Sole Traders and Mandatory SIL Registration

"Surely the mandate is aimed at organisations, not someone like me"

If you're a sole trader delivering Supported Independent Living — one participant, maybe two, no company structure, no head office — it's a reasonable-sounding assumption that mandatory SIL registration was written with bigger providers in mind. It wasn't. The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission's guidance on mandatory registration for supported independent living doesn't carve out an exception for scale. If what you deliver meets the SIL definition, the size of your operation doesn't change whether the mandate applies — it changes what meeting it looks like in practice. This post works through what the rule actually asks of a one-person service, and where the genuine differences are.

The Commission's own position on sole traders

The Commission addresses this directly rather than leaving it to inference: a sole trader who delivers, manages and coordinates a participant's supports in a way that meets the SIL definition is a supported independent living provider under the mandate, in exactly the same sense as a larger organisation is. There's no lower threshold of participant numbers or revenue that exempts an individual operator. What differs is which transition pathway you follow — and that's determined by your current registration status, not by how many people work for you.

Which transition pathway is actually yours

The Commission sets out separate pathways depending on where a provider currently stands, and a sole trader reads these the same way any other provider does:

• If you're already delivering SIL unregistered, your continuity through the transition depends on lodging a valid registration application by the relevant deadline — the transition protection is tied to the application being lodged, not to your business structure.
• If you're not currently delivering SIL but plan to in future, the Commission's pathway requires you to apply for registration before you start, rather than beginning delivery and registering afterwards.
• If you're already registered for an existing group such as 0115, your pathway runs through having your registration varied to include the new SIL class rather than lodging a fresh application from zero.

None of these three pathways reference organisation size. A sole trader who is already delivering SIL and hasn't yet lodged an application is in the same position, on the same clock, as an unregistered organisation of any size — reading the pathway page against your actual current status is the first step, not an assumption about which pathway "should" apply to someone your size.

Registration group 0138 doesn't shrink for a one-person service

Supported independent living sits under registration group 0138, the class of support created specifically for SIL under the mandatory registration reforms. Applying under 0138 means selecting that registration group and being scoped and audited against it — the same group, the same supplementary Practice Standards module, whether the applicant is a fifty-person organisation or a single practitioner. The paperwork doesn't get a "sole trader" simplified track. What you're being assessed against is whether the participant receives safe, high-quality support that meets the standards — a question that applies at any scale.

The certification audit, with you on both sides of it

SIL sits among the higher-risk supports that trigger a certification audit rather than the lighter, remote verification audit pathway. Certification runs in two stages: a Stage 1 desk review of your documented policies and evidence, and a Stage 2 on-site visit where an approved quality auditor tests whether what's written down is actually what happens in practice. For a larger provider, Stage 2 usually means interviews with several staff members. For a sole trader, it usually means the auditor interviews you — the person who wrote the policy, delivers the support, and is being asked to demonstrate it's genuinely followed, all at once. That's a real practical difference worth planning for, even though the standard being audited against is identical.

What "evidence at your scale" genuinely means

Being a one-person service is a real logistical challenge at audit — the same evidence has to exist as for a larger organisation, just built and held by one person rather than a team. In practice that means:

• A genuine incident register, even if you've had few or no incidents — an empty register with no process behind it reads very differently to an auditor than one that shows you know what you'd log and how.
• Your own current worker screening check, correctly recorded, plus checks for anyone you subcontract or bring in to cover leave.
• Policies that describe what you actually do, not a generic template copied from a larger provider's structure you don't have — an auditor testing practice against policy will notice quickly if the policy describes a rostering system that doesn't exist.
• A written service agreement with the participant that distinguishes the SIL support from any separate tenancy or housing arrangement, where one exists.
• A way of showing supported decision-making in your day-to-day practice — how you actually check in with the participant about their choices, not just a policy statement that you do.

None of this is about padding a one-person operation to look artificially like a bigger one. It's about the evidence being real, current, and something you can speak to under interview without relying on someone else's paperwork.

The carve-out that doesn't apply to you

It's worth being precise about the one genuine exemption in this space, because it's easy to misread as covering more than it does: where a participant, or a family member acting as their authorised decision-maker, chooses and directs their own individual support workers themselves, that arrangement generally sits outside the SIL provider definition — the participant is doing the managing, not a provider organisation. That's a different situation from a sole trader who is themselves managing, rostering, and delivering the support on the participant's behalf. Being one person doesn't move you into the participant-directed category; what matters is who is actually exercising the management function, and for a sole trader running their own SIL practice, that's you.

How Compliance Care helps

We work with solo practitioners and small teams as often as larger providers, and the evidence-building task is the same conversation at a different scale: what do you actually do, and how do you show it. We help sole traders map their real day-to-day practice against the SIL Practice Standards, build an evidence base that's genuine rather than borrowed from a template built for a bigger organisation, and get ready for a Stage 2 interview where you're the one in the room.

If you're still confirming whether your service meets the SIL definition at all, start with our guide to applying the Commission's SIL definition to your service. If you've already worked that out and are mapping your own application, our SIL registration checklist and our piece on what actually has to be lodged by 1 October 2026 are the practical next steps, and our registration services can help you build the evidence base itself.

Running your SIL practice solo and want an honest read on where your evidence currently stands? Book a discovery call and we'll work through it against what you actually do, not a template built for someone else's business.