SCHADS Award Compliance: What the Roster Decides, What It Costs, and When You Find Out

Australian figures: SCHADS rates from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026, following the 4.75% Annual Wage Review increase. NDIS prices from the 2026-27 Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits, effective 1 July 2026. Clause references are to MA000100 as consolidated to 1 October 2025. Product behaviour verified against the ShiftCare release of 27 August 2026. Next review due September 2026, ahead of the 1 October 2026 classification changes described below.

The SCHADS Award (MA000100) sets what a support worker must be paid. Almost every cost it creates is decided during rostering. You can resolve most issues with broken shifts, overtime bands, minimum engagement, rest gaps and allowances by meeting compliance guidelines right from the get-go.

The Thing Providers Brace for Is Not the Thing That Costs Them

Ask a provider what SCHADS does to their margin and they’ll likely say something about weekend and public holiday penalty rates.

However, they’re wrong.

Penalty rates are priced. The NDIS sets a higher price limit for Saturday, Sunday and public holiday supports, and those limits track the award penalties closely enough that the margin barely moves. On a three-hour personal care visit, the margin is 26.0% on a weekday and 26.7% on a public holiday. The day of the week is close to neutral.

Roster shape is not priced. Split that same visit around one unpaid break and it becomes a broken shift: the margin falls to 14.1%. Split it around two breaks and it falls to 10.2%. Roster it to a worker who is already at 38 hours, so every hour is overtime, and it falls to 0.5%.

And the sharpest one: send a worker for one hour where the award requires a two-hour minimum engagement, and you pay for two hours against one hour of revenue. That visit runs at −48.1%.

One Night, One Week, One Year

Three-hour weekday personal care	Loaded cost	Margin
As rostered	$163.42	+26.0%
Split around one unpaid break	$189.67	+14.1%
Split around two unpaid breaks	$198.16	+10.2%
Worker already at 38 hours — all overtime	$219.53	+0.5%
One-hour visit against a two-hour minimum	$108.95 cost / $73.58 revenue	−48.1%

Two of those one-hour visits a day, five days a week, is $18,400 a year — assuming a casual SACS Level 2 worker and standard self-care pricing, running fifty-two weeks.

The inputs, so you can check the arithmetic:

Input	Value	Source
Self-care, standard, weekday daytime — item 01_011_0107_1_1	$73.58 per hour	NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits 2026-27, effective 1 July 2026
Self-care, standard, Saturday — 01_013_0107_1_1	$103.54 per hour	As above
Self-care, standard, public holiday — 01_012_0107_1_1	$163.46 per hour	As above
SACS Level 2 pay point 1, casual	$45.28 per hour (permanent $36.22 + 25% casual loading)	Fair Work Ombudsman Pay Guide MA000100, from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026
Broken shift allowance	$21.81 (one unpaid break) · $28.87 (two)	As above
Minimum engagement	3 hours social and community services · 2 hours other streams	SCHADS MA000100
Fully loaded multiplier	1.2032 × wages — 12% superannuation, payroll tax on wages plus super, workers compensation	ATO; Queensland payroll tax 4.75% above the $1.3M threshold; workers compensation ~3%, indicative and industry-dependent

Loaded cost means wages plus on-costs. Workers compensation varies by state and industry, so treat the multiplier as close rather than exact. Revenue is GST-exclusive.

What the Award Decides at the Moment You Roster

SCHADS is usually read as a pay document. Read as a rostering document, it is a set of thresholds that a coordinator crosses or doesn’t cross when they place a shift.

What the roster decides	The threshold	Clause
Ordinary hours	38 per week, 76 per fortnight	28
Rest between shifts	10 hours, or double time until released	25.4(a)
Broken shift span	12 hours from first start to last end, same day	25.6(f)
Broken shift allowance	$21.81 one unpaid break · $28.87 two	25.6
Minimum engagement	3 hours social and community services · 2 hours other streams	10.5
Overtime	150% for the first 2 hours (part-time/casual) or first 3 hours (full-time), 200% after · Sunday 200% · public holiday 250%	28
Casual loading	25%	10.4
Saturday / Sunday penalties	Permanent 150% / 200% · casual 175% / 225%	29
Afternoon / night shift loading	12.5% / 15%	29
Sleepover	8-hour continuous span · allowance at 4.9% of the standard rate · 4 hours’ work rostered either side	25.7
Meal break	30–60 minutes unpaid per 5 hours	27
Tea break	10 minutes paid per 4 hours	27
Roster notice	14 days for a fortnightly roster · 7 days to change one	25.5
Client cancellation	7-day and 12-hour provisions	25.5(f)

Every line in that table is a decision made in the scheduler, days or weeks before anyone runs payroll.What the Award Says

What the Award Says

• 25.4(a): An employee will be allowed a break of not less than 10 hours between the end of one shift or period of work and the start of another.
• 25.6(f): The span of hours for a broken shift is up to 12 hours. All work performed beyond a span of 12 hours will be paid at double time.
• 10.5: Part-time and casual employees will be paid for the following minimum number of hours, at the appropriate rate, for each shift or period of work in a broken shift: (a) social and community services employees (except when undertaking disability services work) — 3 hours; (b) all other employees — 2 hours.

20.12(a): An employee required to work a broken shift with 1 unpaid break in accordance with clause 25.6(a) will be paid an allowance of 1.7% ($21.81) of the standard rate, per broken shift.

20.12(b): An employee who agrees to work a broken shift with 2 unpaid breaks in accordance with clause 25.6(b) will be paid an allowance of 2.25% ($28.87) of the standard rate, per broken shift.

Three things that follow from those clauses, and are routinely missed:

• A broken shift is not two shifts. It is one shift with an unpaid break inside it, and the 12-hour span runs from the first start to the last end. Two three-hour visits at 7am and 6pm are a single broken shift that has already used its whole span.
• The minimum engagement is a payment floor, not a rostering rule. You may roster a one-hour visit. You will pay for two, or three in social and community services.
• The rest gap is measured between shifts, not within a day. A late finish followed by an early start breaches 25.4(a) even when neither shift is long.

Where the Number Is Decided, and Where It Appears

There are three moments in a SCHADS pay cycle, and most software only reaches the last one.

	What happens	When
Rostering	The award decision is made. Span, gap, overtime band, minimum engagement and allowances are all set by where the shift lands.	Days or weeks ahead
Timesheet	The worked hours are confirmed. What they cost under the award is interpreted.	End of the pay period
Payroll	The dollar figure is produced and paid.	After the fact

A breach created at rostering is discovered at payroll — or later, when someone audits it. By then the shift has been worked and the options are back-pay or a repayment, both of which cost more than the original decision would have.

The useful question for any rostering system is not whether it can calculate SCHADS. It is whether it tells the coordinator anything while the roster is still editable.

How ShiftCare Handles It

Every shift is checked against the award as it is created. ShiftCare’s SCHADS engine holds 46 registered rules across 7 categories: hours of work, overtime and penalties, allowances, rostering, breaks, shiftwork, and weekend work. They run when a shift is created, updated, cancelled or deleted, and the result appears as a warning in the shift drawer before the shift is saved.

Each warning names the clause. A broken-shift warning references 25.6, an overtime warning 28.1, a rest-break warning 25.4 — so a coordinator can see the regulatory basis rather than a generic red flag, and the warning states the change that would resolve it.

The check follows the worker, not just the shift. Change one shift in a recurring series and ShiftCare re-validates every future instance. Change one shift at all and it re-validates the same worker’s other shifts in that pay period, which is how cumulative overtime and insufficient rest get caught. Change an award rule at the account level and it re-validates active and future shifts.

Rules are applied per worker. Employment type, SCHADS classification level (SACS Level 1–4, Disability Services Level 1–3) and sector all change which rules and rates apply. Set a default at account level and override it for individual workers.

Hours That Can Actually Be Blocked

Warnings inform. Work Hour Caps stop. You can set a maximum for each staff member across five periods — daily, weekly, fortnightly, four-weekly rolling and monthly — and tick a box to enforce it. At 80% of the cap a coordinator sees a warning and can proceed. At 100% with enforcement on, the shift will not save.

Caps are set per staff member in Staff → List → Payroll Settings, and the Staff List shows each worker’s cap with a mark against the enforced ones.

What the Shift Costs, While You Can Still Change It

On Australian Premium accounts, ShiftCare shows cost, revenue and margin on the shift itself — on the scheduler tile, in the drawer’s Financials tab, as a per-staff row summary and in the Shift Details Report. The cost is award-interpreted, drawn either from Xero AU pay items or from PayCat Connect’s costing engine.

That is the whole point of the page in one sentence: the award decision and the dollar figure arrive at the same moment, in the same place, while the roster is still a draft.

Three things to know about the figures:

• They are estimates. Financials are estimated and only finalised once the shift has been completed.
• The two cost paths differ. The Xero AU path includes superannuation at 12% by default. The PayCat Connect path does not include superannuation. The same shift will show a different cost depending on which one your account uses, so know which you are on before comparing.
• “Loss-making” does not mean negative. The margin states are configurable; the shipped defaults flag a shift as low margin below 10% and loss-making below 5%. A shift returning +3% is flagged.

Dollar values are role-gated. The account owner sees full figures. A user with the Shift Financials and Margin permission sees only the direction — profitable, low margin, loss-making — with no dollar amounts. Everyone else sees nothing at all. That holds in the CSV export too, which means a coordinator can make a cost-aware rostering decision without ever seeing what a colleague is paid.

Seeing the Pattern Instead of One Alert at a Time

A warning in the shift drawer tells you about one shift. Two reports tell you about the workforce.

• Shift Details Report lists the award warnings that fired on each shift — broken shift, overtime, rest, sleepover, allowances, penalties — alongside cost, revenue and margin. It is where you find the worker who triggers a broken-shift warning every week.
• Work Hours Compliance — Staff View, in Reports → Report Hub, shows each staff member’s cap, hours worked and enforcement status, in daily or monthly views, filtered by team, pay group or role.

The difference matters. Warnings at rostering are reactive — they fire when you happen to touch that shift. The reports let you find the pattern and fix the roster before payroll, rather than meeting the same alert again next fortnight.

What This Doesn’t Do

• The 46 award rules warn; they don’t block. Every one of them is advisory. A coordinator can save a non-compliant shift. Blocking exists only through Work Hour Caps, which cover hours — not span, rest or minimum engagement.
• You can’t switch warnings off per category. Award warnings always show. There is no per-category disabled / warn / prevent setting.
• Two rules are currently disabled. The 8-hour sleepover rest variants under 25.4(b) were switched off in December 2024 because they produced false positives. ShiftCare warns on the 10-hour rest gap, not the 8-hour sleepover version of it.
• There is no timesheet-stage interpretation view. You cannot open a completed timesheet in ShiftCare and see the SCHADS breakdown before it goes to payroll.
• There is no SCHADS-interpreted payroll export. The existing timesheet export outputs hours. Interpretation happens in your payroll system.
• It covers SCHADS only. Not the Nurses Award, the Aged Care Award or the Health Professionals Award.
• Rate figures in warning messages are not indexed automatically. When the award rates move, confirm the figures rather than assuming the message text has caught up.
• Shift Costing has to be switched on for you. There is no self-serve path; our support team enables it. And existing shifts are not costed until they are re-saved, so turning it on does not retrospectively price the roster you already ran.

Setting it up

1. Set the account-level award, then override employment type, SCHADS classification and sector for any worker who differs
2. Set maximum hours per staff member in Staff → List → Payroll Settings, and tick enforce on the periods you want blocked rather than warned
3. Connect Xero AU or PayCat Connect for shift costing — one or the other, never both
4. Ask support to enable Shift Costing on your account, and agree your low-margin and loss-making thresholds rather than accepting the 10% and 5% defaults
5. Add Shift Details Report and Work Hours Compliance — Staff View to your fortnightly routine, before payroll rather than after it

Availability: SCHADS award warnings and Work Hour Caps are on the Premium plan. Shift Costing is Australian Premium accounts, enabled by support.

See What SCHADS Does to Your Roster Before Payroll Does

Broken shift allowances, overtime bands, short visits against a two-hour minimum — all of it is committed before a single timesheet is processed. Most providers find out what that costs in the payroll report, not the shift drawer.

For how ShiftCare reads SCHADS rules as each shift is placed, not when it’s paid, see Workforce Intelligence.

Start a free trial and build a week of your real roster. Or bring your roster patterns to a demo, the broken shifts, short visits, and SIL house. We’ll go through what SCHADS does to them.

Sources

• Fair Work Commission, Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award (MA000100), clauses 10, 11, 25, 27, 28 and 29
• Fair Work Ombudsman, Pay Guide MA000100, rates from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026
• Fair Work Ombudsman, Hours of work in the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award
• NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits 2026-27, effective 1 July 2026
• Australian Taxation Office, ordinary time earnings and the superannuation guarantee