Roster of Care for SIL: what it is, and what has to line up with it

If you run or coordinate Supported Independent Living, you have heard “Roster of Care” used loosely — sometimes to mean the actual weekly roster, sometimes the document a provider prepares to show the NDIA a typical week of support. They are related but they are not the same thing, and mixing them up is where SIL funding disputes usually start.

A Roster of Care (sometimes called a Roster of Supports) is the document that describes the support a participant needs across a typical week in a SIL setting: how many staff are rostered at each time of day, what ratio they are supporting at — 1:1, 1:2, 1:3, shared — and how overnight support is structured, whether that is active overnight, a sleepover, or none at all.

It is not the timesheet. It is not the actual roster your scheduling tool produces each week. It is the underlying pattern of support, put together with the participant or their nominee, and the NDIA may use it, alongside other supporting information, when it works out the reasonable and necessary SIL supports for that person, in that house, at that ratio. The NDIA’s own guide to its roster of care tool (June 2026) says a roster of care is optional: when a participant wants their planning discussions to consider one, it goes to them and their support coordinator, for their home and living request or their plan reassessment.

Where rosters of care are prepared for a shared SIL arrangement, each participant has their own, even though several residents in the same house may share overlapping shifts — and the NDIA’s tool lists every resident of the house, including anyone not on the NDIS. That is because SIL funding is individualised: the house’s actual staffing pattern is the sum of what each resident’s Roster of Care says they need, reconciled against what is practical to deliver as a shared roster.

A properly built Roster of Care sets out, for a standard week:

• Ratios by time block — for example 1:2 during the day, 1:1 for personal care windows, shared 1:4 overnight.
• Shift pattern — how the day is broken into blocks (morning, day, evening, overnight) and how many staff hours sit in each.
• The overnight arrangement — whether overnight support is an active shift (staff awake and providing support), a sleepover (staff present and on call, paid a lower rate for the sleepover period plus higher rates for any active time), or no overnight support at all.
• Any 1:1 components layered on top of the shared ratio, for specific needs — behaviour support, community access, medical monitoring.
• A weekly total — hours per ratio type, which is what converts into the funding request.

The NDIA’s tool turns that weekly total into an estimated weekly and annual amount at the price limits — an estimate, not an agreement with the NDIA: the actual supports are agreed with the participant once their plan is funded. Change the ratio or the overnight arrangement and the estimate changes — which is exactly why the document needs to be accurate when it is shared, and kept current afterwards. The free SIL roster of care calculator does the same arithmetic for one participant’s typical week.

Here is the part that causes real problems, and it is not dramatic. It is just accumulation.

A Roster of Care describes a typical week at the point it was written. The actual roster you run changes constantly: someone calls in sick and gets covered by an extra worker instead of the rostered one; a participant’s needs increase and a shift that was 1:2 quietly becomes 1:1 because nobody feels safe running it any other way; an overnight sleepover becomes an active shift because the participant now needs support at 2am; a vacancy gets covered by casual staff on a different pattern for six weeks running.

None of that gets fed back into the Roster of Care unless someone deliberately does it. The document that justified the funding sits still. The roster that is actually worked, and actually billed, moves on. The gap between the two is invisible day to day — but it shows up in two unpleasant ways later.

At plan review, when the NDIA compares what was funded against what was delivered, and the provider has to explain why the actual support pattern does not match the document that justified the funding.

In a funding shortfall or dispute, when a participant’s needs have genuinely increased, the roster has already adapted to that reality, but nobody has gone back to update the Roster of Care or request a plan variation — so the provider is delivering, and often absorbing the cost of, a higher level of support than the funding covers.

The provider carries this gap either way. Under-deliver against the document and you risk a compliance conversation. Over-deliver against it without updating the paperwork and you are funding the difference yourself, indefinitely, until someone notices.

This does not need to be complicated. Once a month, for each SIL participant, sit the Roster of Care next to what was actually rostered and worked over the past four weeks, and ask:

• Ratio — has the actual ratio for any time block drifted from what is documented, more 1:1 than the Roster of Care specifies, or less?
• Overnight — has a sleepover become an active shift more than once or twice, or the reverse? A pattern, not a one-off.
• Total hours — is the actual weekly hours total materially different from the Roster of Care’s weekly total, in either direction?
• Reason for the drift — is it a temporary covering arrangement (a staff vacancy, a short-term escalation), or has the participant’s underlying need genuinely changed?
• Action — temporary drift gets a note and a date to review again. A genuine change in need gets raised with the support coordinator or plan manager as a potential Roster of Care update and plan variation, before the next review rather than at it.

Keep this check boring and regular rather than reactive. The providers who get caught out are almost never the ones with a single dramatic incident — they are the ones where the gap built up unnoticed over six or twelve months, because nobody was looking at the two documents side by side.

Each property in Corella has an indicative staffing grid — a ratio for each time band across the week, costed at one flat hourly rate — a quick way to see what a pattern of support costs while you talk it through. The Roster of Care itself is the funding and clinical document that sits with the provider, support coordinator and plan manager, and it stays a deliberate, human decision.

What the roster board handles is the operational side once ratios and overnight arrangements have been decided: group shifts with several residents on them, ratio shifts that bill the proportion the price guide expects, sleepovers as their own kind of shift rather than a note in a description, and recurring patterns you can copy from one week to the next. The staffing and funding forecast then shows what is already rostered ahead against a participant’s remaining plan funding, which is a useful input when you are doing the monthly check above.

Setting that beside each resident’s Roster of Care is the judgement the monthly check exists to make, and Corella’s reports give you each person’s service hours for any period you choose. How Corella models houses, residents and sleepovers covers the operational side in more detail, and the SCHADS parts that actually bite covers what the overnight arrangement does to your pay bill.