Benchmarks

To access NOVA Employment or any Disability Employment Service (DES), almost everyone is required to be assessed by the Services Australia Services (Centrelink) to determine their “Benchmark” hours: Benchmark hours are the pay point for service providers; being the minimum working hours required for the DES provider to bill the Government and the assessed maximum hours a person is deemed capable of working with DES support.

Persons in receipt of the Disability Support Pension (DSP) are automatically assigned a benchmark of 8 hours employment per week, which is the point at which the provider gets paid.

For providers there is no financial recognition of service provision that exceed these minimums. For service users, finding out whether your potential providers will target employment that enables you to be independent and bring home a decent wage is very hard information to find.

However, using the latest data available (2014) we can tell you that only 14.7 % of all persons found work through NOVA will be working in minimum hours from 8 – 14 hours per week.

The average for all of our competitors show 37% of everyone using their services are working with less than 15hrs per week employment.

Our competitors might find you work that make benchmark hours, but will short hours meet your needs?

The table shows clearly that if you want to work more hours and, as a consequence get paid more and more importantly be given the chance to truly become part of a team, then NOVA’s the choice for you.

To access NOVA Employment or any Disability Employment Service (DES), almost everyone is required to be assessed by the Department of Human Services (Centrelink) to determine their “Benchmark” hours: Benchmark hours are the pay point for service providers; being the minimum working hours required for the DES provider to bill the Government and the assessed maximum hours a person is deemed capable of working with DES support.

The table below shows clearly that if you want to work more hours and, as a consequence get paid more while perhaps more importantly be given the chance to truly become part of a team, then NOVA’s the choice for you.


Weekly hoursNOVADES ESS
0-14 hours14.7%37.0%
15-29 hours50.1%38.3%
30 + hours35.2%24.7%