STA Melbourne

Short Term Accommodation · Melbourne

NDIS Short Term Accommodation in Melbourne, including the test that decides every request

Short Term Accommodation is the support most people call respite. The NDIS funds it so that you and the family who support you can have time apart, and it is generally funded for up to 28 days a year. What almost no provider page explains is the eligibility test underneath it, which turns on how many hours of unpaid support you receive each day, and the five specific situations in which STA will not be funded at all. Two of those exclusions catch people who are certain they qualify. On top of that, the way STA is priced and claimed changed completely on 1 July 2026, and you now pay for your own meals. This page covers all of it.

School holidays and the fortnight either side of Christmas book out months ahead across Melbourne. If you know roughly when you need it, earlier is genuinely better.

What the NDIS actually means by short term accommodation

The operational guideline opens with a sentence worth reading slowly: short term accommodation allows you to have mutually rewarding time apart from your primary informal supports.

Three things follow from that. First, the purpose is the time apart, not the accommodation — the building is a means to an end. Second, the word mutually is deliberate: the support is justified by benefit to both the participant and the carer, which is why a stay planned entirely around the carer’s needs and a stay planned entirely around the participant’s can both be refused. Third, everything hinges on who your primary informal supports are, which the guideline defines as the family and friends who give the majority of your unpaid, active, disability-related support.

If you do not have primary informal supports in that sense, STA is generally not the support for you. That sounds harsh and it is the logic the whole thing is built on.

The eligibility test nobody explains

This is the part that decides most requests, and it is almost never set out on provider websites. The guideline funds STA when all of the following apply:

The six-hour threshold is worth documenting properly rather than asserting. A week-long log of what the family actually does — personal care at 6am, mealtime assistance three times a day, supervision, transfers, night-time repositioning, medication — adds up far faster than people expect, and a specific record is much harder to dismiss than a general statement that somebody needs a lot of help.

The fourth criterion is where most Melbourne requests are won or lost. “Carer wellbeing at risk” is a legitimate ground, and it is the one families are most reluctant to put in writing, because it feels like an admission. It is not. A GP letter describing a carer’s own health, a statement about sleep disruption over months, or a note from a treating team carries real weight.

The five situations where STA will not be funded

These are stated as exclusions in the guideline, not as matters of discretion, and two of them surprise people.

• You live alone independently and do not have drop-in supports. No informal support to have time apart from, no STA.
• You receive more than 18 hours of paid supports in your home each day. At that level the scheme’s position is that your support is already funded.
• You are not actually having time apart from the primary informal supports you live with, or who provide significant daily drop-in support.
• You are living in supported independent living, or you hold individualised living options funding. This is the one that catches the most people. If you are in a SIL house, STA is not the mechanism for a change of scene, because your support is already continuous and funded.
• You are waiting for home modifications. The guideline sends you to medium term accommodation instead, and says STA is not funded in that situation.

That last one is a genuine distinction rather than a technicality. If the reason you need somewhere to stay is that your house is being modified, the support you want is MTA, which is priced and assessed differently. Asking for the wrong one costs weeks.

How much, and for how long

The guideline generally funds up to 28 days of short term accommodation per year, for up to 14 days at a time.

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

Twenty-eight days sounds generous until you divide it by a year. It is a long weekend every six weeks, or two one-week stays and a fortnight. Families who use it well tend to plan the year in advance rather than reaching for it in a crisis, partly because of availability and partly because an unplanned stay is almost always a worse experience for the person going.

What changed on 1 July 2026

This is the most practically important recent development and almost nothing published online reflects it yet.

Until 30 June 2026, STA was priced as a bundled daily rate that wrapped accommodation, support and everything else into one number — the national limit for one-to-one weekday support was $2,178.57 a day. Those bundled rates no longer exist.

Under the 2026–27 pricing schedule, an STA stay is claimed as separate components:

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

Two consequences matter to families. The first is that an overnight period is now claimed differently depending on whether a worker is asleep on site or awake and working, which means the question “will somebody be awake overnight?” is now a funding question as well as a safety one — ask it directly. The second is that because the components are separate, you can see what you are paying for, which was not really true under the bundled rate.

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

What STA includes and what it will not cover

Included: standard accommodation such as a hotel, motel, short stay rental, cabin, cottage, hostel or purpose-built respite house. Supports for the everyday activities your primary informal supports would normally provide. Accommodation for a support worker who needs to stay overnight with you, or where no local support worker is available. You can also take STA support in your own home, or in a homestay with a host who is not one of your informal supports — in those cases only the supports are funded, not the accommodation.

Not included: holidays, which the guideline lists explicitly as cruises, tours, holiday accommodation and airfares. Accommodation or programs for your carers. Day-to-day living costs such as rent, mortgage or utilities. Meals and activities, as above. Transport, where you can travel or use public transport independently.

The holiday exclusion causes the most disappointment, and the line is about purpose. A week in a cabin at Phillip Island with support, so that a family carer gets a break, is within scope. The same week framed as a holiday for the participant is not. That distinction feels thin and it is the one the guideline draws.

The carer picture in Victoria and nationally

STA is one of very few NDIS supports whose justification rests partly on somebody other than the participant, so the carer numbers are relevant.

The most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics survey counted 3.0 million carers in 2022, 11.9 per cent of people living in households, up from 2.6 million in 2018. Of those, 1.2 million were primary carers — 4.5 per cent of Australians — a sharp rise from 861,600 four years earlier.

Two findings in that data change how you read a respite request. 43.8 per cent of primary carers have a disability themselves, which means a very large share of the people providing more than six hours of daily support are managing their own health while doing it. And the number of carers under 25 rose from 235,300 to 391,300, now 12.9 per cent of all carers. Young carers are a substantial and largely invisible group in Melbourne, and a sibling doing significant daily care is a legitimate basis for an STA request.

On access, the picture is static. In 2022, 86 per cent of primary carers reported no unmet need for respite care — statistically unchanged from 86 per cent in 2018 and 87 per cent in 2012. The remaining share is the group this support exists for, and a decade of scheme reform has not moved it. Notably, 84 per cent of female primary carers reported no unmet need against 90 per cent of male carers.

Rights and oversight during a short stay in Victoria

An STA stay is usually not a residential tenancy. A hotel, motel, cabin or purpose-built respite house is short-stay accommodation, so the Residential Tenancies Act protections that apply to a long-term Victorian rental or to an SDA residency agreement under Part 12A generally do not apply to a two-week respite booking. That is not a gap so much as a different framework, and it is worth knowing which one you are in.

What does apply is the NDIS regulatory framework. The provider must be registered to deliver this support, must meet the NDIS Practice Standards, and must report defined incidents to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. In Victoria, Community Visitors appointed under the Disability Act 2006 have standing to visit disability accommodation, and the Office of the Public Advocate is the right contact for concerns about a person who cannot raise them independently.

Three practical questions for any Melbourne STA provider:

• Is this dwelling enrolled Specialist Disability Accommodation, or short-stay accommodation? The answer determines which rules apply.
• Who is the on-call contact overnight, and are they on site or on the phone?
• If something goes wrong, who do I complain to, and will you give me the Commission’s details without being asked?

How to request STA funding

Choosing an STA provider in Melbourne

• Who else is staying that week, and how do you match people? The single biggest determinant of whether a stay goes well, and the question least often asked.
• What are the staffing ratios, and will the same workers be there across the stay? A stay with four unfamiliar workers rotating through is a different experience from one with two.
• Is somebody awake overnight? Now a pricing question as well as a safety one.
• What clinical needs can you actually manage? Enteral feeding, seizure plans, complex bowel care and high-intensity supports sit inside defined scopes of practice. Ask specifically and expect a specific answer.
• What is included in the quote? Meals are the participant’s responsibility under the guideline, so a quote that implies otherwise needs explaining.
• What happens if the person wants to go home early? It happens, and a provider who has thought about it will say so.

We are a registered NDIS provider. We are not a respite centre with a fixed roster of beds, and we would rather tell you on the first call that a particular week is not workable than take the booking and manage the consequences later.

Where we support STA across Melbourne and Victoria