National Core Indicators is a collaboration of state developmental-disability agencies, organized with the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disabilities Services and the Human Services Research Institute. People in the field call it NCI. The project most often cited in workforce stories has two different products, and they should not be mashed together.
One product surveys people who receive services. NCI-IDD asks adults in the IDD system about their lives: where they live, whether they have a job, whether staff are respectful, whether they feel safe. A separate effort, NCI-AD, covers older adults and people with physical disabilities. A statistic about "NCI" that does not say which survey is unfinished.
The other product is a staffing survey of provider agencies. It asks about DSP wages, benefits, vacancies, and turnover. That is the dataset behind a lot of national sentences about the direct support workforce. When researchers publish a poster or a paper from it, the workforce desk covers the findings. This entry does not freeze a wage or a turnover rate. Those figures are only as current as the latest release, and they describe the agencies that answered, not every worker in the country.
States participate voluntarily, and the questionnaire has changed over the years. A comparison from one edition to another is only as good as the researchers' care about that change. Quoting a single national average without the year is how a four-year-old number keeps circulating.
Use NCI-IDD when the source is people receiving services. Use the staffing survey when the source is agency payroll and vacancies. Both are National Core Indicators. They are answers from different people.
Cite the edition year and the survey name in the same sentence. A wage from the staffing survey is not a finding from the interviews with people receiving services, and a state that skipped a year should not be averaged in as if it had answered.