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MTA Melbourne
Table of Contents:
- Introduction
- What Medium Term Accommodation actually is
- The three criteria, and the one exception
- What MTA pays for, and the four things it does not
- Ninety days, and what happens at day ninety-one
- Melbourne's discharge pathways, and why MTA comes up where it does
- Your rights in the accommodation: Victoria is different
- How to request MTA funding
- When MTA will not be funded
- MTA, STA, SIL and SDA: which one is which
- Choosing an MTA provider in Melbourne
- Where we support MTA across Melbourne and Victoria
Medium Term Accommodation · Melbourne
NDIS Medium Term Accommodation in Melbourne, and the rule most people get wrong
Medium Term Accommodation is the NDIS support that pays for somewhere to live when your long-term home exists but is not ready yet. It runs for about 90 days, it covers the accommodation and nothing else, and there is one specific situation — hospital discharge — where the usual requirement to have a confirmed long-term home does not apply. That exception is written into the NDIS guideline and is the single most commonly missed detail in the whole support. This page sets out how MTA actually works, what it costs in 2026–27, how it fits the Melbourne hospital and rehabilitation system, and what your rights are in the accommodation itself under Victorian law.
Discharge date already set? Ring us — we can usually tell you in one call whether MTA is the right request and what evidence the NDIA will want.
MTA in Melbourne at a glance
What Medium Term Accommodation actually is
The NDIS operational guideline describes Medium Term Accommodation as funding for somewhere to live if you cannot move into your long-term home because your disability supports are not ready. That sentence is doing a lot of work, and it is worth taking apart.
The important word is because. MTA is not funding for a housing shortage. It is not emergency accommodation, and it is explicitly not respite. It exists for one scenario: the destination is known, something disability-related is holding up the move, and in the meantime there is nowhere suitable to wait. The ramp is being built. The SDA apartment has a tenant moving out in six weeks. The SIL house has been offered and the roster is still being recruited. Those are MTA situations.
It is also not a standalone support. MTA is only included in a plan as part of a wider set of home and living supports, which means a request for MTA on its own, with nothing around it, tends to go nowhere. It is the bridge in a plan that already has both banks.
The three criteria, and the one exception
For an ordinary MTA request, all three of these need to be true.
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The exception sits on top of that. On hospital discharge, where eligibility for SDA, SIL, ILO or home modifications has been established, the first criterion drops away. You still need the rest of the picture to make sense, but you are not required to name the address.
What MTA pays for, and the four things it does not
MTA funding covers the cost of the accommodation for the time you stay there. That is the whole of it. The guideline is unusually direct about the exclusions, and they catch families out constantly:
- Day-to-day living costs. Food, internet and electricity are yours. These are costs everybody has, so the scheme does not fund them.
- Personal care and other in-home supports. MTA does not include the disability supports you need while you are there.
- Long-term rent or affordable housing. The NDIS does not provide either.
- Respite or emergency housing. Different supports, different criteria. If you are in a housing crisis rather than a housing delay, homelessness services are the right door.
The support question is the one worth resolving before you move in rather than after. Supports already in your plan — personal care, social and community participation — can be used during an MTA stay. Where the stay creates genuinely additional need, extra supports can be funded: more personal care than usual, assistive technology, help with the move itself. But somebody has to ask for them, and the time to ask is when the MTA request goes in, not when a support worker fails to arrive on the first morning.
For 2026–27, the national price limit for MTA is $162.85 per day under support item 01_082_0115_1_1, rising to $227.99 in remote areas and $244.28 in very remote areas. The schedule took effect on 1 July 2026. Most of Melbourne sits in the national band.
Ninety days, and what happens at day ninety-one
The guideline says the NDIA generally funds MTA for up to 90 days. It also says it may fund longer where there is evidence you need it longer because of your disability support needs. Both halves of that matter. The 90 days is a default rather than a wall, but an extension needs evidence lodged before the clock runs out, not an explanation afterwards.
In practice the useful thing is to treat 90 days as three distinct phases.
Weeks one to three. Confirm the destination in writing and map what has to happen before the move. Not a vague list — a dated dependency chain. Modifications need an OT report, a quote, approval, a builder and an inspection, and each step waits on the one before it. Find the longest chain and start it first.
Weeks four to nine. Run the slow things in parallel. Recruitment for a SIL roster, equipment orders with long lead times, and any assistive technology request all take longer than people estimate. This is also where a trial visit to the destination is worth doing, because problems found in week six are fixable and problems found in week thirteen are not.
Weeks ten to thirteen. Either move, or lodge the extension. If the critical path has slipped by more than a fortnight, you already know the answer by about day seventy, and that is when the request should go in.
Melbourne’s discharge pathways, and why MTA comes up where it does
Victoria concentrates its specialist rehabilitation in a small number of designated statewide services, which means the people most likely to need MTA tend to come through a short list of addresses.
The Victorian Spinal Cord Service at Austin Health is the primary provider for traumatic spinal cord injury in Victoria. Alfred Health takes most non-traumatic spinal cord injury. Moderate to severe acquired brain injury is split between Caulfield Hospital, part of Alfred Health, and the Royal Talbot Rehabilitation Centre at Austin Health. Progressive neurological conditions, including motor neurone disease and Huntington’s disease, are served by Calvary Health Care Bethlehem. Paediatric rehabilitation runs through the Victorian Paediatric Rehabilitation Service, with admitted care at the Royal Children’s Hospital and Monash Health.
Those services are designated at the highest statewide level precisely because the conditions they treat change a person’s housing needs permanently. Somebody admitted to Royal Talbot after a severe brain injury is very frequently not going back to the house they left, and the question of where they go instead opens on the ward rather than afterwards.
This is why MTA so often becomes relevant in Melbourne at the point of transfer out of one of those units. The clinical work has finished or plateaued. The person is medically ready. And the housing is six weeks, or six months, behind. A rehabilitation bed is a poor place to wait: it is where people lose conditioning, lose confidence and lose the thread of their own lives, and it is needed by the next person on the list.
The practical implication for families is that the MTA conversation should start while the person is still an inpatient, with the hospital social worker and the treating team in the room. Waiting until a discharge date is issued removes most of your options.
Your rights in the accommodation: Victoria is different
Victoria has gone further than any other state in writing disability accommodation into tenancy law, and it is worth knowing what that gives you.
Part 12A of the Residential Tenancies Act 1997 sets out tailored provisions for Specialist Disability Accommodation. These mirror many of the rights and duties that apply to ordinary renters under Part 2, with additional protections on top — notably safeguards against eviction and against rent increases. Each resident in a household holds their own individual agreement, which matters in a shared setting, because your position does not depend on anybody else’s.
A few features are specific to Victoria and genuinely useful:
- Consumer Affairs Victoria publishes the SDA residency agreement form and an accompanying Information Statement, and registered SDA providers must notify CAV when an agreement is entered into or established.
- An agreement can be “established” rather than signed where the resident needs support to understand it and does not sign. This is a real protection against the common situation where a person is moved in on the strength of a family member’s signature and has no recorded status of their own.
- Community Visitors may enter an enrolled SDA dwelling at any time, without notice, and exercise inspection powers. Very few accommodation types in Australia carry that kind of standing external oversight.
- CAV investigates and conciliates complaints, and can be reached on 1300 558 181.
For interim arrangements — which is exactly what MTA is — Victoria also allows group homes to be gazetted under Part 5, Division 2 of the Disability Act 2006 as a short-term measure, with providers required to take steps so that residents still have Residential Tenancies Act protections. Only one form of agreement can apply to a household at any time.
The practical question to ask before a Melbourne MTA placement, then, is a specific one: what kind of agreement will I be signing, and is it an SDA residency agreement, an ordinary rental agreement, or something else? A provider who cannot answer that clearly is telling you something.
How to request MTA funding
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When MTA will not be funded
Worth knowing in advance, because each of these is a refusal reason in the guideline rather than a matter of discretion:
- It is reasonable for you to stay with informal supports — family or friends — in the meantime.
- You can stay in your current accommodation while you wait.
- The need is not related to your disability. General repairs unrelated to disability are the example given.
- The support is appropriately funded by another service or organisation.
- Your long-term home is not confirmed, except in the hospital and justice discharge pathways described above.
MTA, STA, SIL and SDA: which one is which
| Support | What it funds | Typical duration | Covers support workers? |
|---|---|---|---|
| MTA | The accommodation while your long-term home is not ready | Generally up to 90 days | No |
| STA | Accommodation and support for time apart from your usual informal carers | Up to 28 days a year, 14 at a time | Yes, charged separately from 1 July 2026 |
| SIL | The support roster in a shared home | Ongoing | Yes, that is the whole support |
| SDA | The dwelling itself, where it is purpose-built or modified | Ongoing | No |
People conflate MTA and STA more than any other pair, and the distinction is about purpose rather than length. STA exists so that a person and their family carers can have time apart. MTA exists because a house is not ready. If you are waiting on home modifications, the guideline is explicit that STA is not the right support and MTA may be funded instead.
Choosing an MTA provider in Melbourne
The accommodation is the easy part to assess. These are the questions that predict whether the placement works:
- What is the realistic start date, and what would have to happen to bring it forward? A provider who answers with a date rather than a process is more useful than one who answers with enthusiasm.
- Who delivers the support during the stay, and is it the same team who will support me afterwards? Continuity through the move is worth a great deal and is rarely offered.
- What kind of occupancy agreement will I sign? See the Victorian section above. The answer should be specific.
- What happens at day 91 if the destination has slipped? Ask what they have actually done in that situation before.
- Can you support the clinical needs I have now? Enteral feeding, complex bowel care, tracheostomy management, seizure plans and subcutaneous injections all sit inside defined scopes of practice. A straight answer here matters more than almost anything else on this list.
- Who is my single point of contact, and what happens on a Sunday? Transitions fail on weekends.
We are an NDIS-registered provider and we are not a hospital, a housing agency or a clinical service. What we can do is take a placement at short notice, support it properly while it runs, and work to the date rather than to the paperwork. Where we are not the right fit, we will say so on the first call.
Where we support MTA across Melbourne and Victoria
MTA Melbourne: common questions
The NDIS generally funds medium term accommodation for up to 90 days. The guideline also allows longer where there is evidence you need it longer because of your disability support needs, so the 90 days is a default rather than a hard limit. An extension needs evidence lodged before the period runs out. In practice, if your critical path has slipped by more than a fortnight you usually know by around day seventy, and that is the point to request more time rather than waiting for the end date.
Usually yes, but there is an important exception. The general rule is that you need a long-term home you will move into afterwards, confirmed by something like a provider offer letter, evidence that home modifications are in progress, or a tenancy offer with a likely move-in date. However, the NDIS guideline states that if you are being discharged from hospital and you are eligible for SDA, SIL, individualised living options or home modifications, you do not need to have a confirmed long-term home. The same applies on discharge from a justice setting.
No. MTA funding covers only the cost of the accommodation for the time you stay there. Supports already in your plan, such as personal care or community participation, can be used during the stay. Where the stay creates genuinely additional need — more personal care than usual, assistive technology, or help with moving in — that can be funded separately if it meets the funding criteria, but it has to be requested. The best time to ask is when the MTA request goes in.
The national price limit is $162.85 per day under support item 01_082_0115_1_1, which took effect on 1 July 2026. Remote areas are $227.99 per day and very remote areas $244.28. Almost all of Melbourne sits within the national band. The daily rate is paid to the accommodation provider from your plan, and it does not include day-to-day living costs such as food, electricity or internet, which remain yours.
Purpose, not length. Short term accommodation exists so that you and your primary informal supports — usually family — can have mutually rewarding time apart, and it is generally funded for up to 28 days a year, up to 14 days at a time. Medium term accommodation exists because your long-term home is not ready. They are not interchangeable: if you are waiting for home modifications, the short term accommodation guideline states that STA is not funded in that situation and MTA may be funded instead.
It often can, because it removes the housing step from the critical path. Where somebody is medically ready but their long-term housing is weeks or months away, MTA is the designed mechanism for that gap, and the hospital discharge pathway does not require a confirmed long-term home where eligibility for SDA, SIL, ILO or home modifications has been established. The limiting factor is usually how early the request is made. Starting the conversation while the person is still an inpatient, with the hospital social worker involved, changes the timeline far more than anything that happens afterwards.
It depends on the dwelling. Where the accommodation is enrolled Specialist Disability Accommodation, Victoria uses an SDA residency agreement under Part 12A of the Residential Tenancies Act 1997, which carries additional protections against eviction and rent increases, and gives each resident their own individual agreement. Consumer Affairs Victoria publishes the form and an Information Statement, and providers must notify CAV when an agreement is entered into or established. Where the dwelling is not enrolled SDA, a different form of agreement applies. It is a fair and specific question to ask a provider before you commit.
Then the request changes, and it is better to say so early. MTA is built on the assumption that a destination exists, so if the destination disappears the honest position is that the original basis for the funding has gone. In that situation the work shifts to establishing a new long-term option — which may mean an SDA application, a SIL vacancy search, an individualised living option, or social housing — and seeking an extension of MTA on the evidence of continuing disability-related need while that happens. What does not help is allowing the 90 days to expire while everyone hopes the original plan recovers.
Yes, and they frequently do. A support coordinator, plan manager, hospital social worker or treating team member can prepare and submit the request, and a referral from a hospital carries useful weight because it establishes the discharge context. The decision still belongs to the NDIA, and the participant or their nominee remains the one whose plan it is. What matters most is that whoever submits it attaches the evidence against each criterion rather than describing the situation in general terms.
Sometimes, and we will be straight about when. We are a registered NDIS provider delivering supported independent living and related supports, so in some cases an MTA placement with us leads into a longer-term arrangement we also support, which is the best outcome because the team does not change at the worst possible moment. In other cases the destination is somebody else’s house or a provider in a different part of Melbourne, and our job is to hold the bridge and hand over cleanly. We would rather tell you which of those it is on the first call than discover it at week eight.
