An NDIS progress report summarises the supports you delivered, what the participant achieved, and what they are still working towards. The NDIA asks for six things: goals, supports delivered, progress made, challenges and how you addressed them, risks and how you addressed them, and recommended supports for the next period.
Most templates online give you headings but not the reasoning the NDIA applies when it reads what you wrote. The requirements are published and short, and almost nobody quotes them directly. Here they are, with a worked example for psychosocial work, where progress is harder to quantify than in a physiotherapy report.
What is an NDIS progress report?
A progress report tells the NDIA what supports you delivered to a participant and what came of them. The NDIS guide to report writing puts the purpose plainly: reports "let us know if a participant needs the same or different NDIS supports" in their next plan, and they give the agency evidence of the need for those supports.
That framing matters. Your report is not an activity log and it is not a clinical file note. It is evidence submitted into a funding decision, so everything in it should be there because a planner needs it to decide something.
There is no single schedule that applies to every provider. The guide says you "may be asked" to write progress reports, and for support coordinators the request for service sets the frequency. Check the service agreement rather than assuming a fixed cadence.
What does the NDIA require in an NDIS progress report?
The published list is six items. A progress report should:
- summarise the goals you and the participant are working towards
- summarise the NDIS supports delivered during the reporting period
- describe the progress made towards achieving the participant's goals
- describe any challenges met in working towards those goals, and how they are being addressed
- describe any risks to the participant in delivery of the NDIS supports, and how they are being addressed
- summarise the NDIS supports recommended for the next period, and the expected progress towards achieving goals
Four of the six are about movement, not activity. Progress, challenges, risks and expected progress all ask you to compare two points in time, so a report that only lists sessions attended answers one of six.
Support coordinators write different documents again: an initial plan implementation report due 8 weeks after the plan start date or your acceptance of the request for service, progress implementation reports at the specified frequency, and a plan reassessment and evaluation report. The last one adds items therapists are not asked for, including the participant's capacity to coordinate their own supports and how you built that capacity.
How is a progress report different from a plan reassessment report?
A progress report is an interim update. A plan reassessment report is written by an allied health provider specifically to support a plan reassessment, and the requirements are longer. On top of the six above, the NDIS guidance for allied health providers asks you to:
- outline your service details, meaning the type of service, therapeutic approach, duration and frequency of supports, the goals worked on, and the intended outcome of delivering those supports
- summarise the participant's functional capacity at the beginning of the plan period
- describe the assessment tools used to quantify that functional capacity
- include a summary of the assessment measures used to show progress
- justify recommendations for more or different supports, including proposed outcomes and any risks or impacts on other NDIS supports
This is where baseline and re-measurement become non-negotiable. If you never recorded a starting point, you cannot write the section honestly at the end of the plan. Set the baseline in your first few sessions.
How do you evidence progress when the gains are psychological?
Here is the gap most clinicians hit. The worked example and the named measures in the NDIS guidance are all physical. The measures given are the Timed Up and Go test, the 6-minute walk test and the Berg Balance Scale, and the sample outcome is "a 25% increase in standing balance and lower limb strength" supporting a goal of moving independently at home.
Psychosocial recovery, behaviour support and counselling produce nothing that looks like a Berg score. The structure still works, but you have to supply your own measure. Three approaches hold up well:
Standardised outcome measures, administered twice. Repeat the same instrument at baseline and at review so the difference means something. Clinicians in this space commonly use the K10 for psychological distress, the DASS-21, or the WHO Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0, which maps to the ICF and covers six domains of functioning including self-care, getting along with others, life activities and participation. WHODAS translates cleanly into NDIS language because those domains are functional, not diagnostic.
Countable functional behaviour. Frequency, duration and level of assistance are measurable without any instrument. Days per fortnight the participant left the house unaccompanied. Prompts needed to complete a morning routine. Minutes of sustained attention in a community setting. Record the count at baseline and again at review.
Goal Attainment Scaling. Define in advance what a worse, expected and better than expected outcome looks like for a specific goal, then rate against it. This suits individual goals where no off the shelf instrument fits.
Whichever you choose, name the tool in the report and say when you administered it. "Improved mood" is not evidence. "K10 score moved from 34 at intake in February to 24 at review in July, administered in session both times" is.
What does a completed NDIS progress report look like?
A fictional worked example for a psychosocial recovery goal, kept short to show the shape.
Goal. Participant will independently attend a weekly community activity outside the home.
Supports delivered. 14 sessions of individual psychology, fortnightly, in clinic, February to July, two of them delivered in the community as graded exposure. Focus: anxiety management, a graded exposure hierarchy, and a relapse prevention plan.
Baseline. At intake, participant left the home unaccompanied a median of 1 day per fortnight, all for essential appointments. K10 score 34. Declined all group activity invitations in the preceding six months.
Progress. At review, participant leaves the home unaccompanied a median of 5 days per fortnight and has attended a community art group 6 of the last 8 weeks, twice without a support worker present. K10 score 24, administered in session both times in the same format.
Barriers and how they were addressed. Two exposure steps were abandoned after panic responses in crowded settings. The hierarchy was revised to smaller increments and one session per month moved into the community, which restored progress from April onward.
Risks and how they were addressed. Participant reported passive suicidal ideation in March. A safety plan was completed, the GP notified with consent, and review of ideation added to every subsequent session. No further ideation reported since April.
Recommendations for the next period. Continue individual psychology, reducing from fortnightly to monthly, with a review of frequency at six months. Expected outcome: attendance maintained without a support worker present, and generalisation to a second community setting. Ceasing now carries a foreseeable risk of losing the gains, given the two setbacks recorded in March and April.
Every claim there points to something recorded at the time, across the whole plan rather than in the week the report was due. If your progress notes already carry goal references and measures, the report is largely assembly. PractaLuma is AI-native practice management software for Australian mental-health practices, and this is the join it is built for: notes, standardised assessments, NDIS plan management and report writing in one record, so the baseline you took in February is still findable in July.
How do you tie recommendations to reasonable and necessary?
Your recommendations are read against the funding test. Under the NDIS rules, a support must meet the reasonable and necessary criteria: it needs to relate to the participant's disability, help them work towards their goals, help them work, study and take part socially, be value for money, be likely to be effective and beneficial, work with mainstream supports and others in their network, and be an NDIS support.
The NDIS guidance also gives four questions to ask yourself before recommending anything:
- How are the supports within your scope of practice and expertise to recommend?
- How are the recommended supports linked to the participant's therapy outcomes and goals?
- How will the supports enhance and coordinate well with the participant's life and environment?
- What, if any, risks to the participant are there if the recommended supports are not provided?
The fourth is the one clinicians most often leave out, and it is the one that carries weight when funding is at stake. Say what happens if the support stops, and base it on something that already happened in this plan.
What weakens an NDIS progress report?
Measured against the published requirements, the recurring problems are:
- Activity without outcome. Session counts and attendance with no statement of what changed.
- No baseline. Progress asserted with nothing to compare it to.
- Diagnostic language instead of functional language. The planner is deciding about function and support need, not confirming a diagnosis.
- Silence on barriers and risks. Two of the six required elements. Omitting them does not make the report stronger, it makes it incomplete.
- Recommendations without justification. "Continue current supports" with no expected outcome and no consequence of withdrawal.
- Recommending outside your scope. The guidance asks you to justify scope explicitly, so recommend within your discipline and refer for the rest.
Write plainly enough that the participant can read it, because you are required to share it with them first.
Frequently asked questions
How long should an NDIS progress report be? There is no prescribed length. Cover the six required elements with evidence and stop. A tight three pages that quantifies change beats ten pages of session narrative.
Who do I send the report to? Share it with the participant first. They can then share it with the NDIA at a plan reassessment or a check in. With the participant's consent you can also upload it to the provider portal yourself.
Can I claim for the time spent writing the report? Report writing is non face to face work, and whether it is claimable depends on the support item, the participant's plan and your service agreement. Check the current NDIS pricing schedule, effective 1 July 2026, and confirm the arrangement with the participant before you invoice.
What if the participant made no progress? Say so and explain why. The requirements explicitly ask you to describe barriers, whether you reviewed your therapy approach, and why an outcome was not achieved. An honest account of what did not work, with a changed recommendation, is more useful to a planner than a report that implies progress the file does not support.