7 Payroll Mistakes NDIS Providers Keep Making

This is the most expensive error because it affects every single pay run. A worker classified as SACS Level 2 when they should be Level 3 is underpaid on every hour worked, every penalty rate, every overtime hour — and it compounds over years.

The most common misclassification: experienced support workers doing team leadership or program coordination duties while being paid at the base support worker level. If the work matches a higher level descriptor in the award, the higher level applies regardless of what the contract says.

The SCHADS Award requires a minimum 2-hour engagement for casual employees. In home care, it's common to roster 1-hour visits — but if the worker is casual, you must pay for 2 hours even if the visit is shorter.

Some providers try to work around this by classifying workers as part-time, but then don't guarantee the minimum part-time hours required by the award. That creates a different compliance problem.

Many providers simply don't know the broken shift allowance exists. When a worker does a morning shift and an evening shift with a large unpaid gap in between, that's a broken shift — and the worker is entitled to an allowance on top of their regular pay.

This is especially prevalent in home care where split shifts are a standard rostering pattern. If your payroll system doesn't flag broken shifts, you're almost certainly underpaying.

Providers pay the flat sleepover allowance but forget (or don't track) when the worker is called to duty during the night. Each disturbance must be paid at the applicable rate with a one-hour minimum — including weekend and overtime penalties.

Without a system for workers to log call-to-duty incidents during sleepovers, these payments simply don't happen. And when Fair Work asks for records, the provider has nothing to show.

Overtime under SCHADS kicks in after 38 ordinary hours per week (for full-time) or after 10 hours in a day. The trap: many payroll systems are configured to only trigger overtime after 38 hours, missing the daily 10-hour threshold entirely.

A worker who does a 12-hour shift on Monday is entitled to 2 hours of overtime on that day — even if their weekly total is only 12 hours. If your system only checks weekly totals, those 2 hours get paid at ordinary rates.

Public holiday penalty rates under SCHADS are 250% for full-time and part-time employees (or 275% for casuals). But the errors aren't usually about the rate itself — they're about which hours attract the rate.

A shift that starts at 10pm on the night before a public holiday and finishes at 6am on the public holiday: which hours are at the public holiday rate? The answer is only the hours worked on the actual public holiday (midnight to 6am). The pre-midnight hours are ordinary or evening rates. Many payroll systems apply the public holiday rate to the entire shift.

When a home care worker travels between participant appointments during a shift, that travel time is working time and must be paid. The travel allowance under the SCHADS Award also requires reimbursement of vehicle costs.

This is different from commuting to and from work, which is not paid. The distinction: travel from home to the first client and from the last client to home is not paid. Travel between clients during the working day is paid at the ordinary hourly rate.

Each of these errors individually might seem small — a few dollars per shift here, an hour of overtime there. But multiplied across dozens of staff and hundreds of pay runs, the back-pay liability grows fast.

Fair Work can audit 7 years of records. A classification error affecting 20 workers over 3 years can easily produce a six-figure back-pay bill before penalties are added. And under the serious contravention provisions, penalties of up to $939,000 per contravention apply when the employer knew (or should have known) about the issue.