The 10-Hour Break Between Shifts Under SCHADS

Clause 25.4(a) — Rest breaks between rostered work — states that 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."

Two details in that sentence carry more weight than they look like they do:

• "Shift or period of work" — not just a full shift. A short period of work counts. A worker who does a 30-minute engagement late in the evening has ended a period of work, and the 10-hour clock starts from it.
• "Not less than" — 10 hours is a floor, and 9 hours 55 minutes is a breach. There is no rounding tolerance in the clause.

This provision was substituted most recently by PR798459, operative 1 June 2026, so a rostering rule written against an older version of the award is worth re-checking.

Clause 25.4(b) permits a shorter break of not less than 8 hours, but only by agreement between the employee and employer, and only for the break between:

• (i) the end of a shift and the commencement of a shift directly preceding a sleepover; or
• (ii) a shift commencing after the end of a shift directly following a sleepover.

Read those two limbs closely, because they are narrow. The 8-hour reduction is anchored to a sleepover on one side. It is not available to compress the gap between two ordinary shifts, no matter how willing the employee is or how short-staffed the roster.

So the common request — "can we roster this worker with an 8-hour break instead of 10 because we are stuck?" — has one answer if there is a sleepover in the picture and a different answer if there is not. Without a sleepover on the relevant side of the break, 10 hours is the minimum and agreement cannot lower it.

Clause 25.4(b) requires "agreement between the employee and employer" and does not, on its face, specify a form. That is not an invitation to rely on a verbal yes.

The practical problem with a verbal agreement is evidentiary, and it lands entirely on the employer. In an audit or a dispute, the roster shows an 8-hour gap. If the employer cannot produce the agreement, what the record shows is a breach of clause 25.4(a). The worker's recollection twelve months later, after they have left, is not a document.

Two further cautions on how the agreement is obtained:

• It must be a genuine agreement, not a direction. A message that tells a worker they are rostered with an 8-hour break and asks them to confirm is not the same thing as asking whether they agree. Where a worker feels they cannot say no, the "agreement" is fragile.
• It should be shift-specific. A blanket clause buried in an employment contract signed on day one, purporting to consent to 8-hour breaks in perpetuity, is a much weaker foundation than a recorded agreement for the actual shifts in question.

Keep it in writing, keep it per-instance, and keep it with the roster record.

This is the provision that catches the most providers, and it is stated flatly in clause 25.4(c): a period of sleepover in accordance with clause 25.7 does not constitute a break within the meaning of clause 25.4. The same subclause adds that periods of work performed immediately before and immediately after a sleepover are treated as part of the same shift.

The consequence is significant for rostering. A worker who does an evening shift, a sleepover, and a morning shift has not had a rest break in the middle — they have worked one shift. The 10-hour clock does not restart at the sleepover. It runs from the end of the morning work, which is the end of that shift.

Clause 25.4(d) confirms the flip side: clause 25.4(a) does not prevent an employee from working immediately before and immediately after a sleepover, where those periods include ordinary hours that are part of the same shift. In other words, the 10-hour rule does not forbid the standard sleepover sandwich — it simply refuses to treat the sleepover as the rest.

Providers who count the sleepover as the break and then roster the worker back the following evening on an "8-hour gap" are frequently miscounting on two fronts at once. See our 2026 sleepover changes guide for how these provisions moved.

Example 1 — the plain breach. A worker finishes at 11:00pm Thursday and is rostered to start at 8:00am Friday. That is a 9-hour gap between two ordinary shifts with no sleepover involved. Clause 25.4(a) requires 10 hours, and clause 25.4(b) is unavailable because neither limb applies. The roster is non-compliant regardless of whether the worker is happy with it.

Example 2 — the valid 8-hour reduction. A worker finishes an ordinary shift at 9:00pm Monday and is rostered to start at 5:00am Tuesday for a shift that runs into a sleepover that night. This falls within clause 25.4(b)(i) — the break precedes a shift that directly precedes a sleepover — so 8 hours is permitted, provided the employee and employer have agreed.

Example 3 — the sleepover sandwich. A worker starts at 5:00pm Monday, works active hours to 10:00pm, sleeps over 10:00pm–6:00am, then works 6:00am–9:00am Tuesday. Under clause 25.4(c) this is all one shift, and the sleepover is not a break. The 10-hour clock starts at 9:00am Tuesday, so the earliest the worker can start again is 7:00pm Tuesday — unless the clause 25.4(b)(ii) agreement applies, in which case 5:00pm.

Example 4 — consecutive sleepovers. Rostering the same 5:00pm–9:00am pattern on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday means each day's shift ends at 9:00am and the next begins at 5:00pm — an 8-hour gap. Each of those gaps sits within clause 25.4(b)(ii), so the pattern is available, but it requires agreement for each one and it is the agreement that makes it lawful, not the fact that it is a recurring roster.

Clause 25.4 is a rostering obligation. Nothing inside clause 25.4 prescribes a payment: no penalty rate buys out a short break, and no dollar figure attaches to breaching it. That much is worth stating plainly, because it changes how you should respond to a breach.

But one adjacent clause does put money on the table, and it is the one providers most often miss. Clause 28.3 — Rest period after overtime deals with the case where overtime is what ate the 10 hours:

• Clause 28.3(a) — an employee other than a casual who works so much overtime between the end of their ordinary work on one day and the start of it on the next that they have not had at least 10 consecutive hours off duty "will be released after completion of such overtime until they have had 10 consecutive hours off duty without loss of pay for rostered ordinary hours occurring during such absence".
• Clause 28.3(b) — if, on the employer's instructions, that employee resumes or continues work without having had the 10 consecutive hours off, they "will be paid at the rate of double time until they are released from duty for such rest period", and are then still entitled to the paid absence.

So the honest rule is a two-part one, and the parts do not overlap:

• A short gap built into the roster, with no overtime behind it → a clause 25.4 breach and nothing more. You cannot "pay your way" out of it — offering an extra loading does not make a non-compliant roster compliant — and the fix is forward-looking rather than a back-payment calculation.
• A short gap caused by overtime, for a non-casual → clause 28.3 is engaged and there is money owed: double time for work performed inside the rest period, plus no loss of pay for the rostered ordinary hours missed while taking it.

Three conditions have to hold together before clause 28.3 pays anything: the employee is not a casual; the earlier shift of the pair actually contained overtime; and that overtime is what caused the shortfall. Overtime sitting on the second shift says nothing about the break that preceded it. Where any one of the three fails, the clause 25.4 breach still stands — it is simply a rostering problem rather than an underpayment.

An individual flexibility arrangement does not sidestep any of this. An IFA that was made to deal with, say, broken shift allowances does not carry across to the rest break rule — clause 25.4 has its own agreement mechanism in 25.4(b), with its own narrow scope.

The reason this breach is so common is that it is invisible within a single day. Every individual shift can look reasonable; the problem only appears when you sort every period of work per employee chronologically and measure the gap between consecutive entries — across day boundaries, across pay periods, and across different clients or programs.

Three things that make manual checking unreliable:

• Multiple programs — a worker doing an evening shift under one program and an early start under another may appear in two different rosters that nobody compares.
• Short engagements — clause 25.4 covers a "period of work", so a 15-minute late call counts as an end point.
• Sleepovers — which must be excluded as breaks under clause 25.4(c) while the surrounding work is merged into one shift.

CrossVault's Timesheet Validator performs this check per employee across the whole file, applies the sleepover-adjacency logic in clause 25.4(b) and (c), and flags where an 8-hour break has been used without a recorded agreement. It also reports the clause 25.4 breach and the clause 28.3 payability question separately, so a rostering breach is never presented as an underpayment and an overtime-driven shortfall is never quietly written off as one. See the break between shifts reference for the clause text.

If your roster simply gave you less than 10 hours between two shifts, that is your employer's rostering problem to fix and usually nothing lands on your payslip. If you worked overtime at the end of the first shift and that is why the break was short, clause 28.3 changes the answer — provided you are not a casual. You should have been released until you had 10 consecutive hours off, without losing pay for the rostered ordinary hours in that window; and if you were told to start anyway, those hours are double time until you are released. Upload a payslip to our free payslip check and it will verify your rates and allowances against the current SCHADS minimums, line by line.