There is no "sleepover allowance" in the Hospitality Award
The term doesn't appear in MA000009. The nearest equivalent is the overnight stay allowance in clause 26.15, which applies when an employee is requested to stay overnight on the employer's premises to provide prompt assistance to guests outside ordinary business hours — the classic case being a motel or small hotel where someone needs to be on site after the desk closes.
Likewise there is no general on-call/stand-by allowance in the award: being contactable at home is not separately compensated the way it is under care-sector awards. If a venue wants guaranteed availability beyond the overnight-stay scenario, that's a matter for over-award arrangements or an enterprise agreement.
How the overnight stay allowance works (clause 26.15)
The employer must pay:
- a flat allowance per overnight stay — $64.10 in the award text consolidated to January 2026; that figure predates the 1 July 2026 Annual Wage Review (+4.75% to allowances tied to the standard rate), so confirm the current amount in the FWO pay guide for MA000009 before configuring payroll; and
- 150% of the ordinary hourly rate for work of more than one hour performed during the overnight stay.
Two features make this allowance unusual, and both matter for payroll:
- The allowance itself covers work of up to one hour during the stay (the note to clause 26.15). Short interruptions — letting a guest in, handling a late query — are inside the flat payment, and only when work exceeds an hour does the 150% rate start.
- Hours during an overnight stay don't count as hours of work for overtime or leave accrual purposes (clause 26.15(c)). The stay sits outside the ordinary-hours system entirely.
Worked example
A motel employee finishes their rostered shift at 10pm, stays overnight on premises as requested, and is woken once to deal with a guest issue for 30 minutes.
- Overnight stay allowance: one flat payment (current pay-guide amount).
- The 30 minutes of work: $0 additional — it's within the one hour the allowance already covers.
- If instead the disruption ran 2.5 hours: the employee is paid 150% of their ordinary rate for the work of more than one hour's duration, on top of the allowance — and those hours still don't feed the overtime or leave accrual clocks.
How different is this from SCHADS? Very.
If you operate across both sectors — or found this page while researching care-sector sleepovers — the contrast is stark:
- Work during the night: SCHADS pays a minimum of 1 hour at overtime rates for every disturbance, even a 10-minute one (clause 25.7(e)); Hospitality absorbs the first hour of work into the flat allowance.
- Counting the hours: SCHADS call-to-duty time counts as hours worked and can trigger daily/weekly overtime; Hospitality overnight-stay hours are excluded from overtime and leave accruals entirely.
- On-call: SCHADS pays $25.66 (Mon–Fri) or $50.81 (weekends/public holidays) per 24 hours just for being available, plus remote-work minimums for phone calls; Hospitality has no equivalent.
- The allowance: SCHADS sleepover is $62.87 per night from 1 July 2026, with a strict 8-hour span, facility requirements, and adjacent-shift rules.
Applying one award's overnight logic to the other — in either direction — misprices every overnight. Our full SCHADS sleepover guide covers the care-sector side.
Split shifts: the allowance hospitality does have
What hospitality rosters do share with care work is the broken day — the lunch-and-dinner double. Clause 26.14 pays a split shift allowance per day, scaled by the length of the unpaid gap between periods of work (the award text lists per-day dollar amounts, including a higher rate where the break exceeds 3 hours — again, confirm current figures in the FWO pay guide post-July-2026). Unlike SCHADS there's no agreement requirement for a two-break day, but the same payroll failure mode applies: systems that don't detect the split day never pay the allowance.
Getting award questions answered from the source
The pattern in this post — a widely-searched entitlement that doesn't exist under the name people search for — is exactly where paraphrased summaries mislead and payroll errors start. CrossVault's Awards Assistant answers questions from the actual text of the award, with clause citations — it covers the Hospitality Award (MA000009) alongside SCHADS, the Aged Care Award and dozens of others. Ask it your scenario and check the clause yourself.