SDA Assessments Sydney
Specialist Disability Accommodation decisions rest on the quality of your functional evidence. Our AHPRA-registered occupational therapists assess you in your current home and write the housing report the NDIA relies on, including which design category your needs actually support, and why nothing smaller would do.
SDA funds the building, not the support
This is the single most useful thing to understand before you apply, and it is where most confusion starts.
What SDA pays for
The dwelling itself: purpose-built or heavily modified housing designed around a person’s functional needs. The funding attaches to the property, which is why you can change support providers without moving house.
What SDA does not pay for
Your day-to-day support. That is funded separately, usually through Supported Independent Living, an Individualised Living Option, or support at home. Rent and everyday living costs are also yours, as they would be anywhere.
Because they are separate decisions, they need separate evidence. A report that blurs the two, or argues for a building when the real need is more support, is one of the most common reasons an application stalls. If you are still working out which you need, start with our SIL and SDA comparison.
Who SDA is generally for
Eligibility is decided by the NDIA against the SDA rules. Nothing here changes that, but it is worth knowing what the decision turns on.
- 1You are an NDIS participant, and SDA is being considered as a reasonable and necessary support in your circumstances.
- 2You have extreme functional impairment, meaning your disability substantially limits everyday activities such as moving around, self-care or communication, even with assistive technology in place.
- 3Or you have very high support needs, which is about the volume and intensity of person-to-person support you require through the day and often overnight.
- 4There is current evidence, usually from an occupational therapist, describing your functional capacity and your home and living needs.
Those two pathways matter, because they are not the same argument. The first is about how much your impairment limits you even with the best available equipment already in place. The second is about how much human support you need and how often. A person can meet one and not the other, and the evidence that supports each looks quite different. An assessment that argues the wrong one, or argues both vaguely, gives a delegate very little to act on.
The NDIA has estimated that around 6 per cent of participants will require SDA. That is a planning estimate of expected need rather than a cap on approvals, and it is not a reason to rule yourself out. Our detailed guide to what the SDA eligibility criteria actually mean goes through both pathways in plain English.
Source: Specialist disability accommodation, NDIS. NDIS rules change; confirm the current position with the NDIA, your planner or your support coordinator.
Why SDA requests get knocked back
Almost never because the person did not need it. Usually because the evidence did not do a specific job. These are the patterns we see most often.
- The evidence describes the diagnosis, not the functionA delegate cannot fund a diagnosis. Cerebral palsy does not tell them anything about whether you can get through a doorway in your wheelchair, or what happens at two in the morning. Function is the currency, and diagnosis on its own is the weakest evidence there is.
- Nobody explained why something smaller would not workThis is the big one. The NDIA will reasonably ask why home modifications, assistive technology, or a different support arrangement cannot meet the need instead. If the report does not answer that directly, the request looks like it skipped a step.
- The design category is asserted rather than reasonedSaying a person needs High Physical Support is not evidence. Setting out the transfers, the equipment, the space required to use it and the consequences when it is not available is evidence.
- The support picture stops at bedtimeSDA decisions frequently turn on the overnight period, and it is the part most often missing. What happens if you need repositioning at 3am, or need to get to the toilet, or a seizure occurs, is central rather than a footnote.
- The evidence is oldCapacity changes, especially with progressive conditions or after a hospital admission. A report from three years ago describes somebody who may no longer exist in the way it says.
- It reads as a preferenceLocation, layout and who you live with all matter enormously to a person’s life. But unless each is tied back to a functional reason, they read as wishes, and wishes are the easiest thing in the world for a decision maker to decline.
The four SDA design categories
Every SDA dwelling is built to one of four design standards. Which one your evidence supports is a clinical question, not a preference, and it is a core part of what our assessment addresses.
Improved Liveability
Better light, clear sightlines and a layout that is easy to understand and navigate.
Generally forPeople with sensory, intellectual or cognitive impairment, where the difficulty is understanding and moving through a space rather than physically fitting in it.
Fully Accessible
Wheelchair accessible throughout: circulation space, door widths, benches, bathroom and approaches.
Generally forPeople with significant physical impairment who can transfer independently or with limited assistance, where a standard dwelling physically cannot be used.
Robust
Impact-resistant construction, low-stimulation design, secure and durable fittings, and considered exit routes.
Generally forSituations where a standard dwelling would not be safe, or would be damaged repeatedly, and where safety of the resident and others is part of the housing question.
High Physical Support
Fully accessible plus clinical infrastructure: ceiling hoist provision, backup power, and space for equipment and support workers to work safely.
Generally forPeople with very high physical support needs, usually including hoisted transfers and often assistive technology that a standard dwelling cannot support.
The categories are not a ladder from least to most, and you do not get the next one up by arguing harder. They describe different kinds of barrier. Someone with high cognitive support needs and no physical impairment may need Improved Liveability and would gain nothing from High Physical Support. Matching the category to the actual barrier is the part of the report that does the work.
Category is only half the decision
Separately from the design category, SDA is classified by building type, and that is what decides how many people you live with.
The four building types are an apartment, a duplex or villa or townhouse, a house for up to three residents, and a group home for four or five. For most people this matters as much as the design features, because it is the difference between living alone and sharing with four other people you did not choose.
It is also a functional question more often than people expect. Somebody whose psychosocial disability is worsened by noise, unpredictability or shared space has a clinical reason for a smaller building type, not merely a preference for one. Somebody who needs two support workers for a transfer needs the physical room for both of them to work. Both belong in the evidence.
A funding decision generally specifies the design category, the building type, the number of bedrooms and residents, the location, and whether on-site overnight assistance is included. Our report addresses the functional reasoning behind each, so a request is not read as a list of preferences.
SDA is the environment lever, at its largest
Our assessments across every service work on three levers. Understanding where SDA sits among them is the clearest way to see when it is genuinely the right answer.
Change the task
Do the same thing a different way. Shower seated rather than standing. Reorder a routine so the hardest task happens when energy is highest.
Change the environment
Alter what surrounds the task. A rail, a ramp, a different bench height, a bathroom reconfiguration. And when no modification can fix it, the dwelling itself.This is where SDA sits
Build the capacity
Grow the underlying ability where growth is genuinely possible. Strength, technique, routine, confidence, or the skills to manage independently.
SDA is not a bigger version of home modifications. It is what remains when the first and third levers cannot close the gap, and when the environmental change required is beyond what modifying an existing dwelling can achieve. A bathroom can be reconfigured. A doorway can be widened. A house that cannot take a ceiling hoist, has no circulation space for a powered wheelchair and no room for two support workers to transfer somebody safely is not a modification problem.
Saying that clearly, and showing the working, is exactly what a delegate needs in order to approve a request rather than send it back. It is also why we assess in your current home: the dwelling you are in now is the evidence for why it does not work. Read our full assessment methodology.
What our SDA assessment covers
We assess in your current home, because your current housing is the evidence for why it does not work.
Function across a full day
Self-care, transfers, mobility, communication, cognition, night-time needs and safety, observed rather than asked about.
Your current housing
What specifically fails: access, bathroom layout, doorway widths, circulation space, equipment that does not fit, and what has already been tried.
The full day and night
The type, intensity and pattern of support you need, including overnight, and what informal support is currently absorbing.
Design category reasoning
Which of the four categories your functional needs support, with the reasoning set out rather than asserted.
Why not something else
Why home modifications, assistive technology or a different support model would not adequately meet the need. The NDIA expects this.
Standardised measures
Validated tools such as the WHODAS 2.0 and COPM where appropriate, so findings sit against something objective.
What every recommendation in the report has to do
The same published standard applies to an SDA report as to everything else we write. It is what stops a housing request reading as an opinion.
Every recommendation must name the evidence it rests on, say where that evidence came from, and state what happens without the support. A recommendation that cannot meet all three does not go in the report.
For a housing request this matters more than almost anywhere else, because the decision is expensive and long-lived, and it will be read closely. A report where each recommendation carries its own evidence, source and consequence is difficult to decline on the grounds that the case was not made.
How this works in practice
A young adult with high physical support needs, still living in the family home
This is a worked example, written to show how we would approach an assessment of this kind. It does not describe a real person or a real assessment. Funding outcomes depend on individual circumstances and are decided by the funder.
The situation
Consider a support coordinator asking for an SDA assessment for a woman in her twenties with a physical disability affecting all four limbs. She lives in her parents’ home, where she grew up. Her father has been doing all transfers manually for years and has recently hurt his back. The family have been told to “apply for SDA” but have no evidence beyond a diagnosis and a two year old therapy report.
What we would do
We would assess in the family home across two visits, one in the morning and one in the early evening. We would observe a transfer from bed to chair and from chair to shower, timing and describing what is actually required, and measure the bathroom, doorways and circulation space. We would speak separately with both parents and with the support worker, because the picture people describe separately is frequently not the one a family gives together in the room.
The evening visit matters. Fatigue late in the day changes what she can contribute to a transfer, which changes the number of people required, which changes the equipment question entirely.
What the evidence would show
In a case like this the bathroom often cannot be modified to work, because there is no structural way to create the circulation space needed for a hoist and two people. Doorways can be widened, but that does not solve the bathroom. Where a mobile hoist has been tried, it may not be usable safely in the available floor space. The point is that the alternatives are not dismissed in a sentence. They are tested and documented, each with the reason it does not work.
What the report would set out
The functional evidence for High Physical Support with ceiling hoist provision, the reasoning for a building type with room for two support workers, the overnight repositioning requirement described by the people who actually do it, and the consequence of no change: continuing manual handling by an injured parent, and a support arrangement one back injury away from collapsing entirely.
Why it would be defensible
Because every recommendation names what was observed, who described it and what happens without it. The alternatives question is answered before it is asked. Whatever the decision, it could not be declined on the basis that the case had not been made.
How it works
Referral and scope
You, your family or your support coordinator contacts us. We confirm what the NDIA has asked for and whether an SDA assessment is genuinely the right report, before anything is booked. If a different report would serve you better, we say so at this point.
Assessment in your current home
Usually one or two visits, and at more than one time of day where fatigue or fluctuating capacity affects the support picture. We assess function, the dwelling, your support pattern and the overnight picture, and speak with the people around you with your consent.
Report in 2 to 3 weeks
A comprehensive report addressing eligibility, design category, building type reasoning and alternatives considered, written for the person who has to make the decision rather than for another clinician.
Follow-through
We answer questions from your planner or support coordinator about the report, and provide updated evidence if a review requires it.
SDA assessments across Greater Sydney
We are a mobile service and come to you. There is no clinic to visit.
Our base is Liverpool and South West Sydney, and we assess across Greater Sydney and beyond. If you are outside these areas, ask us at referral and we will tell you honestly whether we can help or whether somebody closer would serve you better.
SDA assessments: your questions
What is an SDA assessment?
Who is eligible for SDA?
What is the difference between SIL and SDA?
Which SDA design category will I get?
Why do SDA requests get knocked back?
Do I need an OT report to apply for SDA?
How long does an SDA assessment take?
Can you assess for SIL and SDA at the same time?
Will an assessment guarantee I get SDA?
What does an SDA assessment cost?
SDA guides
Plain-English guides written by our occupational therapy team.
Request an SDA assessment
Send a referral or an enquiry below, or call 1300 316 664. Tell us your plan review date if you have one and we will plan around it.
Evidence the NDIA can act on
Talk to our mobile OT team about an SDA assessment. We come to you, across Liverpool, Western Sydney and Greater Sydney.
Make a referral or call 1300 316 664The rest of the home and living picture
SIL Assessments: the support people, evidenced hour by hour All five home and living supports, mapped Home and Living Supporting Evidence