

The mistake that creates most of the trouble is treating "roster of care" as one thing when, in practice, a SIL provider lives with two related but distinct rosters. Getting clear on which is which removes a lot of anxiety.

The funded roster does not have to be replicated shift for shift in the delivered roster — the NDIA expects real-world flexibility, because needs change day to day and a participant's actual week never matches a spreadsheet exactly. But the two should still reconcile in pattern and quantum. The overall hours, the ratios, the overnight arrangement and the total cost you deliver and claim should be traceable back to what was funded. A delivered roster that consistently looks nothing like the funded one, or claims more than was funded, is where audit findings and claiming problems begin.

This is the operational heart of the topic, and it is why the roster of care belongs in your audit preparation rather than being filed away as a funding formality. The discipline is the same one that runs through every SIL record set: what was funded, what was delivered and what was claimed all have to tell the same story. That theme connects directly to the consistency the new SIL Practice Standards for 2026 are designed to test.

Inside the NDIA roster of care tool

You do not need to be an Excel expert to use the roster of care tool well, but you do need to understand what each part is doing, because that is what the NDIA reads and what your delivered roster has to map back to. The tool brings together two things that older processes kept separate:

1. The hourly breakdown of supports A view of the supports proposed across a typical week, broken down by hours. This is where you set out how much support is needed, when, and in what form — the building blocks of the budget.
2. The roster of care and weekly support summary The roster of care lays the supports out across the week, and the tool automatically calculates a weekly support summary. This summary is the overview the NDIA uses to gauge whether the proposed cost is reasonable and necessary.
3. Shared vs individual (1:1) supports The tool distinguishes supports delivered one to one with a participant from supports shared across the people in the home. Shared supports are apportioned between the residents, which directly affects each person's cost.
4. The overnight arrangement Whether overnight support is funded as sleepover or active overnight, based on the participant's overnight support needs. This is one of the most commonly misaligned elements between funding and delivery.

The tool calculates the weekly and annualised value of the proposed supports automatically from the hours and the applicable price guide rates. Your job is to make the inputs an accurate, honest reflection of the participant's assessed needs — not to engineer a number. The NDIA reads the roster against the participant's assessments, so a roster that does not match the documented need is the kind of thing that gets queried before it ever reaches your delivery.

Support ratios: 1:1, 1:2 and 1:3 explained

The support ratio describes how many participants one worker supports at the same time, and it is one of the biggest drivers of cost in a roster of care. The numbers are read worker-to-participant:

• 1:1 — one worker supports one participant for that period. The highest cost per participant, used where a person needs dedicated, undivided support.
• 1:2 — one worker supports two participants in the shared home at the same time. The cost of that hour is shared between the two.
• 1:3 — one worker supports three participants together. The cost is shared three ways, lowering each person's hourly cost for that support.

Higher ratios exist because a shared SIL home is a shared living environment — a worker preparing a shared evening meal or supervising a common area is genuinely supporting more than one person at once. The roster of care separates these shared supports from the 1:1 supports a participant needs alone, and apportions the shared time across the residents.

For delivery and audit, the practical rule is simple: the ratio you actually staff and the ratio you claim against should be the same as the ratio that was funded. If a support was funded and is being delivered as 1:3 but each participant is claimed at a 1:1 rate, the records will not reconcile and the over-claim is exposed the moment an auditor or the NDIA lines the documents up. Ratios are also why a clear, accurate roster matters in a multi-resident home — the share each person carries has to be defensible.

Active overnight vs sleepover: the two-hour rule

Overnight support is the element of a roster of care that providers most often get out of step between funding and delivery, partly because the two arrangements look similar on a roster but are funded very differently. The NDIA's guidance draws the line at two hours of awake support overnight:

The audit and claiming risk here is alignment. Your roster of care should record the correct overnight type for each participant, your delivered roster should staff that arrangement, and your claims should match it. The classic mismatch is a participant funded and claimed as sleepover whose progress notes, night after night, describe a worker awake and active for most of the night. If the documented reality is active overnight, the funding and the delivery no longer line up — and that is a genuine prompt to revisit the roster of care with the participant and the NDIA, not something to paper over. The reverse is also a problem: claiming active overnight while the notes show an undisturbed sleepover is an over-claim.

How to build a roster of care that matches funding

Building a roster of care that holds up is less about spreadsheet skill and more about honesty and traceability. The supports you propose have to flow from the participant's assessed needs, and the roster you deliver has to flow from the roster you funded. Four habits make that happen:

1. Start from assessed need, not from a target number

The NDIA reads the roster of care against the participant's support and accommodation needs assessments. Build the hourly breakdown from what those assessments and the participant's goals actually call for — the daily living tasks, the supervision, the overnight arrangement — and let the weekly value fall out of that. A roster reverse-engineered from a desired total is the kind that gets queried and, worse, the kind your delivery can never honestly match.

2. Be precise about shared vs 1:1 and the overnight type

These two fields drive the cost and they are the two most audited for alignment. Record honestly which supports are genuinely shared and which need to be one to one, and record the overnight arrangement that matches the participant's real overnight need against the two-hour rule. Precision here is what lets your delivered roster reconcile later.

3. Keep the funded roster on file and visible to your rostering

The people building your fortnightly staff roster should be able to see the funded roster of care for each participant. That is how delivery stays anchored to funding. If your rostering team has never seen the roster of care, drift is almost guaranteed.

4. Treat changes as a trigger, not an inconvenience

When a participant's needs change in a way that moves their support hours, ratio or overnight type, that is a signal to update the roster of care and revisit funding with the NDIA — not to silently deliver and claim against the old one. Documented, proactive change management is itself evidence that your system works.

These habits are the bridge between your funding paperwork and your day-to-day operation. Where the documents around the roster of care fit — the support plans, the service agreement, the rostering records — is mapped in our guide to SIL policies and procedures, which sets out the full manual a small provider needs.

Why auditors and the NDIA ask for it

The two parties ask for the roster of care for different reasons, and understanding both is how you prepare for each.

The NDIA asks for it at the funding end. It is the mechanism they use to decide whether the home and living supports proposed for a participant are reasonable and necessary before they fund them. To the NDIA, the roster of care is a proposal to be tested against the participant's assessed needs.

An approved quality auditor comes at it from the delivery end. The auditor's job, when sampling a SIL participant, is to check that the supports you actually deliver and claim match the participant's funded supports and stated needs. The roster of care is the bridge they walk across to do that. As we cover in our guide to what auditors check for SIL providers, an auditor will routinely line the funded roster of care up against the staff rosters you worked, the shift records, the progress notes and the claims — and look for whether the support delivered, the ratios, the overnight type and the total hours reconcile across all of them.

This is why the roster of care is not a "set and forget" document. It is the reference point a SIL audit returns to again and again, and it is one of the most efficient places to find evidence that funding, delivery and claiming agree — or that they do not. For where this sits in the full audit picture, see our guide on how to prepare for an NDIS SIL audit.

The funded-delivered-claimed reconciliation

If you take one practical thing from this article, make it this: the roster of care lives at the centre of a three-way reconciliation, and your job before audit is to make sure all three sides agree. Each side is a different document set, and the gaps between them are where findings and claiming risk live.

When all three agree, a SIL audit of that participant is largely a confirmation exercise. When they diverge — active overnight delivered against sleepover funding, 1:1 claimed against 1:3 delivered, total hours claimed exceeding funded hours — the auditor has a thread to pull, and over-claiming carries consequences well beyond an audit finding. Building the habit of checking this reconciliation, rather than discovering it during an audit, is the whole point. It is the same discipline that underpins the SIL audit checklist we publish for small providers.

A roster of care self-check you can run this week

You do not need to wait for an auditor to test your reconciliation. Pick one SIL participant and one recent fortnight, then walk the three sides the way an auditor would.

Run this each fortnight, log it even when the answer is "reconciles, no action," and you build the evidence an auditor most wants to see — that management is actively keeping funding, delivery and claiming in agreement. To benchmark where your roster of care and the rest of your SIL system stand before you commit to anything, take the free SIL Readiness Scorecard; it points you to the specific records most likely to cause a finding.