What Actually Happens at Your First NDIS Planning Meeting

Published by SESI Care Services · Updated September 2026 · 5-minute summary

Quick answer: The NDIA calls it a plan meeting, and it is a conversation, not a test. It is run by an NDIA planner, the person who can actually approve your plan, and it happens in person, on Microsoft Teams or over the phone. You will be asked about your living situation, your goals, your day-to-day supports and who already helps you. Nobody expects you to know the price of anything. The NDIA aims to start building your plan within 21 days of you becoming a participant and to approve it within 56 days. One thing to settle first: the standardised support needs assessment you may have read about is not in use yet. The NDIA is introducing it from April 2027 and is still testing it, so a meeting in September 2026 runs on the older conversation-plus-evidence model.

Key takeaways

• It is called a plan meeting. Your ongoing contact is your my NDIS contact, but only an NDIA planner can approve or change a plan.
• Bring someone. A family member, friend, advocate, support coordinator or recovery coach. You do not have to justify why.
• The needs assessment is not live. It is scheduled for April 2027 and is in testing.
• Describe the bad days, not the good ones. Most people under-report, because the good day is the easier one to talk about.
• Funding arrives in slices. New plans use funding periods, usually three months, and unspent funding rolls forward inside the same plan.
• You can push back. You have 3 months to ask for an internal review of a decision you disagree with.

Who is actually in the room

The words get used loosely, including inside the sector. These are two different roles.

Who	What they are	What they can and cannot do
NDIA planner	An NDIA employee	Can make funding decisions under NDIS law, create your plan, change it with you, and approve it
My NDIS contact	A local area coordinator, an early childhood partner or a person at the NDIA	Your ongoing point of contact and practical help. Cannot change or approve your plan

Which one you deal with depends on your circumstances. Children younger than 9 go through the early childhood approach and an early childhood partner. People in remote areas, hospital, residential aged care or justice settings are more often handled directly by NDIA staff.

So if the person you have dealt with for weeks keeps saying they will “put it forward”, that is because they are your my NDIS contact, not the decision maker.

What is live now, and what is only announced

	Status as at September 2026
Plan meeting with an NDIA planner	Live. This is the current process
Funding periods, usually 3 months	Live in new and reassessed plans
Standardised support needs assessment	Not live. Scheduled from April 2027, currently in paid, voluntary testing
Whole-of-person budgets under new framework planning	Not live. Part of the April 2027 rollout
Rewritten reasonable and necessary rules	Not live. Commence 1 February 2027

The testing is voluntary and paid, and the NDIA says it “will not change your current NDIS plan, funding, supports or eligibility”. Our guide to what the 2026 NDIS legislation changed sets out the commencement dates in full.

How the conversation becomes a budget

There is no calculator you can see. The planner works from what you have given them and from what the NDIA knows about people in comparable circumstances, then applies the reasonable and necessary test. The NDIA operational guideline on creating your plan says they will ask about your goals, consider what your family, friends, community and other government services already provide, then work out what NDIS supports you need. The inputs it names are your goals, your living arrangements, how you move around your home and community, and what you need to build skills.

What your family already provides is where people trip up. Describing your mother as someone who “helps a bit” when she is doing four hours a day is not modesty, it is a data point that lowers your budget. Say what she does, and what it costs her.

To be funded, a support must relate to your disability, help you towards your goals, be value for money and be likely to be effective. It cannot be a day-to-day living cost, income replacement, or something family or mainstream services already provide.

What functional capacity evidence is used

Right now the NDIA works from what you already submitted plus anything new you bring. The operational guideline names reports from your doctors or allied health professionals, and functional assessments such as the PEDI-CAT or WHODAS.

What makes a report useful is not the diagnosis, which the NDIA already has. It is function: what you can and cannot do, how often, with what help, and what happens without it. “Diagnosed with X, attends fortnightly” tells a planner nothing about hours. “Requires physical assistance to transfer, cannot be left unsupervised for more than two hours” tells them a great deal.

You do not have to commission a new assessment first. If the planner needs more, they will ask, and approval may take longer while they wait.

Funding periods, and why your money does not arrive in one lump

Since May 2025 the NDIA has been rolling out funding periods. Your total plan amount is divided into slices, usually three months, and you can spend up to the amount released in that slice.

• Your total budget does not change, only when it becomes available.
• Unspent funding rolls forward. The NDIA’s legislation FAQs confirm unspent funds roll into the next funding period in the same plan.
• You generally cannot pull money forward. Future periods are released early only in exceptional circumstances with an urgent need.

This matters for a first plan, because your first three months are usually the most expensive: equipment, assessments, setting things up. Funding periods are set with your circumstances in mind, so raise it.

How long a first plan runs

Plan length is decided in the meeting, and you can have a view about it. The operational guideline says that where your living and support needs are stable and not likely to change significantly, plans generally go for 5 years if you are aged 9 and over, or 2 years if you are younger than 9. Shorter plans are used for early intervention supports, a degenerative condition, or a positive behaviour support plan involving restrictive practices.

Two things people misunderstand. Your plan does not expire: it ends when a new one is approved or you leave the NDIS, not when the reassessment date passes. And a long plan is not set-and-forget: you get a check-in at least annually, and can ask for a change at any time. Our plan reassessment checklist covers what to have ready.

What to bring

The NDIA’s preparation guidance is brief. This is the fuller version.

• Draft goals, written down. Not slogans. Concrete: get to my sister’s place without asking my son to drive me, shower without someone in the room, hold two shifts a week.
• A week in the life, hour by hour, for a normal week and a bad one.
• Your current supports, paid and unpaid, with actual hours.
• Any reports from doctors or allied health, especially anything describing function.
• Bank account details if you intend to self-manage.
• A view on plan management. Self-managed, plan-managed and NDIA-managed are covered in our guide to support coordination versus plan management, which people routinely confuse.
• Someone to take notes, so you are not listening and writing at once.

Send it in beforehand rather than producing it on the day: it speeds the process up.

Describing a typical week honestly, including the bad days

This is the thing that most changes the outcome, and almost everyone gets it wrong the same way. Asked how you are managing, the socially trained answer is “not too bad”. In a plan meeting that answer costs you money. The planner is not testing your resilience, they are working out how many hours your life needs.

• Describe the range, not the average. “Two or three days a fortnight I cannot get out of bed” is information. “I have good days and bad days” is not. Frequency turns a description into hours.
• Say what happens when nobody helps. Meals skipped, medication missed, no shower for four days. Uncomfortable to say aloud, but say it.
• Do not describe your best day. If you have travelled to an office, dressed and arrived on time, the planner is seeing a good day. Say that today is not representative.
• Count the invisible work. The three hours you lose recovering after a supermarket trip are part of the need.

If saying this in front of a family member is hard, ask for part of the meeting to happen without them.

Who can come with you, and what to do if you feel rushed

You can bring a family member, a friend, an advocate, a support coordinator or a recovery coach. You do not need permission or a reason. If you want someone genuinely independent, the Australian Government funds free disability advocacy through the National Disability Advocacy Program, whose Disability Advocacy Finder lists providers in your area. Advocates are independent of the NDIA, the NDIS Commission and every provider.

If the meeting goes badly:

• Say so in the meeting. “I do not think I have explained this well, can we come back to it” is a complete sentence. You can also pause and continue another day.
• Ask for the reasons, including for supports you asked for that are not included.
• Complain, separately from any review. The NDIA takes complaints on 1800 800 110.
• Ask for an internal review. You have 3 months from the day you received the decision. The NDIA aims to finish these in 60 days, and if you still disagree you have 28 days to go to the Administrative Review Tribunal.

What happens immediately after

Often the planner approves the plan in the meeting. If not, they aim to approve it within the Participant Service Guarantee timeframe of 56 days from you becoming a participant, and to send you a copy within 7 days. A note for parents: the guarantee lists 56 days for a child under 9, while the Guide to your first plan says 90 days. The two NDIA pages do not agree, so ask your planner which applies.

You are then offered a plan implementation meeting. It is optional, usually about an hour, and the NDIA aims to make a time for it within 7 days of approval. Your access to funding is not affected either way. It covers using your plan, what you can buy, finding providers, and the my NDIS app.

Then the practical work starts: choosing providers, signing service agreements, getting shifts rostered. If your plan includes support coordination, that is who does the legwork. SESI provides support coordination by phone and video Australia-wide, and in-person supports across Victoria, including Narre Warren. If the vocabulary in your plan is still opaque, our glossary of 25 NDIS terms is the quickest way through it.

Frequently asked questions

Talk to SESI

If your first plan has just been approved and you are unsure what to do with it, tell us what your week looks like and we will talk through what the funding realistically covers.

Tell us what’s going on: sesi.com.au/referral · Call: 1800 017 374

This guide is general information based on National Disability Insurance Agency guidance and the NDIS operational guidelines current at September 2026. Several changes commence in 2027 and detail may change. It is not advice about your individual plan or access decision. For questions about your NDIS plan, contact the NDIA on 1800 800 110.