When referrals stall, the default response in an NDIS operation is a job ad. More outreach needed, therefore more people. We made that exact hire twice while scaling our own SIL operation, and both times the new coordinator was absorbed into rosters and incident paperwork within a quarter, and the outreach went back to whoever had spare time on a Sunday night.
The job ad says $75,000. That is not the cost.
The full cost of the hire
The market average salary for an NDIS support coordinator is $75,080. Sydney runs higher. Add superannuation at 12%, workers compensation, leave loading, and the standard overheads of employment, and the realistic year-one cost of that role sits between $90,000 and $100,000 before they send a single message to a coordinator.
Then add the parts no one budgets.
Recruiting for it took us the better part of a quarter, both times. Ramp to full productivity takes another two to three months: they need to learn your homes, your vacancy profile, your referral sources. And when they leave, the whole cost cycle restarts. Coordination roles churn.
Call it $95,000 in year one, optimistically.
What the hire actually spends their week on
Here is the part the audits taught us that running our own homes never did: the outreach job the hire was made for is a small fraction of where their hours actually go.
When we map this in diagnostics, the dedicated outreach work (monitoring coordinator groups, sending first-touch messages, running follow-up) comes out at roughly 5 hours a week. The rest of the role gets pulled into intake admin, compliance documentation, and whatever fire is burning that day. The case study we published measured it at 5.2 hours per week before install.
So the $95,000 buys you 5 hours a week of the thing you hired for, done during business hours.
That last clause matters more than the salary. In our outreach data, 67% of coordinator enquiries go to 3 or more providers simultaneously. The provider who responds first usually wins the conversation. Coordinator posts go up on Saturday mornings and at 9pm on weeknights. A salaried human answers them on Monday. (We held a hard line on weekend boundaries for our own staff, which meant our response times were exactly as slow as everyone else's.)
What the agent costs
The Referral Agent installs for $3,500 with a $1,000 per month retainer. Year-one cost: $15,500.
It monitors the coordinator groups continuously, sends a personalised first message inside the response window, runs the follow-up sequence to completion, and logs every contact. It worked 41 new coordinator contacts in its first 21 days at the provider in the case study. Active conversations went from 3 to 18, and the ops coordinator's outreach time dropped to 45 minutes a week, handling only the replies that needed a human.
The guarantee is referral activity within 60 days or the install fee refunded. No job ad comes with that clause.
What the agent cannot do
An honest comparison names the limits. The agent does not take a coordinator to coffee. It does not run a property tour, negotiate a complex placement, or make the judgment call on a participant whose needs sit outside your registration groups. Relationship depth is human work and stays human work.
Which is the actual answer to the hiring question: the role you think you need to hire is two jobs wearing one title. The mechanical job of monitoring, first touch, follow-up, and logging is high-volume, time-sensitive, and runs at 11pm. The relationship job is low-volume, high-judgment, and runs over coffee. Hiring a person to do both means paying a relationship-grade salary for monitoring-grade work, and still missing the Saturday post.
When hiring is still the right call
If your participant load is growing and the billable coordination work is outgrowing your team, hire. That role generates revenue. What we are arguing against is hiring for the unbillable chasing — the StewartBrown FY24 data showing 55.7% of providers operating at a loss is, in our audits, substantially a story about salaried hours doing work that produces no claimable line.
Put the human on billable, judgment-heavy work. Put the agent on the mechanical pipeline that feeds them.
Run your own numbers
The 30-minute Operational Diagnostic maps where outreach hours currently go in your operation and prices both paths against your actual vacancy cost. You leave with the comparison in writing, whichever way it points.