At Accessible Homes Australia, our homes are built around a simple idea — you shouldn’t have to share your home to receive the support you need. Onsite Shared Support (OSS) is what makes living alone in your own home, with 24/7 care just a buzz away, possible. “Living alone with Onsite Shared Support” is a 24/7 model where tenants live independently in their own Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) home, with a support team based on the same site, ready to respond when something unplanned comes up.
We’re often asked two things about OSS: who is it actually for, and how does it stack up on cost? Here’s a plain-English answer to both.
Who OSS is for
OSS sits alongside SDA — it isn’t a standalone support available to any Participant. To access it, you first need to be SDA-eligible, or applying for it, because eligibility for this care model is assessed and granted at the same time as your SDA funding. And while the two are delivered by different teams, they’re linked within one Home and Living model.
It was introduced by the NDIA as the pathway to live by yourself — or with the people of your choosing, like family — for participants who want to live independently, as opposed to those with a specific disability-related need to live alone. If living independently is your preference, this is the model that makes it viable.
On top of general SDA eligibility criteria, the NDIA looks at four additional points when deciding whether to fund “living alone with onsite shared support”. These aren’t hurdles designed to trip you up – they’re the things your housing application needs to set out clearly and directly. Per the NDIS Specialist Disability Accommodation Operational Guideline, you’ll generally meet the criteria where:
- You can use technology to call for assistance — a buzzer, app or call system to reach the onsite team.
- Your ad hoc support needs sit at around 2.5 hours a day or less — as a guide, up to an average of 2.5 hours of unplanned, person-to-person help per day, on top of your planned daily support.
- You can usually wait up to 60 minutes for unplanned support without it becoming a risk to your safety or wellbeing.
- You understand the risks of living alone.
A couple of these are worth unpacking. The 60-minute figure isn’t a target response time – in our communities help is usually only minutes away – it’s a safety threshold the NDIA uses to check the model is a genuine fit. And the 2.5 hours is a guide to the kind of support you need, not a stopwatch.
Here’s the part we can’t stress enough. If you want to live independently, the strength of your application against these four points is what gets you there. Addressed clearly — ideally with your OT and support team — they make for an application that’s funded the first time. Left vague, they’re often what causes an application to stall or come back with the wrong outcome, such as living in a group home to receive shared 24/7 supports. For anyone serious about living in this model, it’s worth the effort to evidence each criteria directly.
Why it’s so cost-effective
This is where OSS really earns its place. Because one onsite team supports a whole community of tenants rather than a single household, the cost of round-the-clock backup is shared – the same economies of scale a group home offers, but without anyone having to share their home.
Here’s the part that tends to surprise people. The NDIS funds OSS through a dedicated line item, Unplanned onsite shared supports in Specialist Disability Accommodation. At the current price limit (FY25-26), that works out to about $220 a day per tenant for 24/7 onsite backup.
For comparison, a single inactive overnight sleepover shift – where a worker sleeps onsite and is funded just to be there overnight – costs $297.60 under the current NDIS price limits. So a tenant’s whole-day OSS contribution costs less than funding one night of a sleepover in a traditional supported living arrangement – and OSS covers the full 24 hours, not just the night.
Scaled across a model like ours, the difference adds up quickly. AHA’s own modelling shows clustered, single-occupancy SDA with OSS can cost the NDIS as much as around $70,000 a year per person less than an equivalent group home delivering the same support hours – whilst also providing more independence, more privacy, and better outcomes.
That’s the win-win we keep coming back to: better living, at a lower cost to the scheme.
Want to know more?
If you’re a participant, family member or support coordinator wondering whether OSS could be the right fit — or a provider interested in delivering it at one of our sites — we’d love to talk. Get in touch with our team and we’ll walk you through it.
