EXECUTIVE SUMMARY — NDIS AND AGED CARE
For Zaid. 7 September 2026. Baseline v2.0.0. Every figure below is computed, not typed, and traces to a source or a named assumption. Nothing here is legal, financial or tax advice.
1. The answer
Start the aged care business first. Register the NDIS entity in parallel and take core-support clients second. Run support coordination from your own hours alongside both.
One aged care client leaves you $1,002 a month after you have paid the worker AND paid someone to do the administration. One NDIS participant on the same basis leaves you $435. That is 2.3 times the money on a third of the service hours, and it is the whole reason for the ordering.
It is a recommendation, not a decision. Section 5 tells you exactly what would change it.
2. The five numbers
| $44,483 – $52,848 | Capital before first revenue, both entities, drawing nothing for six months. $21,949 of setup, six months of $1,840.50 a month fixed cost, and $11,492–$19,856 of working capital that must sit permanently behind the wage cycle. Your earlier files put the whole thing at $15,000–$30,000 for one business and had no working-capital line at all. |
| $1,002 vs $435 | Contribution per client per month, aged care against NDIS, both after paid administration. |
| –$2.07 | What an hour of NDIS core support earns if administration runs at 0.40 hours per billable hour. At 0.25 it is $6.70. With you doing it unpaid it is $21.30. This one assumption swings the NDIS business from good to loss-making, and it is the arithmetic behind the published finding that about half of NDIS providers lost money in 2024-25. |
| 1 client / 126.5 hours | Aged care breaks even at one client. NDIS breaks even at 126.5 billable hours a month once administration is paid — 39.8 if you do it yourself, 411 if you employ a manager on $95,000. |
| 52.4% | Three-year return: $420,114 of contribution against $275,727 of total cost, a net of $144,387. Cash break-even month 10; month 17 once your own foregone income is charged as a cost. |
3. The thing that surprised me most
In aged care the price is not what limits you. The client's budget is.
Each Support at Home participant holds a fixed annual classification budget. Ten per cent is deducted for care management before any service is delivered. What is left, divided by what you charge, is every hour that client can ever buy from you in a year.
| Their budget | What it buys | Contribution to you |
|---|---|---|
| $10,731 (Level 1) | 1.8 hours a week | $302 a month |
| $30,000 (the modelled average) | 5.0 hours a week | $1,002 a month |
| $78,106 (Level 8, the top) | 13.1 hours a week | $2,749 a month |
You cannot sell more hours to a willing client. You can only acquire more clients. Aged care is an acquisition business, not a rostering one — the opposite of the NDIS, where the price is a hard cap and the volume is open. That single difference is why the two are compared per client rather than per hour.
4. Three things that are true and uncomfortable
The aged care sector just posted its first negative quarter, and I am still recommending it. Both facts are real. An independent verification pass was run specifically to resolve them. The losses sit in legacy overhead and in the replacement of the old dual-fee structure — providers used to charge care management and package management, and Support at Home replaced both with a single 10% pool. The direct-services line is still positive at about $16.10 per client per day. A new entrant carries neither problem. This is the largest single exposure in the whole study. The early warning to watch is the direct-services line turning negative in the quarterly sector report — not the total, which is already negative and already explained.
Your choice of two companies costs $606.50 a month, $7,278 a year, $22,578 over three years. It buys real liability separation between two separately regulated care businesses. It does not buy independence from you: both plans depend on you doing the administration unpaid in year one, so illness stops both revenue lines on the same day. The separation is legal, not operational.
The trade study is close, and one of your own answers decides it. Four options were scored against five criteria whose weights were fixed before any option was scored. Aged care first wins at 3.70; support coordination only is second at 3.55. That margin is 0.15. Raise the weight on capital preservation from 25% to 31% and support coordination wins outright. If the most you are willing to lose entirely is a small number, option C is the right answer and mine is the wrong one.
5. What would change this recommendation
- An average assessed budget of $20,000 instead of $30,000 — contribution per client falls 36% to $639. At $12,000 it falls to $348. This is the single largest lever in the plan and it is a Low confidence assumption.
- Administration at 0.40 hours per billable hour — the NDIS line loses $2.07 an hour.
- The aged care direct-services line turning negative in a published sector report.
- Award classification landing at SCHADS Level 3 — removes 29% of the NDIS margin.
- Your foregone income being $90,000 rather than $60,000 — the three-year return falls from 52.4% to 14.9% and the decision becomes marginal rather than clear.
6. Six things I need from you
| ACT-003 | What is the most you are willing to lose entirely? | Not a comfort question. It sets the weight on capital preservation, and at 31% it changes which business you should start. |
| ACT-010 | Record the assessed classification of your first five aged care referrals. | The whole aged care case rests on a $30,000 average I cannot verify before you trade. |
| ACT-011 | Work the Aged Care Commission's registration fee calculator to a quoted figure. | The one entry cost that can be resolved exactly today, free, in about twenty minutes. It is currently a $600–$3,000 band. |
| ACT-001 | Will you run this yourself full time, or fund it and employ a manager? | Yourself: NDIS break-even 40 hours a month. A manager on $95,000: 411. Ten times the volume. |
| ACT-002 | What must you draw each month, and from when? | Every scenario here assumes you work for nothing. |
| ACT-013 | Confirm your foregone employment income. | It is the input that changes the verdict, and only you hold it. |
Four more (ACT-005 to ACT-008) are phone calls that cost nothing and collapse the widest uncertainty bands in the study. Do those first, before any money moves.
7. How much of this you should trust
I would rather you knew the shape of the uncertainty than felt reassured.
- 74 sources. 23 at High confidence. Every one of the other 51 states why it is below High.
- 31 assumptions. 26 are Low confidence. Every one states what breaks if it is wrong.
- 10 HIGH risks open. None can be closed as accepted without your written acceptance.
- 53 open items across every register, and the dashboard publishes that number from the registers rather than from anyone's recollection.
- 44 mechanical checks, all passing. Ten of them have been deliberately broken and repaired to prove they can fail.
- 31 of 32 requirements independently verified against this baseline by a verifier that built none of it. One — REQ-CON-04 — is honestly open: its cause was fixed after the closing pass and has not been re-verified.
- Five independent verification passes ran against this baseline. They found, in order, 9 failing requirements, then 15 defects, then 15 more, then a trade study whose published scores did not follow from its own matrix and had survived three passes, then a checker scoped to one folder while the requirement it enforced named four. Each pass found something the one before it missed. Two open defects are recorded rather than written off: DEF-053 (five checkers a determined party with write access could still defeat) and DEF-054 (four stale sentences that cost a reader trust but change no number).
The honest summary of that: the arithmetic has been attacked hard and holds. The inputs are mostly Low confidence, and no amount of verification fixes that — only your first five real clients will.
8. If you do nothing else this month
Ring the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission and get a registration fee quoted (ACT-011). Answer ACT-003 for yourself. Those two cost you an afternoon and between them they decide both whether and which.
Full study: 05_Outputs/NDIS_and_Aged_Care_Business_Enabling_Study_v2.0.docx. Live model: 05_Outputs/NDIS_and_Aged_Care_Financial_Model_v2.0.xlsx — change a driver and every number moves. One-page plan: 01_System/BUSINESS_PLAN_A3.html. Status: Dashboard.html. Start here: README.md.