If you have spent any time looking at SDA as an investment, you have probably hit the same wall most people do. Someone quotes you yields of "10 to 12 percent, sometimes 15", you get interested, you try to verify it, and you end up squinting at a clunky spreadsheet that was never built to answer your question.
That spreadsheet is the NDIA's official SDA pricing arrangements file, and it is the right place to get the raw prices. An SDA calculator fixes everything after that, but only if you use it properly. Used well, it is the single most useful tool for separating a realistic Specialist Disability Accommodation investment from a glossy pitch. Used badly, with numbers typed in before you understand them, it hands you a beautiful projection that has nothing to do with the property in front of you.
This is a plain walk-through of how to use an SDA calculator the way a seasoned investor would: what to plug in, what to ignore, what to stress-test, and how to tell when a sales pitch does not match reality. You can try our free SDA calculator as you read. It makes all of this a lot less abstract.
The short answer
- An SDA calculator projects rental income, capital growth and total return for a Specialist Disability Accommodation property over time. The official NDIS price tool stops at the single-year payment; an investor calculator keeps going.
- Match every input to a real property: building type, design category, location and feature flags. Do not pick the highest-paying option just because the number is bigger.
- SDA payments are indexed to the March-quarter CPI each 1 July. The March 2026 figure was 4.6 percent (ABS), which is why our calculator now defaults to 4.6 percent. Also run it at a conservative long-run rate near 2.4 percent.
- Model capital growth with a cap rate, then always stress-test "cap rate softens by 1 percent". That is the Conservative exit scenario, and it is where weak deals fall apart.
- A FracHaus share is 7 percent of a property (seven retail shares, 49 percent retail, a 51 percent sponsor share), roughly $98,000 on a $1.4 million property.
- Default occupancy is 95 percent and a normal provider fee is 10 to 15 percent of gross. If a pitch assumes 100 percent occupancy or quotes gross yield only, treat it as a yellow flag.
That is the short version. The rest of this article shows the working.
A 60-second recap of how SDA actually pays
SDA is a funding stream within the NDIS for participants with extreme functional impairment or very high support needs. The government, through the NDIA, pays a set dollar amount each year for each eligible participant living in the property. On top of that, the participant pays a rent contribution from their own funds. Two pieces, then:
- The SDA payment, paid by the NDIA to the registered SDA provider. The amount depends on building type, design category, location and a few feature flags.
- The MRRC (Maximum Reasonable Rent Contribution), paid by the participant. About $13,419 per year per single room in 2025-26.
This income is government-supported, which is not the same thing as risk-free. The funding source is the Commonwealth, but an individual property still depends on being tenanted, on the provider doing its job, and on the dwelling keeping its SDA certification. Hold that distinction in your head, because it is the difference between the headline yield and the yield you actually bank.
What a good SDA calculator does that the official tool doesn't
The NDIA publishes its own SDA price tool, usually as a downloadable Excel spreadsheet or a limited online lookup. It tells you the maximum annual SDA payment for a given property configuration. That is genuinely useful, and our calculator uses the very same official pricing underneath. The problem is where it stops.
A single-year maximum price is fine if you are a provider pricing a building. It is not enough if you are an investor deciding whether to put $70,000 or $500,000 into a ten-year hold. The questions you actually need answered are:
- What does this earn in Year 5, and in Year 10?
- What does it cost me to run (provider fees, council rates, insurance)?
- What is it likely worth when I want to sell?
- How does total return, rent plus capital growth, compare with the next property?
- What happens if a room sits empty for a year?
The official tool answers none of those. Most investors end up rebuilding it themselves in a custom spreadsheet, usually badly, with formulas that do not compound the way they think they do. We built our SDA calculator to close that gap: same NDIS pricing data, plus everything an investor actually cares about. Multi-year projections, capital growth, exit scenarios, total ROI and the equity multiple, the lot.
| What you get | Official NDIS price tool | SDA Returns Calculator |
|---|---|---|
| Time horizon | One year (the maximum price) | 5, 10, 15 or 20 years, year by year |
| Operating costs | Not included | Provider fee plus council rates, insurance and other costs |
| Occupancy | Assumes a filled room | Model realistic occupancy (95 percent default) |
| Capital growth | Not modelled | Three exit scenarios: Bullish, Hold-Flat, Conservative |
| Headline output | A maximum annual price | Total ROI, equity multiple and a downloadable CSV |
| Fractional ownership | Not covered | Models a FracHaus share (7 to 49 percent) |
What you actually plug in, and the trap at each step
Here is the order I would run through, with the gotcha at each step. The golden rule sits over all of them: match the inputs to a real property you are looking at, not to whichever combination spits out the biggest number.
1. Building type and resident count
The simplest input and one of the most consequential. Smaller dwellings with fewer residents generally pay more per participant, but they also cost more per resident to build, so it tends to wash out on yield. If the property is a "3-bedroom house, 3 residents", pick that. Do not pick "1-bedroom apartment" because the per-participant payment looks higher. The maths will simply be wrong for the building you are buying.
2. Design category
The four categories that matter for investment are:
- Improved Liveability (IL), for sensory, intellectual or cognitive impairment.
- Fully Accessible (FA), for significant physical impairment, wheelchair-accessible throughout.
- Robust, for complex behaviours, requiring a resilient build.
- High Physical Support (HPS), for very high support needs. Ceiling hoists, height-adjustable benches, emergency backup power.
HPS pays the most, by a clear margin. It also costs the most to build, and the participant pool is smaller, since only the highest-need participants qualify for HPS housing. Most investors would rather tenant an HPS dwelling with a lower-category participant than leave it empty, and the calculator lets you model exactly that in Buyer Mode. Do not pick HPS just because the yields look fat. Pick the category the property is actually certified as.
3. Location
SDA payments are adjusted by a location factor that varies by SA4 region and building type. The calculator carries all 88 Australian SA4 regions, so you select the region rather than guessing the factor. Location also drives the yield a buyer will accept at exit, which matters for capital growth (more on that below).
4. The feature flags
A few toggles change the payment, and each one should match the real property:
- On-site overnight accommodation (OOA) and fire sprinklers: both lift the payment where the building genuinely has them.
- Input Tax Credits (ITC) claimed? Most retail investors holding personal title cannot claim ITCs, so the answer is usually No, which actually produces a higher base rate because the NDIS pays more when you cannot claim. Counterintuitive, but that is how the pricing works.
- Breakout room: only relevant for Robust properties. A dedicated space (not a seclusion room, an important distinction) earns the higher "Robust with Breakout" rate.
Match these to the actual property. Do not switch them on just because they nudge the numbers up.
Investor Mode and Buyer Mode answer two different questions
The calculator has two modes, and picking the right one matters more than any single input.
Investor Mode models buying shares in a brand-new property at launch. Year 1 is the property's first year of operation, fully tenanted at its certified category. One thing worth knowing: in this mode the entry net yield is calculated for you as Year-1 Net Income divided by Purchase Price. You do not type a yield in. If you want a different entry yield, you change the purchase price, and the readout updates. It is a quiet sanity check that the price you have in mind reflects a realistic yield for the location.
Buyer Mode models buying existing shares from another investor on the secondary market. Here you do set the yield (the calculator offers 7, 8, 9 or 10 percent), because secondary pricing is negotiable and depends on what you actually agree. Buyer Mode is the more interesting one if you are picking up shares partway through a hold, because it lets you configure each room: its current participant category, a future category, and the year you expect a vacant room to fill. The calculator then shows your Actual income against the property's Potential income (what it would earn with every room at the certified category), so the upside from filling or upgrading a room is visible rather than assumed. That is the honest way to model a property that is earning less today than the brochure implies.
Multi-year projections are where most calculators fall over
Once Year 1 is in, the interesting question is the next ten years. SDA payments are indexed annually on 1 July to CPI, using the March-quarter figure published by the ABS. The March 2026 quarter came in at 4.6 percent (source: Australian Bureau of Statistics), which sets the 1 July 2026 indexation. By comparison, the 1 July 2024 indexation was 3.6 percent. The mechanism is automatic: whatever CPI does, SDA payments follow.
That cuts two ways for an investor. In a high-inflation year like this one, SDA payments rise faster than wages and most other rental income. In a low-inflation year, the same mechanism cools off. SDA payments are not magic, they track the cost of living. Two caveats sit alongside that: past indexation does not guarantee future indexation, since the Federal Government can change SDA pricing policy, and your costs index too. Council rates and insurance in particular have a habit of climbing faster than CPI.
Key fact: our SDA calculator now defaults the inflation rate to 4.6 percent, the March 2026 ABS CPI figure that sets the current indexation, not a flat long-run guess.
This is the input people get wrong most often, so it is worth being deliberate. The 4.6 percent default shows you what the next year looks like if CPI stays where it is. The smart move is to also run the projection at something closer to the RBA's long-run 2 to 3 percent target band, say 2.4 percent, for a sober long-run view. If a deal only works when you assume 4.6 percent every year for a decade, it is a deal that needs a very good Plan B for when inflation eventually cools. A bad calculator lets you set one flat "indexation" number and applies it to everything. A good one indexes the income, the rent contribution and the costs, separately.
Capital growth is the part nobody models properly
SDA is usually pitched as "high yield", and that part is true. Capital growth is the bit most investors skip, because it is harder to model. The key idea is that SDA properties trade at a yield, or cap rate, much like commercial real estate. As the rental income grows each year through NDIS indexation, the value grows with it, because a buyer in ten years will typically apply a similar cap rate to a higher income.
A worked example, which is exactly how the calculator derives the exit value:
- Year 1 net income: $150,000.
- A buyer requires a yield of 8 percent.
- Property value: $150,000 ÷ 0.08 = $1,875,000.
Better locations command lower yields because they carry less vacancy risk, and a lower yield produces a higher price for the same income. The calculator runs three exit scenarios so you see the spread rather than a single hopeful figure: Bullish (the cap rate tightens), Hold-Flat (the cap rate stays put), and Conservative (the cap rate softens). The one to respect is Conservative.
Fractional SDA is how most retail investors actually get in
Here is where this gets practical. A whole SDA property costs $1.2 to $1.5 million minimum, plus stamp duty, plus all the operational headache. For most people that is too much capital tied up in one asset. FracHaus is our fractional ownership structure, and the maths is straightforward:
- Each FracHaus property has seven retail investor shares of 7 percent each (49 percent retail in total), plus a 51 percent sponsor share.
- One investor can hold anywhere from 1 to 7 shares (7 to 49 percent of the property).
- All SDA rental income and capital growth flow proportionally to every owner.
- It is held as Tenants in Common (TIC). You hold actual legal title to your fraction on the certificate of title, not units in a trust.
Minimum entry is one share. On a $1.4 million property, that is roughly $98,000, a far more realistic starting point than buying the whole house. In the calculator you simply set how many shares you hold, and toggle between Investor Mode (new property at launch) and Buyer Mode (existing shares on the secondary market) depending on which side of the deal you are on.
How to sanity-check a deal someone puts in front of you
If a property marketer sends you a glossy investment summary, run their numbers through the calculator before you do anything else. Five checks catch most of the trouble:
- Does their Year 1 net income match yours? Plug their property details in exactly. If their headline yield is materially higher than the calculator shows, ask why. The usual reasons: they assumed 100 percent occupancy (the calculator defaults to 95 percent), they used a different provider fee, or they bundled MRRC and the SDA payment without showing the split.
- What inflation rate did they assume? Big Year 10 numbers usually hide an optimistic rate. Current CPI (March 2026) is 4.6 percent and the RBA's long-run target band is 2 to 3 percent. If a pitch needs 5 percent or more every year for a decade to look good, it is betting on a decade of elevated inflation. Possible, not bankable.
- What cap rate at exit? Many pitches quietly assume the cap rate never moves. Always also model "cap rate softens by 1 percent" and see if the deal still stands up.
- Gross yield or net yield? Gross is income before provider fees and costs; net is what you take home. The standard is to quote both. A pitch that mentions only gross is a yellow flag.
- What is the provider fee? 10 to 15 percent of gross is normal. Above 15 percent needs explaining. Below 10 percent can mean corners are being cut on tenancy management.
The bottom line
SDA is not a magical asset class. It is an interesting one, with some genuinely attractive features (government-supported income, indexed yields, real underlying property, and a tenant the wider market is undersupplying) and some real risks (vacancy, certification, policy change, illiquidity). The point of running the numbers properly is not to talk yourself into a deal. It is to find the deals where the maths still works when you are being conservative. Those are the ones worth a closer look.
So use the SDA calculator, save a few scenarios, and compare them side by side (it holds up to four, and exports the lot to CSV). If a configuration looks good across both Hold-Flat and Conservative scenarios, on sober rather than hopeful assumptions, you have found something worth investigating. When you are ready to look at real properties, our current FracHaus offers are listed with full numbers, so you can plug them straight in and check the working yourself.
Frequently asked questions
An SDA calculator is a tool that projects rental income, capital growth and return on investment for a Specialist Disability Accommodation property funded under the NDIS. It uses the official NDIS SDA pricing as its base, then models the things an investor needs: multi-year income with CPI indexation, operating costs, capital growth, exit scenarios and total return.
The official NDIA tool shows the maximum annual SDA payment for a property configuration and stops there. The SDA Returns Calculator uses the same 2025-26 v3.0 pricing data for Post-2023 New Build stock, then adds multi-year projections, operating costs, capital growth across three exit scenarios, total ROI, the equity multiple, a CSV export, and FracHaus fractional ownership modelling.
Annual SDA payments run from roughly $26,000 to over $117,000 per participant, depending on building type, design category, location and features. A fully tenanted High Physical Support 3-bedroom house in Sydney generates around $215,000 gross per year before provider fees and costs, plus the participant MRRC of about $13,419 per room. Net figures are lower once the provider fee (10 to 15 percent of gross) and operating costs come out.
Investor Mode models buying shares in a new property at launch, with Year 1 as the first year of full operation and the entry yield calculated automatically from your purchase price. Buyer Mode models buying existing shares on the secondary market, where you set the yield and configure each room's current and future category (including vacancies and fill dates), so the calculator can compare the property's actual income against its potential income.
The calculator defaults to 4.6 percent, the March 2026 ABS CPI figure that sets the 1 July 2026 NDIS indexation. Use that for a current-conditions view, then also run a conservative rate near the RBA's long-run 2 to 3 percent band (around 2.4 percent). If a deal only works at the higher rate sustained for years, treat that as a risk, not a base case.
FracHaus is SDA Data's fractional ownership structure. Each property is split into seven retail shares of 7 percent (49 percent retail in total) alongside a 51 percent sponsor share, held as Tenants in Common so each investor holds direct legal title to their fraction. Minimum entry is one share, roughly $98,000 on a $1.4 million property, with income and capital growth shared proportionally.
Sources and data provenance
This guide is written from SDA Data's own market analytics and modelling. The pricing inputs come from the NDIS Pricing Arrangements for Specialist Disability Accommodation 2025-26 Version 3.0, effective 20 March 2026, for Post-2023 New Build stock, with location factors from NDIS Appendix E. The MRRC figure of $13,419 per year per single room is from the NDIS SDA Operational Guideline. The 4.6 percent indexation rate is the March 2026 quarter CPI published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Last reviewed June 2026.
This article provides general information about SDA investment and is not financial advice. Outcomes vary with actual investment performance, NDIS policy and market conditions, and past NDIS indexation does not guarantee future indexation. Speak with a licensed financial adviser before making any investment decision.
