How to Describe Your Home and Living Support Needs

Here is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of every Home and Living request: the NDIA doesn’t fund what you need. It funds what you can demonstrate you need.

Those two things should be the same. Often they aren’t, and the gap is where good applications go to die. We’ve read functional capacity assessments describing a person as “requires assistance with personal care” when the reality was two workers, a hoist, forty minutes and a seizure risk. Both statements are true. Only one of them gets funded properly.

This guide is about closing that gap. It’s written for participants, families and support coordinators preparing a Home and Living request — whether you’re seeking Supported Independent Living, an Individualised Living Option, or Specialist Disability Accommodation. The principles are the same for all three, and almost nobody explains them properly before the assessment happens.

Why vague descriptions cost people funding

Scale explains the scrutiny. SIL-related payments reached roughly $11.7 billion nationally in the year to June 2025 — close to half of all core daily-activity spending in the scheme — while the NDIA works toward the National Cabinet target of holding annual scheme cost growth to 8 per cent, down from 10.8 per cent as at June 2025.

In practice that means your request lands on the desk of someone whose job includes questioning it. They’re comparing what you’ve claimed against evidence, against benchmarks, and against what similar participants receive. A delegate reading “needs support with meals” has no way to distinguish between someone who needs a reminder to eat and someone who needs full preparation, modified textures and supervision for choking risk. Faced with ambiguity, decisions default downward.

The fix isn’t exaggeration — padding is transparent and damages the credibility of your legitimate claims. The fix is specificity.

The single most useful technique: narrate a real day

Ask most families to describe support needs and you get a list of categories. Ask them to walk through yesterday, hour by hour, and you get the actual picture.

Before any assessment, sit down and write out a typical weekday from waking to sleeping. Not what usually happens in general — what happened on one specific, real day. For each activity, capture four things:

1. What has to happen (not the category — the actual task)
2. What the person does themselves
3. What someone else does, and how many someones
4. How long it takes, and when

The difference in output is stark. Compare:

“Michael needs support with morning personal care.”

with:

“Michael wakes around 6:30am. He cannot reposition himself in bed, so a worker repositions him before transfers. Transfers from bed to shower chair require two workers and a ceiling hoist — he has no weight-bearing capacity. Showering takes approximately 35 minutes with hands-on assistance throughout, including bowel care three mornings a week, which adds around 25 minutes. Michael directs his own care verbally and chooses his clothes. Dressing takes a further 20 minutes with two workers for the lower body.”

The second version funds correctly. The first version funds someone’s guess.

Cover the four domains delegates actually assess

Structure your notes around these, because this is roughly how the decision gets made.

1. Physical and personal care

Be concrete about the mechanics: transfers (how many people, what equipment), showering and toileting, continence support, dressing, eating and drinking (including modified diets or PEG feeding), medication administration, mobility around the home, and any clinical tasks.

State the level of assistance precisely. The sector’s language — independent, supervision, prompting, partial assistance, full assistance — exists for a reason. “Partial assistance with dressing, full assistance for lower body, two workers required” says something. “Help with dressing” doesn’t.

2. Daily living and household tasks

Meal planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, managing money, appointments, correspondence. For each one, the key question is not “can they do it?” but “what happens if nobody supports it?”

That reframing matters enormously for people with intellectual disability, acquired brain injury or psychosocial disability, whose capacity is often intact in theory but not in execution. A person may be entirely able to cook and yet not eat for two days because initiating the sequence is where their disability actually bites. Write that down. Executive function needs are real and are chronically under-evidenced because they don’t look like anything from the outside.

3. Overnight support

This is the most contested line in any Home and Living request, and the most poorly evidenced. The distinction matters financially: a sleepover worker sleeps on site and wakes when needed; an active night worker is awake and working. The annual cost difference is substantial, so delegates probe overnight claims hard.

The winning move is almost embarrassingly simple: log it. For four weeks before your assessment, record every time overnight support was actually needed — the time, what happened, how long it took. A log showing eleven wakings across a fortnight for repositioning and continence care is an argument. “He needs help at night” is an assertion. Guesswork in either direction hurts you: families who accept a sleepover when the data justifies active nights end up under-supported, and requests claiming active nights the data won’t support get cut along with everything else.

4. Safety, behaviour and risk

Describe what actually happens, plainly, including the incidents nobody enjoys writing down. Wandering or absconding. Falls. Fire and kitchen safety. Vulnerability to exploitation. Behaviours of concern, with frequency, triggers and what de-escalation requires.

Families often soften this section out of loyalty or embarrassment. It’s understandable and it backfires. A behaviour support practitioner’s report describing three incidents a week requiring two-person response, with specific antecedents, is evidence. “Can get frustrated sometimes” removes the basis for the support that keeps everyone safe.

Don’t forget the good days — and the goals

An assessment that only catalogues deficits produces two bad outcomes: it misrepresents the person, and it misses the capacity-building the NDIS is actually designed to fund.

Say what the person can do, and what they want to learn. “Sarah can prepare simple meals with verbal prompting and wants to cook independently within two years” gives a delegate something to fund toward. It also protects against the trap of support calibrated permanently to someone’s worst day.

Include the fluctuation, too. For people with psychosocial disability, MS, chronic fatigue or epilepsy, capacity moves. Describe the range honestly: what a good week looks like, what a difficult week looks like, how often each occurs. Support that ignores the difficult weeks produces crises; support locked at crisis level all the time produces dependence and resentment. Delegates can only fund flexibility they know about.

Name what informal support currently provides — and its limits

Every Home and Living request is implicitly answering the question: why can’t the current arrangement continue?

Understating family support seems tactically clever and reads as evasive. Delegates cross-reference, and credibility lost in one section damages the whole request. State it straight, then state the limits:

“Michael’s mother currently provides all evening and overnight support, seven nights a week. She is 68, had a knee replacement in March and has been advised against assisting with transfers. There is no other family member able to take on this role. On two occasions this year Michael has been left without support when she was hospitalised.”

That paragraph does more work than any adjective. It’s specific, verifiable, honest about the past, and clear about the future. It’s also, for many families, the hardest thing to write — because it feels like an admission of failure. It isn’t. It’s the truth doing its job.

Practical preparation: a short checklist

• Book the occupational therapist early. The functional capacity assessment is the backbone of everything. Waitlists run to months, and booking early is the single most effective way to shorten the overall timeline.
• Keep a four-week diary before the assessment: daily support events, overnight events, incidents, good days and bad.
• Gather supporting reports: GP and specialist letters, behaviour support plans, hospital discharge summaries, previous OT reports.
• Brief the assessor in writing beforehand with your day-narrative and diary. Assessors see a snapshot; you’ve seen years.
• Have someone who knows the person well present at the assessment, especially for participants who mask, minimise or present well on the day. Presenting well is a genuine skill many people with disability have spent decades developing, and it works against them here.
• Read the draft report before it’s submitted. If it’s generic, ask for specificity. It’s your evidence and you’re allowed to question it.

A before-and-after worth copying

Here’s the same fortnight of a real-world situation, written two ways. The content is identical. Only one version funds correctly.

Version A — how most reports read:

Priya requires assistance with daily living tasks including meal preparation, personal care and community access. She has some independence but needs prompting. Overnight support is required. Her mother currently assists but is finding this difficult.

Version B — the same person, described properly:

Priya prepares breakfast independently. Lunch and dinner require full support: she cannot judge cooking times safely and has had two minor burns in the past year. Meal preparation takes 40 minutes with a worker present throughout.

Showering requires standby assistance for safety (history of falls — three in 12 months, two requiring GP review) plus hands-on help washing her hair. Approximately 30 minutes daily.

Priya attends TAFE two days a week and travels by taxi. She cannot use public transport independently due to difficulty problem-solving when routines change. Travel training is a stated goal.

Overnight: a four-week log recorded 9 episodes requiring staff response, primarily continence assistance between 1am and 4am, each taking 15–20 minutes. A sleepover arrangement has been sufficient on 26 of 28 nights.

Priya’s mother (71) has provided all support for 24 years. She was hospitalised in February for 6 days, during which Priya stayed with an aunt who is unable to repeat this. Her mother has been advised by her GP to cease assisting with transfers.

Version B took an afternoon to write and a four-week diary to substantiate. It also answers, in advance, almost every question a delegate would otherwise send back — which is time saved twice over.

Two mistakes worth avoiding

Describing support needs when the request is for SDA. These are different arguments. SIL and ILO requests are about people — how much human assistance is required. SDA requests are about the building — why ordinary housing, even with modifications, cannot work. A report full of excellent support-needs detail will fail an SDA application if it never explains why the environment itself has to change. If you’re seeking SDA, make sure the evidence addresses hoists, circulation, sensory environment or structural safety explicitly. (Our SDA guides cover this distinction in depth.)

Letting the report describe a category instead of a person. Delegates read hundreds of these. The ones that succeed read like a specific human being’s actual life. The ones that don’t read like a template with a name inserted.

The bottom line

You can’t control NDIA processing times, waitlists or who reads your file. You can control how clearly your reality is documented — and in our experience, that single factor separates successful Home and Living requests from unsuccessful ones more than anything else.

Write the day. Log the nights. Say the hard parts plainly. Name what family does and what it costs them. Then let the evidence speak.

If you’d like help thinking through how to describe a particular situation — or a second pair of eyes on a draft roster of care before it’s submitted — call us on 1300 271 824. We do this every week, including for people who end up choosing another provider entirely.

Sources: NDIS Quarterly Reports to disability ministers, 2024–25, including scheme payment and cost-growth figures. General information only — not legal or clinical advice.