SCHADS Award Changes from 1 July 2026: What Every Provider Needs to Know

In the 2026 Annual Wage Review, the Fair Work Commission awarded a 4.75% increase to modern award minimum wages, including every rate in the SCHADS Award (MA000100). The increase takes effect from the first full pay period starting on or after 1 July 2026.

Critically, the 4.75% does not just apply to base hourly rates. It flows through to every rate that is calculated from the standard rate — penalty rates, casual loadings, overtime, and allowances such as the broken-shift allowance, sleepover allowance, vehicle and travel allowances, and the laundry/uniform allowances. If your payroll prices any of these as a fixed dollar figure rather than a percentage of the standard rate, those figures all need to be updated.

Alongside the 4.75% increase, the new award wage floor for ongoing employment is $1,004.90 per week, or $26.44 per hour. Entry-level rates that apply to the first six months of employment must be at least $978.10 per week, or $25.74 per hour.

These are the absolute floors that apply across modern awards — they are not the SCHADS rate for a specific classification. To work out your own updated rate, take your current hourly rate for the relevant SCHADS level and pay point and apply the 4.75% increase, then check it against the Fair Work Ombudsman pay tools once the updated SCHADS pay guide is published.

Separately from the annual increase, the Fair Work Commission has reformed how sleepover shifts work. These changes took effect from the first full pay period on or after 1 June 2026.

The key change: where an employee works before and after a sleepover, that work must now be treated as a single, continuous shift for overtime purposes. Previously, providers could (and often did) treat the work either side of the sleepover as two separate engagements, which understated overtime liability. Under the reformed rules, the hours either side combine — and overtime is assessed against the combined total.

The reforms also allow an employee to work up to 12 ordinary hours by agreement in connection with a sleepover. This is a meaningful shift for any provider running overnight supported-independent-living (SIL) or disability home-care rosters, and it changes how overtime should be calculated for a large number of common roster patterns. For a full breakdown with worked examples, see our guide to the 2026 SCHADS sleepover changes.

The most far-reaching change is still rolling out. Following a finding that the SCHADS workforce — predominantly women — had been subject to long-standing gender-based undervaluation, the Fair Work Commission is replacing the existing classification structures in Schedules B, C, E and F with a single integrated Final Classification Structure, and removing the Equal Remuneration Order.

The first stage affects Schedule E (Home Care Employees — Disability Care), who are set to receive an interim increase of around 15% from 1 October 2026. This addresses the anomaly where disability support workers were paid less than aged-care workers for comparable work. The new arrangements apply from 1 October 2026 for Schedule E employees, and otherwise from 1 October 2027.

Because parts of this decision remain preliminary and transitional, the exact final rates and the mapping from old classifications to the new structure are still being finalised. Providers with Schedule E staff should treat October 2026 as a hard deadline to reclassify and re-rate, not the annual July adjustment.

• Update every rate, not just base pay. Apply 4.75% to base rates, penalties, casual loading, overtime and all allowances from your first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026.
• Re-check your overtime logic for sleepovers. If your system treats the work before and after a sleepover as separate shifts, that is now non-compliant — combine them when assessing overtime.
• Flag your Schedule E workforce. Identify which staff are covered by Schedule E so you are ready for the October 2026 reclassification and ~15% interim increase.
• Audit historical pay. The sleepover-overtime change in particular exposes a common underpayment pattern. It is worth checking whether the old, split-shift treatment caused underpayments in recent pay runs.

Every one of these changes is the kind of thing that quietly slips through manual payroll: an allowance that was never re-rated, a sleepover roster where the overtime was split, a Schedule E worker left on the old classification. CrossVault's Timesheet Validator reads your timesheets against the current SCHADS rules and flags exactly these gaps — missing or mis-rated allowances, sleepover and overtime errors, broken-shift breaches, and underpayments — so you catch them before Fair Work does.