27/07/2026
Dear Service Provider,
Thank you to all who attended the new National Childcare Scheme (NCS) mandatory co-payment functionality webinar on 23 July 2026.
Recorded webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPV4Lu9MFmg&feature=youtu.be
Presentation:https://earlyyearsportal.ncs.gov.ie/NCS-New-Co-payment-functionality-training-slides.pdf
Two additional online training demonstrations will be held online on the following dates.
Online Webinar 30 July 2026https://earlyyearsportal.ncs.gov.ie/NCS-New-Co-payment-functionality-training-slides.pdf
Online Webinar 27 August 2026 A link will be available mid-August
*Matching content will be delivered in each session
Further to the recording of yesterday’s webinar, there will be additional resources to support you with submitting NCS claims when the new co-payment functionality is implemented. These resources will be circulated next week.
Your local City/County Childcare Committee (CCC) will be available to assist. You can find information on your local CCC here
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-children-disability-and-equality/campaigns/city-and-county-childcare-committees/
The Early Years Provider Centre (EYPC) will also be on hand to offer any practical support that may be needed.
For EYPC support when the new co-payment functionality goes live, you can raise a request on the Early Years Hive using the following categories:
Programme: NCS
Request Type: Registrations
Request Type Details: Claim
Summary: Co-payment functionality
Please see the below statement from the Department of Children, Equality and Disability.
Statement from DCDE on new NCS Co-payment Functionality
Dear Service Provider,
We are writing to you in relation to the upcoming change in how NCS claims data will be collected, from 31 July 2026.
The purpose of this change is to collect fee information at child-level, which will allow the Department have a deeper understanding of how much parents are paying after deductions and subsidies, and the impact of the National Childcare Scheme on affordability.
To achieve this, new mandatory fields will be added to the NCS claims section of the Early Years Hive. When setting up a new or updating an existing claim, you can:
Select a fee type from your active fee table, or
If a child's attendance pattern is not reflected in your fee table, enter:
-the number of hours and minutes being paid for, and the fee charged for those hours and minutes before any subsidies or discounts are applied.
The system will then automatically calculate and display a parent's weekly co-payment amount.
This information is vital in order for the Department to understand how the NCS is contributing to delivering the Programme for Government commitment that parents will pay no more than €200 per month for early learning and childcare.
This process has been designed to try to minimise the number of additional steps required of providers, using information providers are already using to calculate co-payment amounts, and to allow providers to export and use the data.
Several features have been included to make the process easier:
Co-payment information can be exported as a PDF or as a CSV file, for sharing with parents or use for invoicing.
Multiple claim weeks can be edited at the same time, to deal with different fee types and claims in and out of term.
For ECCE children, an ECCE subsidy can be applied to ECCE payable weeks based on your ECCE calendar.
Future NCS subsidy uplifts will automatically update affected claims, reducing the need for manual calculations.
The co-payment information will not be used for Pobal compliance, and there will be no requirement to print out or save the information unless it is useful for you to do so. This change has no effect on attendance rules.
For claims submitted before 31 July 2026, there is no requirement for these claims to be retrospectively updated with co-payment information.
We recognise that these changes introduce additional data entry requirements, however this will provide evidence that is critical to enable future policy change.
