NDIS household tasks: what support can you get?
Cleaning, laundry, meals and the rest of the load — what the NDIS actually funds under household tasks, what it will not, and why the answer depends as much on who else lives with you as on your disability.
In short
- Household tasks is a budget line, not a service menu — it sits in Core, under Assistance with Daily Life.
- Cleaning, laundry, meals, shopping and keeping a home organised are the everyday core of it.
- Funding turns on your disability, and on whether anyone else in your home can reasonably do the job.
- Cleaning has its own hourly price limit, set below the standard support worker rate.
- Yard work is a separate line item with a harder test. Products, groceries and repairs never qualify.
- Ask by describing what actually goes undone — not by naming the support you think you want.
Most people meet this support as a phrase on a plan document — “assistance with household tasks” — and reasonably assume it is a service someone will explain to them. It is not. It is a budget line, and what it buys is decided partly by the agency, partly by you, and partly by facts about your home that nobody thinks to ask about until the money is already allocated.
This guide is the whole picture: what sits inside household tasks, the test that decides whether you get it, what an hour of it costs against your budget, where the edges are with yard work, meals and repairs, and how to ask for it in a way that works. If you only want the short answer to one question — whether a cleaner is covered — the cleaner question has its own short guide and will be faster.
What “household tasks” actually means in a plan
Household Tasks is the name of a registration group inside the Core budget, under the support category Assistance with Daily Life. That matters for a practical reason: it means the funding is flexible. It is not ring-fenced for cleaning, and it competes with the rest of your everyday supports rather than sitting in a pot of its own.
In day-to-day terms, assistance with household tasks covers the running of a home:
- Cleaning — bathrooms, kitchen, floors, the surfaces that become a health issue when they slide
- Laundry, linen and bed changing, including a service that collects, washes and returns it
- Meal planning, preparation and cooking, including batch cooking for the week ahead
- Grocery shopping and everyday errands, either alongside you or on your behalf
- Dishes, tidying, decluttering and the small systems that keep a household functioning
- Household admin — the paperwork and organisation that running a home quietly requires
- An occasional deep clean, where the reason it is needed is disability-related
Two things are worth separating early, because asking for the wrong one is a common way to end up short. Household tasks is about the home. Daily living and personal care is about you — showering, dressing, grooming, eating. One worker often does both inside a single visit, but they are different lines in a plan and they are funded at different rates.
The funded line, job by job
The questions people actually bring to this topic are not abstract. They are about one chore at a time: the lawn, the gutters, the spring clean, the detergent. Here is where each of them generally lands, and why.
| The job | Generally | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Cleaning bathrooms, kitchen and floors | Usually funded | The core of the support, where your disability is the reason it does not get done safely or reliably. |
| Laundry, bed changing and linen | Usually funded | Funded as part of the same support. A service that collects, washes and returns linen has its own line item. |
| Meal preparation and cooking | Usually funded | The labour is funded, whether a worker cooks with you or in batches for the week. The ingredients are not. |
| Grocery shopping and errands | Usually funded | With you or on your behalf. Again: the help is funded, the shopping itself is yours. |
| Tidying, decluttering and household admin | Usually funded | The organising work that keeps a home functioning counts as a household task, not an extra. |
| Lawn mowing and yard tidying | Depends | There is a yard maintenance line item, but it turns on whether anyone else in your household can do it. |
| Gutter clearing and pressure washing | Depends | Judged under the same yard test, and usually only where the job is a genuine safety risk you cannot manage. Never automatic. |
| An occasional deep clean or spring clean | Depends | Reasonable as a one-off where the need is disability-related. It is not a standing entitlement on top of regular hours. |
| Cleaning products, detergent and bin bags | Not an NDIS support | Consumables everyone buys. What is funded is the labour, not the shopping list it uses. |
| Groceries and the food itself | Not an NDIS support | An everyday living cost, disability or not — the same reason rent and utilities sit outside a plan. |
| Repairs — a leaking tap, a failing heater | Not an NDIS support | Property costs, belonging to whoever owns the home. A plan does not become a maintenance fund. |
| Cleaning up after other adults in the house | Not an NDIS support | Your funding covers your disability-related need, not the household generally. Spending it this way just shortens it. |
“Generally” is doing real work in that column. Every one of these is decided against your own circumstances rather than against a list, so a job in the first band can still be refused and a job in the second can still be funded. What this table gives you is the argument you will need to make, not the answer you will get.
The test that decides it
Three questions decide whether household support appears in your plan, and only the first is about you.
The first is whether the task is genuinely harder because of your disability. Not harder because life is busy, or because work is long, or because the house is big — those are true for most households. The support exists for the gap your disability creates, which is a narrower thing and a legitimate one.
The second is whether the support is reasonable and necessary. That is a defined test with several parts, including value for money and a link to your goals, and the agency sets out what reasonable and necessary means (opens in a new tab) in its own words. It is worth reading directly rather than through any provider’s summary, including this one.
The third is the one that surprises people, and it is the reason two participants with identical needs get different answers: whether anyone else in your household can reasonably do the job. Informal support — a partner, an adult child, a housemate — is counted. If you live with capable adults, the agency will generally expect the ordinary domestic load to be shared the way it is in any other home, and will fund the part that is specifically yours and specifically disability-related.
The question is never whether the housework is hard. It is whether your disability is the reason it does not get done.
That third test cuts both ways, and it is worth being straight about the uncomfortable direction. Your funding is for your disability-related need, not for the household. A provider quietly cleaning up after everyone in the house is not doing you a favour — they are spending your budget on something it was not funded for, and the only person who runs out early is you.
What an hour actually costs your budget
This is the part almost nobody is told, and it is worth real money. Household tasks does not bill at the standard support worker rate. Cleaning has its own support item with its own, lower price limit — and so does yard maintenance.
For 2026–27 the national price limit for house cleaning and other household activities is $60.10 an hour. The standard weekday rate for personal care is $73.58. That is roughly a thirteen-dollar-an-hour difference for work that often happens in the same visit, which means a provider billing your cleaning at the personal care rate is costing you about a fifth of every hour. You are entitled to ask which item an invoice is claimed under, and the NDIS publishes how price limits work (opens in a new tab) for participants who want to check.
$60.10
an hour — the cap on NDIS-funded house cleaning
The national price limit for the House Cleaning and Other Household Activities support item in 2026–27. It is a ceiling, not a quote; it is higher in remote and very remote areas; and it changes every 1 July. Check the current NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits before relying on this figure.
Because this comes out of Core, hours spent here are hours not spent elsewhere. Four hours of cleaning a fortnight is a meaningful share of a modest Core budget, and it is far better planned across the year than discovered in month nine. How support budgets are structured (opens in a new tab) is worth understanding before you decide how much to ask for, and our guide to what the scheme funds and what it does not covers the flexibility in more detail.
Lawns, gutters and everything outside the back door
Yard work is the single most misunderstood corner of this topic, and the confusion is understandable: there is a real house-or-yard maintenance support item, so the answer is not simply no. Its 2026–27 national price limit is $59.01 an hour.
But the test applied to it is harder than the one applied to cleaning, and it is applied more strictly. Yard maintenance is generally funded where the job is essential rather than cosmetic, where it relates to safety or access, and where nobody in your household can do it. Overgrowth blocking a wheelchair path, debris creating a fall risk, a hazard you cannot safely reach — those are the shapes of a successful request.
Decorative gardening is not funded. Planting, landscaping and keeping a garden looking well are ordinary home costs, and the fact that you would enjoy them is not the test.
Gutter clearing and pressure washing are asked about constantly, and the honest answer is that they are judged case by case under this same item rather than being covered or excluded outright. A blocked gutter creating a genuine safety problem that you cannot address because of your disability, in a house where nobody else can either, is arguable. The same job in a household with capable adults is not. Anyone who tells you these are simply “NDIS approved” is selling rather than advising.
Repairs are a different thing again and are never funded: a leaking tap, a failing heater, a roof at the end of its life are property costs belonging to whoever owns the home. If a change to the building is needed because of your disability, that is a home modification, which is a separate process with an occupational therapy assessment behind it.
Meals, and the part that surprises people
A support worker preparing food in your kitchen is straightforward — that is labour, and it is funded like any other household task.
Delivered meals work differently, and the split catches people out. The NDIS can fund the preparation and delivery component of a prepared meal, but not the food itself, on the same logic that keeps groceries out of a plan: everybody eats, so the ingredients are an everyday cost. In practice providers usually apply a convention of around seventy per cent funded and thirty per cent paid by you. That ratio is a working convention rather than a legislated formula, and it does vary — so ask any meal provider to show you their split in writing before you commit.
How to ask for it, in the order that works
Household support is routinely requested a year late, after a long stretch of quietly coping, and the request is usually weaker than it needs to be. The difference between a funded request and a refused one is almost never how much the person needed it. It is what they brought.
Write down what actually goes undone
For two or three weeks, keep a plain record: which jobs did not happen, what it cost you when they did not, and what you gave up in order to do the ones you managed. “The bathroom goes three weeks and I skip a shower rather than face it” is evidence. “I need help with cleaning” is a preference. Planners read them very differently.
Get the functional evidence
An occupational therapist’s report describing your functional limitations at home is the single most useful document for this request, and it carries far more weight than a letter confirming a diagnosis. If you already have one, check that it speaks to household tasks specifically — many describe personal care in detail and the home barely at all.
Ask in tasks and hours, not in labels
Name the jobs and the frequency: two hours a fortnight for bathroom and floors, one hour a week for laundry, batch cooking on a Sunday. A number attached to a task is something a planner can fund. “Household tasks” on its own is something they have to guess at, and guesses come in low.
Be honest about who else is in the house
The informal supports question is going to be asked, so answer it first and answer it accurately. If you live with someone who works full time and has their own health problems, say that plainly rather than leaving the planner to assume a capable adult with spare capacity. Overstating help you do not have costs you funding; overstating need you do not have costs you credibility.
Say whether you want it done for you or with you
These are different supports with different purposes, and the default is “for you”. If what you actually want is to build the routine yourself with someone alongside, that is a capacity-building conversation and it belongs in the request rather than being negotiated later with whoever turns up.
Done for you, or done with you
Support here can be delivered two ways, and the choice is genuinely yours. Having the job simply done is the right answer where energy is the scarce resource — there is nothing to prove by insisting on independence that costs you the rest of the week.
Doing it alongside you is the other path, and for some people it produces a materially more independent life: cooking together, working through a laundry routine until it holds, building systems that survive after the worker leaves. Where that is the goal, life skills development is the support designed for it, and it is funded from a different part of your plan.
If what you want is narrower than the full domestic load — the cleaning specifically, done well and reliably — household cleaning is that support on its own.
If you live in supported accommodation
In Supported Independent Living, household tasks are generally built into the roster rather than funded separately — the support that keeps the home running is part of the SIL support itself. If you are in SIL and being asked to fund cleaning as an extra on top, that is worth questioning before you agree to it.
The bottom line
Household tasks is one of the most useful supports in the scheme and one of the most under-asked-for, largely because people treat it as a luxury rather than as the thing that makes the rest of their week possible. It is not a luxury. If your disability means the housework does not get done, that is precisely what this exists for.
Be specific about what goes undone. Be honest about who else is in the house. Know which item your provider is billing under. And ask before you are worn down — a plan review is the natural moment to say plainly what is not working, but you do not have to wait for one to start preparing the case.
Explore the related Gencare supports
Common questions
Household Tasks is a registration group inside the Core budget, under the support category Assistance with Daily Life. It covers the running of a home: cleaning, laundry and linen, meal preparation and cooking, grocery shopping and errands, dishes, tidying and decluttering, and household admin. It is funded flexibly from Core rather than being ring-fenced, so it competes with your other everyday supports.
Three things have to hold. Your disability has to be the reason the task cannot be done safely or reliably — not that life is busy. The support has to be reasonable and necessary, which is a defined test including value for money and a link to your goals. And informal support has to be genuinely unavailable: if you live with capable adults, the agency will generally expect the ordinary domestic load to be shared, and will fund the part that is specifically yours and disability-related.
For 2026-27 the national price limit for House Cleaning and Other Household Activities is $60.10 an hour, with higher limits in remote and very remote areas. That is notably below the $73.58 standard weekday rate for personal care, so it is worth checking which support item a provider is claiming under. Price limits are ceilings rather than set fees and they change every 1 July, so confirm the current figure in the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits.
Sometimes. There is a house or yard maintenance support item, with a 2026-27 national price limit of $59.01 an hour, but the test is stricter than for cleaning. Yard work is generally funded where it is essential rather than cosmetic, where it relates to safety or access, and where nobody else in the household can do it. Decorative gardening, planting and landscaping are not funded.
It is decided case by case under the yard maintenance item rather than being covered or excluded outright. A blocked gutter creating a real safety problem you cannot address because of your disability, in a home where nobody else can either, is arguable. The same job in a household with capable adults generally is not. Any provider advertising these as simply “NDIS approved” is selling rather than advising.
Cleaning products, detergent and bin bags — the support is the labour, not the shopping list. Groceries and the food itself. Repairs and maintenance such as a leaking tap or a failing heater, which are property costs belonging to whoever owns the home. Renovation or landscaping, unless it is a disability-related home modification, which is a separate process. And domestic work for other adults in the household who could do it themselves.
It can fund the preparation and delivery component of a prepared meal, but not the ingredients, on the same logic that keeps groceries out of a plan. Providers commonly apply a convention of around seventy per cent funded and thirty per cent paid by the participant. That ratio is a working convention rather than a legislated formula and it varies between providers, so ask to see the split in writing before committing.
Household tasks is about the home; personal care is about you. Showering, dressing, grooming and eating are personal care. Cleaning the bathroom afterwards is a household task. Most people need some of both, and one worker often does both in a single visit, but they are separate lines in a plan funded at different hourly rates.
Keep a plain record for a few weeks of what actually goes undone and what it costs you. Get functional evidence — an occupational therapist report that speaks to the home specifically, not only to personal care. Ask in tasks and hours rather than labels: two hours a fortnight for bathroom and floors reads very differently from “help with cleaning”. Answer the informal supports question honestly and first. And say whether you want the work done for you or alongside you, because the default is for you.
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