More Quasi than Market: Price Caps and Market Design in the NDIS
Date
From: Wednesday May 27, 2026, 12:30 pm
To: Wednesday May 27, 2026, 1:30 pm
More Quasi than Market: Price Caps and Market Design in the NDIS
As of 2025-26, the NDIS supports over 700,000 participants at a projected cost of $52.3 billion. Recent reforms have targeted cost sustainability through tighter eligibility and reduced plan funding, and we argue that a third, largely untouched lever matters at least as much: the design of the market itself. Using administrative data, we show that exit rates are very low and that around 80 per cent of participants use only one provider over an entire year. We also examine provider pricing behaviour around the 1 July 2025 price cap adjustments. Prices moved rapidly with the caps in both directions while service volumes were largely unchanged. Even providers pricing well below the cap raised their prices when caps increased, suggesting that caps influence pricing behaviour beyond directly binding providers. Together, these findings suggest the NDIS operates more quasi than market, and the market discipline required to generate efficient outcomes is largely absent from the scheme.
Join us from 12.30 - 1.30pm at 123 Pitt Street (Level 24) or online via Microsoft Teams.
This is a free event for members and $10 for Non-Members
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Pelin Akyol is a Research Manager at the e61 Institute, where she leads research on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and the economics of demographic change, including fertility and informal care. She is an applied economist with a PhD in Economics from Penn State University, and her work spans education, labour markets, health, and demographics, with a particular focus on gender and intergenerational outcomes.
Her research has been published in leading economics journals, including the European Economic Review and the Journal of Health Economics, and has been featured in outlets such as VoxEU, Education Week, the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian.
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Venue
Macquarie University City Campus
Level 24, 123 Pitt Street, Sydney NSW 2000