Am I a SIL Provider? Applying the Commission's Definition to Your Service

"We support people in shared housing" isn't the same question as "are we a SIL provider"

A huge number of providers genuinely don't know whether the mandatory SIL registration rules catch their service. You might deliver support in shared or group living arrangements, help someone with daily tasks in their home, or coordinate a roster of workers for a household — and still land on either side of the line, depending on details that sound minor but aren't. Getting this wrong in either direction has real consequences: assuming you're not a SIL provider when you are means operating unregistered past the deadline; assuming you are when you're not means chasing registration you don't actually need. This post works through the NDIS Commission's own definition, piece by piece, against practical examples.

The Commission's definition, broken into its parts

Supported independent living is a package of home and living support for people with higher support needs. Under the NDIS Commission's mandatory registration guidance for SIL and the related NDIS guide to supported independent living, a person or organisation is delivering supported independent living to a participant where three things are true together:

• The participant requires support at all times of the day, or for most of the day — this is a genuine intensity threshold, not a description of any regular support arrangement.
• The assistance helps the participant live in their home as autonomously as possible, including assistance with or supervision of daily life tasks — cooking, cleaning, personal care, managing money, and similar activities of daily living.
• The support is delivered so as to help the participant access the community as part of living independently, not solely inside the home.

None of these three tests, on its own, decides the question — it's the combination that matters. A service that delivers intensive daily support but has no community-access dimension, or one that helps with community access but only for an hour a week, is answering "no" to at least one part of the test even though it looks similar to SIL from the outside.

Carve-out one: who's actually managing and directing the support

The mandate is aimed at organisations that manage and deliver a participant's SIL package — rostering staff, holding the service agreement, and directing how support is provided. It is not aimed at the situation where a participant themselves chooses, directs, and manages their own individual support workers directly — recruiting, rostering, and supervising the people who support them, rather than a provider organisation doing that on the participant's behalf. If your organisation's role is limited to something closer to that self-directed model — the participant is genuinely the one managing the arrangement — you are answering the "who manages this" part of the test differently to an organisation running the household's support roster itself. This distinction is worth thinking through carefully rather than assuming; the practical test is who actually holds and exercises the day-to-day management function, not what the funding category is called.

Carve-out two: intensity and hours, not just the setting

The second place providers get caught out is assuming that any shared-living or group-home setting automatically means SIL. It doesn't — the setting is not the test, the intensity is. A service that provides a few hours of support a day, or support on some days but not most, doesn't meet the "at all times, or for most of the day" threshold even if it happens inside a shared-living arrangement that looks superficially like a SIL household. Equally, short-term and respite-style accommodation supports sit in a genuinely different category from SIL under the Commission's practice framework — SIL is ongoing, higher-intensity support for someone living in their home, not a short-term or occasional accommodation arrangement. If your service is closer to periodic or respite support than to sustained, most-of-the-day assistance, you're likely answering the intensity test differently to a SIL provider, regardless of the physical setting.

Sole traders aren't exempt from the same test

The Commission's mandatory registration guidance addresses sole traders directly: organisational size doesn't change the analysis, and a sole trader who delivers, manages, and coordinates a participant's supports in a way that meets the SIL definition is a SIL provider under the mandate, and follows the transition pathway matching their current registration status just like any larger organisation. Being a one-person service is a genuine practical challenge at audit — certification evidence still needs to exist, just built at a smaller scale — but it isn't a basis for concluding the rule doesn't apply. If you're a sole trader delivering intensive, sustained support that otherwise meets the three-part test above, the size of your operation doesn't move you outside the definition.

Worked examples

• Likely SIL: your organisation rosters support workers across a shared home, providing assistance with daily tasks and community access most hours of most days, and your organisation — not the participants — manages that roster and the service agreement.
• Likely not SIL: a participant in the same shared home employs and directs their own support workers individually, with your organisation providing only a coordination or administrative function around that arrangement, not managing and delivering the support itself.
• Likely not SIL: you provide a few hours of in-home support a few days a week to someone who otherwise lives independently — genuinely valuable support, but not at the "all or most of the day" intensity the definition requires.
• Worth checking carefully: a sole trader supporting one participant intensively across most of the day, including help with community access — small in scale, but likely meeting the same three-part test as a larger provider.

If any of these examples describes a genuinely borderline case for your service, that's the sign to work through the definition against your actual service agreements and rosters rather than against how the arrangement is informally described — "we run a group home" and "we deliver SIL" are not automatically the same statement.

Why getting this right matters before the deadline, not after

A provider who is genuinely delivering SIL and delays registering because they've assumed the rule doesn't apply is the harder position to be in — the Commission's transition protections depend on lodging a valid application in time, and that clock doesn't wait for a provider to work out their status. Conversely, a provider chasing SIL registration they don't actually need is spending certification effort on the wrong category. Either way, working through the Commission's actual three-part test against your real service delivery — not against assumption — is worth doing early, while there's still time to act on the answer.

How Compliance Care helps

We help providers work through exactly this kind of classification question against the Commission's actual guidance, and then build the genuine evidence base the relevant registration category requires — whether that turns out to be SIL registration under group 0138, a different registration group entirely, or confirming that your current unregistered status is in fact the correct one. Getting the classification right first is what makes everything that follows — application, self-assessment, audit — point at the right target.

If your service looks like it sits in the SIL definition, our SIL registration checklist and our guide to scoping registration group 0138 correctly are the practical next steps. If you're still working out whether the mandate applies to you at all, our unregistered SIL provider guide is built for exactly that starting point, and our registration services can help you confirm the classification before you commit to a registration pathway either way.

Genuinely unsure which side of the line your service sits on? Book a discovery call and we'll help you work through it against your actual service delivery, not assumptions.