Pricing and costs

What does an NDIS certification audit cost? Ten real quotes

Written by James, creator of Bluetail·Published 7 September 2026·Last reviewed 9 September 2026

In September 2026 we sent the same NDIS Commission Initial Scope of Audit to a list of approved quality auditors and asked each of them to quote. Ten came back. This page is what they said.

The NDIS Commission does not set prices for audit services, and encourages providers to get quotes from multiple approved quality auditors and compare them. Audit pricing is scope-dependent, which makes it difficult to give providers a useful starting figure. Here is what ten real quotes for one real scope actually looked like.

The scope these quotes apply to

Prices are meaningless without the scope attached, so here is ours:

• Certification audit, Stage 1 and Stage 2, not verification
• Core Module, including section 4.3, management of medication
• Five registration groups: 0107 assistance with daily personal activities, 0116 innovative community participation, 0117 development of daily living and life skills, 0120 household tasks, and 0125 participation in community, social and civic activities
• One worker, three participants, one site
• Regional New South Wales, roughly two hours from the nearest capital city

A larger or higher risk scope costs more. The NDIS Commission says the cost of an audit depends on the size and scale of your organisation and the number of participants you support. If you only need a verification audit, these figures do not apply to you. Our guide on verification versus certification explains which one you need.

The ten quotes

Auditors are anonymised. Ordered cheapest first.

Median $5,202.50. Average $5,997.

Auditor E originally quoted $4,990. The day after we shared the range of competing quotes with them, they revised it down to $4,500 unprompted - which is why the letters above run out of order. More on that below.

What the range does and does not tell you

All ten auditors were quoting from the same Commission document, so the spread is real and worth knowing about. But this is not a perfectly like for like comparison of what you would finally pay, for two reasons.

Travel was not treated the same way. Three quotes said it was included, though only one of those put it in the written quote. One more included it only if a local auditor happened to be available. The other six charge it on top, after the audit.

Two auditors recorded the site count differently in their own paperwork, one logging a single site and one logging two, despite receiving identical source material. We have reported the quotes as we received them rather than adjusting them ourselves.

And the prices are softer than they look. When we replied to one auditor with the range of quotes we had received, they came back within a day with an unprompted $490 discount. These headline numbers are opening positions - it costs nothing to tell an auditor what the rest of the market quoted you and ask if theirs is final.

The practical takeaway is not that the cheapest quote is the right one. It is that taking any single quote as representative of the market could leave your budget thousands of dollars away from another auditor’s quote based on the same Commission-issued scope document.

Travel is the number that is not in the quote

Three of the ten told us travel was included. Only one of those said so in the written quote. The other two confirmed it by email while their own terms and conditions still said travel was charged at cost - and the signed document is the one that governs, not the covering email. If an auditor tells you travel is included, get that wording onto the quote or the agreement before you sign it.

It is worth being blunt about why this matters. Almost no auditor will quote travel in advance, and the exposure is not small: if the auditor allocated to you has to travel several hours - or needs accommodation, which you cover - the real bill can land hundreds of dollars, potentially more than a thousand, above the headline quote. That can be bigger than the gap between two competing quotes, and you only find out after the audit. Stage 1 is a desktop review conducted remotely, so the travel exposure sits almost entirely on the on-site Stage 2.

One more included travel only if a local auditor happened to be available. For the remaining six, travel was additional. Several charge actual travel costs, one adds an administration fee, and some also charge for travel time. Between them the wording covers flights, accommodation, meals, taxi or rideshare, hire car, mileage and incidental expenses. Travel time is generally charged by the hour after the first hour or two, in one case on both the outward and the return journey, at hourly rates ranging from $50 to $230 between quotes.

Two things made this harder to pin down:

• Several quotes excluded travel “outside the metropolitan area” without defining where that boundary sits, which matters if you are regional.
• Some charge for travel time after the first hour but do not state the hourly rate anywhere in the quote.

One genuinely useful thing we learned: the auditor’s head office address was not a reliable guide to travel cost. One auditor based well outside our region confirmed they could allocate a local assessor and that travel was already inside their quoted price. The question worth asking is not where the company is, it is who would actually conduct your audit, and what travel applies.

Costs that sit outside these numbers

Follow-up work. Five of our ten quotes priced follow-up work for major non-conformities separately. The hourly rates quoted were $230 to $290, with one applying a four hour minimum. A sixth charges for follow-up audits without stating a rate. Going in with tailored documents and evidence is the best protection against follow-up work, so it is worth knowing what to have ready for Stage 1.

The mid-term audit. These ten totals are for the initial certification audit only. The NDIS Commission says a mid-term audit is for providers who initially completed a certification audit, and is completed 18 months into your registration period. None of our ten auditors gave a firm price for it in the initial quote.

An annual management fee. One of the ten charges $699 a year on top of the audit price. Several others state plainly that they charge no annual or management fees, so it is worth asking about directly.

GST, which is on top of every ex GST figure above.

Questions worth asking before you choose

1. How many auditor days is the quote based on, and how many auditors? Three of our ten told us without being asked. There is more to this one than it looks: our Initial Scope of Audit noted that under the auditor guidelines the on-site stage required twoauditors - but an auditor can request the Commission’s approval to send one, given the small size of the organisation. Only one of our ten volunteered that, and it may explain part of the price spread, since a second auditor roughly doubles the on-site cost.
2. Do you have contracted auditors local to my area, to reduce travel? And if I am flexible with dates, can you select an auditor close to me where possible?
3. If travel time is charged after the first hour or two, what is the hourly rate?
4. What availability do you have? Ask directly if you are in a rush or cannot be flexible with dates - seven of our ten quotes contained no dates or lead times at all. Of the three that did, one offered an audit within four weeks of signing, another could not start for two months.
5. Please send the terms and conditions and the certification agreement before I accept anything.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Two of the ten sets of terms say that acceptance may occur without a signature, one referring to acceptance by email or text and another to instructing the auditor to commence services, or verbally. If you are still comparing, make that clear in your correspondence and read the terms before telling anyone to proceed.

Two other things worth checking in the paperwork: payment timing varies a great deal, from half the fee before the audit through to nothing until each stage is finished; and three sets of terms say the audit report is not released until payment is received, which is worth factoring in if registration timing matters to you.

Limitations of this comparison

These are ten quotes for one provider’s scope in September 2026. They are not a price list and they are not advice. Your audit will be priced on your own scope, and auditors adjust their fees. Five of our ten quotes were valid for only 30 days, so treat these figures as a September 2026 snapshot.

The cheapest quote is also not automatically the right choice. An auditor who is responsive, who explains their reasoning and who tells you what you are being charged for is worth something.

What we would say confidently is this: get at least three quotes. The NDIS Commission encourages exactly that. Every auditor in this comparison received the same NDIS Commission Initial Scope of Audit, yet the headline prices varied by 2.7 times. We will update this page as further quotes come in.

Was your quote different? We are collecting what providers were quoted and what they actually paid, so this page can eventually show real figures for verification audits, renewals and mid-term audits too. Add your audit- about ninety seconds, anonymous, and you will see how your price compared with everyone else’s.

Common questions

Bluetail is not an auditor and is not affiliated with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission or the NDIA. This page describes quotes we received for our own scope, to give people a realistic starting point. Check current prices and terms directly with approved quality auditors.