Aged Care Award vs SCHADS: Which One Covers Your Workers?

The Aged Care Award covers employers in the aged care industry, defined as providing accommodation and care for aged persons in a hostel, nursing home, aged care independent living units, aged care serviced apartments, garden settlement, retirement village or any other residential accommodation facility — and it applies to those employers to the exclusion of any other modern award (clauses 4.1 and the clause 2 definition).

The SCHADS Award's home care stream covers personal care, domestic assistance and support delivered in private residences — including its dedicated aged-care rate table.

So the question is not "is this aged care work?" but "where does the client live, and who runs it?" A personal care worker in a nursing home is MA000018. The same worker doing the same tasks in the client's own house is SCHADS home care. Providers that operate a facility and a community/home care arm can legitimately have both awards in one payroll — and workers who move between settings may sit under different awards on different days. (Nurses performing nursing duties are under the Nurses Award in both settings.)

The two awards diverge on exactly the items that dominate care payroll:

• Sunday rates. Aged Care Award: full-time and part-time employees get time and three quarters (175%) for ordinary Sunday hours, and casuals get 200% in substitution for the casual loading (clauses 23.1–23.3). SCHADS: 200% for permanents and 225% for casuals (loading on top). Paying SCHADS Sunday rates in a facility overpays; paying facility rates to home care staff underpays every Sunday.
• Sleepovers. Aged Care Award sleepovers span 8–10 hours, carry an allowance of 5.2% of that award's standard rate, and only emergency work may be required during them — with all time worked paid at overtime rates for full-timers (clause 22.9). SCHADS sleepovers are a flat 8-hour span with a $62.87 allowance (from 1 July 2026), a 1-hour minimum at overtime rates per disturbance, and the June 2026 pre/post-sleepover shift rules. The disturbance-payment mechanics are materially different.
• Minimum engagements. Aged Care Award: 4 hours per engagement full-time, 2 hours part-time and casual (clause 22.7). SCHADS: 2 hours for home care and disability, 3 hours for SACS work.
• Broken shifts. Both allow them by agreement with a 12-hour span (double time beyond), but SCHADS pays a broken shift allowance ($21.81/$28.87 from 1 July 2026) while the Aged Care Award pays ordinary rates plus applicable penalties with no equivalent allowance (clause 22.8).
• Overtime. Aged Care Award full-timers: 150% for the first 2 hours Monday–Friday then 200%, with 200% for weekend overtime and 250% public holidays (clause 25.1). SCHADS varies the band by stream (2 vs 3 hours) and pays Sunday overtime at 200%.

The recurring failure patterns:

• Retirement village home care. Independent living units and serviced apartments are inside the MA000018 definition — but a separately constituted community care service delivering into private homes nearby is SCHADS. The corporate structure and the service setting both matter; assume nothing from the brand name.
• One award for a mixed workforce. A provider running a facility plus a home care package program puts everyone on whichever award the payroll system was first configured for. Half the workforce is then on the wrong rates.
• Workers moving between settings. A carer doing facility shifts Monday and home visits Tuesday may genuinely change award between days. Systems keyed to one award per employee can't represent this.
• Copying SCHADS rules into facility payroll (or vice versa) — e.g. paying SCHADS broken shift allowances in a nursing home, or applying the facility's 175% Sunday rate to home care staff owed 200%.

Because the wrong-award error applies to every hour of every affected worker, exposure scales like a misclassification finding multiplied across the workforce — see our classification guide for how the same logic plays out within SCHADS.

Getting the boundary right matters more this year than most:

• The 2026 Annual Wage Review lifted minimum rates in both awards by 4.75% from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026 — current dollar figures are in each award's Fair Work Ombudsman pay guide (SCHADS rates are in our calculator).
• Direct care classifications in both awards have been reshaped by the Aged Care Work Value Case increases phased through 2023–2025.
• From 1 October 2026, the SCHADS home care classification structure (Schedule E) is rewritten with interim increases around 15% — which widens the facility-vs-home-care rate gap again. Our Schedule E guide covers it.

A practical sequence: map every service line to a setting (facility-based → MA000018; private residence → SCHADS home care; disability/community programs → SCHADS SACS); check each worker's actual roster against those settings; and where a worker crosses settings, decide deliberately how each shift type is awarded and document it. If you want to test a specific scenario against the award text, our Awards Assistant covers both MA000018 and MA000100 — ask it the coverage question with your facts and it answers from the award clauses.