STA Brisbane

Short Term Accommodation · Brisbane

NDIS Short Term Accommodation in Brisbane, and what Queensland’s respite figures don’t tell you

On paper, Queensland carers do better than anyone. In the most recent national survey, 88 per cent of Queensland primary carers reported no unmet need for respite care — the highest figure of any jurisdiction the Bureau of Statistics was able to publish, against 86 per cent nationally and 80 per cent in Western Australia. That is a genuinely good result and it is also the kind of statistic that conceals the thing you actually care about, because a figure about unmet need says nothing about whether the right place was available in the right week with the right staff. This page is about how short term accommodation really works in Brisbane: the eligibility test underneath it, the five situations where it is not funded at all, and the pricing structure that changed completely on 1 July 2026.

Queensland school holidays and the weeks around Christmas are the tightest periods across South East Queensland. Rough dates are enough to start a conversation.

The support, as the guideline defines it

Read the opening line of the operational guideline slowly: short term accommodation allows you to have mutually rewarding time apart from your primary informal supports. Nothing in that sentence describes a facility. What it describes is a relationship under strain.

Who counts as a primary informal support is defined too — the family and friends from whom you receive most of your unpaid, active, disability-related assistance. Every condition in the eligibility test traces back to them, and the accommodation is simply how the separation is achieved. Hence the provision allowing STA to be delivered in your own home, or through a homestay with somebody who is not one of your informal supports, with the supports funded and the accommodation not.

The word mutually is not decoration either. A request resting solely on a carer being worn out, and one resting solely on a participant wanting independence, are each vulnerable. What the scheme funds sits where those two interests meet.

Reading the Queensland respite numbers honestly

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports the proportion of primary carers with no unmet need for respite care, drawn from the Bureau of Statistics’ Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers. For 2022, Queensland recorded 88 per cent, the strongest result of the jurisdictions with publishable sample sizes. Western Australia recorded 80 per cent. Nationally the figure was 86 per cent, statistically unchanged from 86 per cent in 2018 and 87 per cent in 2012.

Three observations are worth making about that.

The first is that a decade of scheme reform has not shifted the national number. Whatever else the NDIS has changed, access to a break for the people providing the most care is roughly where it was.

The second is the gendered gap. Nationally, 90 per cent of male primary carers reported no unmet need against 84 per cent of female primary carers. Given that the survey also found 6.1 per cent of women were primary carers against 3.0 per cent of men, the group doing most of this work is also the group reporting more unmet need.

The third is that “no unmet need” is a low bar. It records the absence of a stated gap. It does not record whether a suitable place was available in the week it was needed, whether the staffing matched the person, or whether the family would describe the stay as good. Queensland performing well on that measure and a Brisbane family struggling to find a workable fortnight in January are entirely compatible facts.

What you actually have to satisfy

Four conditions, all of which must hold, and they are almost never published on provider pages.

The first is simply that the need arises from your disability support needs — the threshold question attached to any NDIS support.

The second is that you live with, or receive daily drop-in support from, your primary informal supports. Living in the family home is the ordinary case, but regular daily drop-in support counts as well.

The third is the number that decides most applications: those informal supports must be providing more than six hours of disability-related support a day, on a long-term basis. It is a daily threshold, not a weekly average.

The fourth is that at least one further factor applies. The guideline lists high intensity supports, intensive behaviour support, limited availability of in-home services where you live, and carer wellbeing being at risk.

Evidencing the six hours properly is the most valuable thing a family can do. A week-long log — personal care at 6am, three mealtimes, transfers, supervision, medication, overnight repositioning — adds up much faster than people expect, and a specific record is considerably harder to argue with than a general statement that somebody needs a great deal of help.

Where a request fails outright

The guideline sets out five circumstances in which STA is not funded. They operate as exclusions rather than as factors to be weighed.

STA is unavailable if you live alone independently and have no drop-in supports, because there is no informal caring arrangement to step back from. It is unavailable if you receive more than 18 hours of paid support in your home each day, on the basis that your support is already funded at that level. It is unavailable if you are not genuinely having time apart from the informal supports you live with or who drop in substantially each day. It is unavailable if you live in supported independent living or hold individualised living options funding — the exclusion that surprises the largest number of people. And it is unavailable if you are waiting for home modifications, which the guideline sends to medium term accommodation instead.

That final exclusion is substantive rather than procedural. Where building work is the reason you need somewhere to stay, MTA is the support, assessed on different criteria and priced differently, and asking for the wrong one costs weeks.

Twenty-eight days, and how to spend them

The guideline generally funds up to 28 days a year, for up to 14 days at a time.

Children are treated more flexibly. The NDIA may fund more than 28 days a year in exceptional situations, though the guideline says it generally will not go beyond 60 days. Additional criteria apply, including that the child lives with you, that you are their primary carer, and that they need care beyond what is usual for their age.

Twenty-eight days is less than it sounds once it is divided into a year. It is a long weekend every six weeks, or two single weeks and a fortnight. Families who get value from it tend to decide the shape in advance — partly because availability in South East Queensland is genuinely tight in the obvious weeks, and partly because an unplanned stay is nearly always a worse experience for the person going.

The pricing overhaul of 1 July 2026

This is the change least reflected in anything published online, and it affects what you can actually arrange.

Up to 30 June 2026, an STA stay carried a single bundled daily rate covering accommodation and support together, with the national ceiling for one-to-one weekday support set at $2,178.57 per day. That structure has been dismantled.

Under the 2026–27 schedule a stay is claimed in separate parts:

High intensity support carries higher hourly limits, from $79.60 on a weekday daytime to $176.84 on a public holiday.

Two practical consequences. An overnight period is now claimed differently depending on whether a worker sleeps on site or stays awake and working, so “will somebody be awake overnight?” has become a funding question as well as a safety one — ask it directly and get the answer in writing. And because the components are itemised, you can finally see what you are being charged for, which the bundled rate obscured.

Providers also have to discuss changes to existing service agreements with you, and you must agree before the new rates are claimed against your plan.

The inclusions and exclusions in full

Within scope: ordinary accommodation — a hotel, motel, short stay rental, cabin, cottage, hostel or purpose-built respite house. Assistance with the everyday activities your informal carers would ordinarily handle. A support worker’s accommodation where one must stay overnight, or where no local worker can be found. STA support delivered in your own home or in a homestay with a host outside your informal network, where only the support is funded.

Outside scope: holidays, which the guideline itemises as cruises, tours, holiday accommodation and airfares. Any accommodation or program for your carers. Ordinary living costs, rent, mortgage and utilities among them. Meals and activities. Transport, if you are able to travel or use public transport without assistance.

Rights and oversight during a Queensland short stay

Where a short stay is in rooming-style accommodation, Queensland’s Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008 may apply, and it brings useful structure. A rooming accommodation agreement is made on Form R18, penalties apply if a provider does not give you a written agreement, and the form allows you to nominate a support person — informally, or formally through a power of attorney — who then receives notices and paperwork alongside you. The provider must deliver every service you are paying for, consider requests to change services fairly, and give written notice on Form R9 before entering your room.

Where the stay is in a hotel, motel or cabin, that framework generally will not apply, because short-stay commercial accommodation is a different arrangement. Knowing which one you are in is the point.

What applies in either case is the NDIS regulatory framework. The provider must be registered for this support, must meet the NDIS Practice Standards, and must notify the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission of defined incidents. In Queensland, the Office of the Public Guardian operates a community visitor program and can be reached on 1300 653 187; community visitors can check on people who have a cognitive impairment or find decisions difficult. Free tenant advice is available from QSTARS on 1300 744 263, and Disability Advocacy Pathways on 1800 130 582. Complaints about the quality of an NDIS service go to the Commission rather than to the Residential Tenancies Authority.

Three questions for any Brisbane provider before a booking:

• Is this a rooming accommodation arrangement, enrolled SDA, or short-stay commercial accommodation?
• Who takes the call overnight, and is that person on the premises or on a phone?
• If I need to complain, will you give me the Commission’s details without my having to ask twice?

Requesting STA funding

Choosing an STA provider in Brisbane

• Who else will be staying, and how do you match people? The strongest single predictor of whether a stay goes well, and the least asked.
• What are the ratios, and will the same workers be there throughout? Four unfamiliar faces across five days is a different experience from two.
• Is anybody awake overnight? Now a pricing question as much as a safety one.
• Which clinical needs can you genuinely manage? Enteral feeding, seizure management plans, complex bowel care and high intensity supports all fall within defined scopes of practice. Ask specifically.
• What exactly is in the quote? Under the guideline food is the participant’s own cost, so any price suggesting otherwise should be explained.
• What happens if the person wants to come home early? It happens often, and a provider who has thought it through will tell you how it is handled.

We are a registered NDIS provider rather than a respite centre with a fixed set of beds, and we would rather tell you on the first call that a particular week will not work than take the booking and manage the fallout.

Where we support STA across Brisbane and South East Queensland