NDIS Rostering for SIL: Match Your Roster to the Roster of Care & Funding (Without Overspending)

The Three Rosters That Have to Agree

Most SIL overspend stories sound the same. The house is full, the team is working hard, the participants are well supported — and the provider is quietly losing money every week. When you trace it back, the cause is almost never the care. It's that three different "rosters" have drifted apart, and nobody costed them against each other before the support started.

To roster SIL well, you have to hold three things in your head at once:

• The roster of care (funded): The NDIA-approved pattern of support for each participant — the ratios and hours they're funded for, hour by hour across a typical week. This is your budget. We unpack it fully in SIL roster of care: what it is and how to build one that matches funding.
• The staffing roster (delivered): The shifts you actually roster — who works, when, in what ratio. This is what you spend.
• The claim (paid): What you bill against each participant's plan. This is what you get back.

When all three agree — funded hours = delivered hours = claimed hours, at the right ratios and support types — the house is financially sustainable and audit-ready at the same time. When they drift apart, you either overspend (deliver more than you're funded for) or you over-claim (bill more than you delivered, which is a serious compliance problem). This article is about keeping the first two locked together so the third looks after itself.

Start From the Roster of Care, Not the Staff Availability

The single biggest rostering mistake is starting with "who's available this fortnight?" and slotting people in. That builds a roster around your team's preferences, then leaves you to discover whether the funding stretches. Reverse it.

Start with the funded roster of care for every participant in the house. Lay their funded support pattern out across the week — day support hours, evening hours, the overnight arrangement, weekend hours, and the ratio at each time of day. That funded pattern is the shape your staffing roster has to fill. Only once you can see the funded shape do you bring in staff availability to fill it.

A clean way to do this is to draw the week as a grid, one row per participant, columns across the day, and write the funded ratio in each block:

Now you can see the brief your staffing roster has to meet: deliver 1:1 in the mornings, 1:3 in the day, 1:2 in the evening, and a sleepover overnight. If your draft staffing roster delivers anything richer than that — say, 1:1 all evening when only 1:2 is funded — you've found an overspend before it happened. That's the whole game.

Get the Support Ratios Right (This Is Where the Money Leaks)

Support ratios are the number one source of SIL overspend, and they're deceptively easy to get wrong. A ratio of 1:2 means one worker supports two participants at the same time; 1:3 means one worker for three. When a support is funded at a shared ratio, the worker's cost is split across the participants who share that block — so each participant is only funded for their share of that worker's hour.

The leak happens when the roster delivers a richer ratio than the funding allows:

Two practical rules keep ratios honest:

• Roster shared ratios as shared shifts. If three participants are funded 1:3 for an evening block, build one shift covering all three — not three overlapping 1:1 shifts. The roster should physically look like the funded ratio.
• Watch the edges. The expensive mistakes happen at transitions — when a 1:1 morning worker stays on into a 1:2 daytime block, or when one participant's appointment pulls a worker out of a shared ratio and the others quietly drop to a richer ratio you can't claim. Map who covers whom at every changeover.

For the full breakdown of how 1:1, 1:2 and 1:3 ratios are funded and reconciled, see the roster of care guide — this article assumes you've set those ratios correctly and focuses on rostering staff to deliver them.

Active Overnight vs Sleepover: The Single Biggest Swing

If ratios are where the steady leaks happen, the overnight arrangement is where the big swings live. Over a week, the difference between an active overnight and a sleepover can be the difference between a profitable house and a loss-making one — and providers get it wrong in both directions.

• Active overnight (active assistance): The worker is awake and supporting the participant through the night. It's rostered and claimed at the relevant hourly support rate for every hour. It's appropriate where a participant genuinely needs support overnight — frequent waking, medical monitoring, behaviour support needs.
• Sleepover (inactive overnight): The worker sleeps on site and is available if needed. It's rostered and claimed as a sleepover (typically an allowance plus any active hours actually worked). It's appropriate where the participant usually sleeps through and only occasionally needs support.

The roster of care tells you which one each participant is funded for. The trap is rostering active overnight out of caution when only a sleepover is funded — you'll burn through nine hours of hourly support cost every night with no funding behind most of it. The reverse trap is rostering a sleepover when the participant actually needs active support, which is both a care risk and a claiming problem when the shift notes show the worker was up most of the night.

One more nuance: if a sleepover is repeatedly interrupted and the worker is genuinely active for long stretches, that's a signal to revisit the funded overnight type at the next plan review — backed by your overnight shift notes. The way you record those nights matters; the NDIS overnight shift notes guide walks through capturing active vs passive support so the evidence is there when you need it.

Cost the Roster Line by Line — A Worked Week

Here's the discipline that prevents almost every overspend: before you commit a roster, cost it. Every shift in the week gets two numbers next to it — your real wage cost (base SCHADS rate + the applicable penalty loading + on-costs like superannuation and leave) and the NDIS funded amount for that support type, time and ratio. Then you sum the week and compare.

The figures below are illustrative — they exist to show the method, not to quote real rates. Plug in your current numbers from the price guide and your enterprise agreement or the SCHADS Award.

The test is simple. Add up the total wage cost for the week (including on-costs) and add up the total funded amount the roster of care provides for the same week. If wage cost plus your overhead allocation is below the funded amount, the roster is sustainable. If it's above, the roster is structurally loss-making — and no amount of working harder fixes a roster that loses money on paper. You redesign it: tighten ratios to the funded level, correct the overnight type, or escalate a genuine funding shortfall to the participant's support coordinator for a plan review.

SCHADS Penalties, Public Holidays and the Price-Limit Squeeze

The reason a roster that looks fine on base rates can lose money is the SCHADS Award penalty loadings — the higher rates you must pay for evenings, weekends, and public holidays. The NDIS price limits are set with these loadings in mind, but the match only holds if you roster the right people on the right shifts.

Where providers get squeezed:

• Public holidays. Public holiday loadings are the steepest. A house full of active support on a public holiday can cost far more than a normal day while the funded amount rises by less. Plan public-holiday cover deliberately — minimum safe staffing at the funded ratio, not a default full roster.
• Overtime creep. A worker who picks up shifts across multiple houses and tips into overtime is paid at overtime rates you usually can't claim back. Visibility across all houses — not just one roster in isolation — is what catches this.
• Broken shifts and minimum engagements. Two short shifts with a gap can trigger minimum-engagement and broken-shift provisions that cost more than one continuous shift delivering the same support. Roster continuous blocks where the support pattern allows.

If you want to compare the platforms that calculate SCHADS loadings automatically and flag the price-limit gap as you build the roster, the NDIS rostering software guide covers the main options. The principle holds whether you use software or a spreadsheet: the penalty rate is part of the wage cost, so it must sit in your line-by-line costing.

Sharing Staff Across a Shared House Without Double-Claiming

Shared SIL houses are where rostering and claiming get genuinely tricky, because one worker's hour can legitimately be funded across several participants at a shared ratio — but only once. The discipline is: a single worker-hour delivered at 1:3 is claimed as three one-third shares, and those three shares must add up to one worker-hour. You can't claim three full hours for one worker's hour, and you can't claim a 1:1 rate against a participant who was actually supported at 1:3.

Keep these straight:

• One worker, shared ratio: Claim each participant's funded share of that block. The shares reconcile to the worker's cost.
• One worker pulled to 1:1: If a worker leaves a shared block to provide 1:1 support to one participant (an appointment, a behaviour episode), the other participants' ratio changes for that period. Record it — both for claiming and for the shift note.
• Vacancy in the house: If a 1:3-funded block only has two residents present, the funded ratio assumption changes. Don't keep claiming as if three were supported when one was in hospital or on leave.

This is exactly the reconciliation auditors and payment reviewers probe. The cleanest defence is that your roster, your claims and your shift notes all tell the same story for every block. When they diverge, it's almost always the roster that was right and the notes or claims that drifted — which is why the documentation layer matters as much as the roster itself.

The Roster Only Counts If Your Notes Prove It

Here's the part that ties rostering back to everything else on this site: your roster is your intention; your shift notes are your evidence. At audit, and whenever a claim is reviewed, the two have to reconcile. The support type, the ratio, the start and end times, and the participant in the note must line up with the rostered shift and the amount claimed.

Consider how this plays out:

This is why good documentation and a sound roster are two halves of the same job. The roster of care sets the funded pattern; the staffing roster delivers it; the shift notes prove it was delivered as funded. If you want the field-by-field detail on writing notes that survive this reconciliation, see exactly what to record in every SIL shift note, and the broader principle that case and shift notes are your audit evidence. Auditors don't watch your shifts — they read your notes against your roster.

A 10-Minute Roster Self-Check

Before you commit next fortnight's roster, run it through these questions. Any "no" is a place where funded, delivered and claimed are about to drift apart.

• Did I build this roster from the funded roster of care, not from staff availability?
• Does every shift's ratio match the funded ratio for that participant and time of day (no accidental 1:1 in a 1:2 or 1:3 block)?
• Is the overnight arrangement on the roster (active vs sleepover) the one the participant is actually funded for?
• Have I costed the week line by line — wage cost (with penalties and on-costs) vs funded amount — and is wage cost below funding?
• Have I checked public-holiday and weekend cover separately, where penalty loadings are steepest?
• For shared blocks, do the per-participant shares add up to one worker-hour (no double-claiming)?
• Have I accounted for vacancies/leave so I'm not rostering or claiming a ratio that no longer reflects who's present?
• Will the shift notes for this roster be able to evidence the support type, ratio and times I'm claiming?

If a roster fails on cost — wage cost above funding even when the ratios are correct — that's not a rostering problem you can fix on the floor. It's a funding shortfall to escalate to the participant's support coordinator for a plan review, with your notes and roster as the evidence. Rostering harder won't close a structural gap; better evidence and a plan review will.

To see where your wider SIL documentation sits before an assessor does — including the records that have to reconcile with your roster — run the free SIL Readiness Scorecard. It flags the documentation gaps that most often trigger non-conformities, so you can fix them on your terms rather than the auditor's.

These rostering and claiming principles flow from the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits and the funded supports in each participant's plan, with the NDIS Practice Standards requiring that the supports you deliver — and the records that prove them — are accurate, complete and matched to what each participant was funded for. Your roster is where funding meets delivery, one shift at a time.