SCHADS Award Increase 2026: Every Rate, Plus What Else Changes on 1 July

• 4.75% increase to every SCHADS Award (MA000100) minimum pay rate, confirmed by the Fair Work Commission on 2 June 2026.
• Effective date: the first full pay period that starts on or after 1 July 2026 — not 1 July itself if that date falls mid-period.
• Headline example: SACS Level 2.1 rises from $34.58/hr to $36.22/hr; Level 3.1 rises from $38.65/hr to $40.49/hr.
• National Minimum Wage also rises, to $26.44/hr ($1,004.90/week).
• Payday Super begins the same day — super must be paid within 7 business days of every payday, not quarterly.
• Super guarantee rate stays at 12% — only the payment frequency changes, not the rate.
• NDIS price limits did not rise on 1 July 2026 — the 2025-26 Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits continue until the next scheduled review.

The Fair Work Commission's Expert Panel handed down the Annual Wage Review 2026 decision — [2026] FWCFB 3500 — on 2 June 2026, lifting all modern award minimum rates by 4.75%. That includes the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award 2010 (MA000100). Close to 3 million award-reliant workers nationally are covered by some part of this decision, though the SCHADS-specific flow-on is what matters for providers in this sector.

The decision specifies the operative date as the first full pay period that starts on or after 1 July 2026, which is why the exact date your increase lands depends on your own pay cycle rather than the calendar date itself. For example, if your fortnightly cycle runs from Monday 22 June to Sunday 5 July, that period has already started before 1 July, so the increase doesn't apply until the following fortnight, beginning Monday 6 July. Get this wrong in either direction — applying it a period early or a period late — and you've either overpaid unnecessarily or underpaid in a way that's technically a breach.

The same decision lifted the National Minimum Wage to $1,004.90 per week ($26.44/hour) for adult employees not covered by an award, with a lower entry-level rate of $978.10/week ($25.74/hour) for the first six months of a job. That floor doesn't set your SCHADS rate directly, but it's a useful sanity check: no SCHADS classification should ever sit below it.

The Fair Work Ombudsman published the updated MA000100 pay guide on 24 June 2026. Treat that pay guide, not this article, as the source of truth for your own payroll run — verify every rate at fairwork.gov.au/pay-guides before you process pay.

The table below covers every pay point in the Social and Community Services (SACS) stream — the classification most support coordinators, case managers, disability support workers and recovery coaches sit under. It shows the outgoing 2025-26 rate, the new 2026-27 rate, the dollar increase, and the casual rate (base plus 25% casual loading):

Not employed under the SACS stream? Home Care, Disability Services, Crisis Accommodation and Family Day Care Coordination each have their own pay points, and they rise 4.75% too. For any pay point not listed above, multiply the current 2025-26 rate by 1.0475 and round to the nearest cent — then reconcile against the official MA000100 pay guide before running payroll.

For a standard 38-hour week, the new SACS full-time minimum weekly wages from 1 July 2026 are:

• Level 1.1: $1,046.90/week (up from $999.40)
• Level 2.1: $1,376.36/week (up from $1,314.04)
• Level 3.1: $1,538.62/week (up from $1,468.70)
• Level 4.1: $1,774.60/week (up from $1,694.04)
• Level 5.1: $2,029.96/week (up from $1,938.00)
• Level 6.1: $2,218.06/week (up from $2,117.36)
• Level 7.1: $2,398.94/week (up from $2,290.26)
• Level 8.1: $2,603.00/week (up from $2,484.82)

Annualised over 52 weeks, that's a minimum of $54,439/year for a full-time Level 1.1 worker (up from $51,969), $71,570/year for Level 2.1 (up from $68,330), $80,008/year for Level 3.1 (up from $76,372), and $105,558/year for Level 5.1 (up from $100,776).

The rate rise isn't the only thing changing on 1 July 2026. Payday Super also starts that day, and it changes the payment cycle for superannuation rather than the rate itself:

• Super must reach the employee's fund within 7 business days of every payday, replacing the old quarterly cycle.
• The super guarantee rate itself stays at 12% — it reached 12% on 1 July 2025 and nothing under current law lifts it further.
• The Small Business Superannuation Clearing House (SBSCH) closes permanently from 1 July 2026. If your business used it, you need an alternative clearing house or direct-payment method in place before then — some commercial clearing houses take days to onboard a new employer, so this isn't a same-day fix if you leave it until 30 June.
• A new Super Guarantee Charge applies to late or missed contributions, with steeper penalties than the old quarterly regime.

For a payroll team, this means a 4.75% wage increase and a fundamental change to super timing both need to be live in the same pay run. If your rostering and payroll systems already run on a per-payday cycle, the super side is mostly a clearing-house and cash-flow problem; if you're still batching quarterly, it's a process rebuild, because every pay run now needs a matching super remittance rather than a quarterly catch-up. Rosters with a lot of casual and part-time shift variation — the norm in disability and home care — make this harder, since the super liability per employee changes shift to shift rather than settling into a predictable quarterly total.

For NDIS-funded providers, the 4.75% increase lands without a matching increase to what participants pay. The 2025-26 NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits (PAPL) continue unchanged through to the next scheduled pricing review, meaning core support worker price limits are not being uplifted specifically for 1 July 2026. Published PAPL figures for the current period include a weekday support price limit of around $70.23/hour, rising to roughly $98.83 on Saturday, $127.43 on Sunday, and $156.03 on public holidays — always check the current figures on the NDIA pricing arrangements page, as these are reviewed periodically and can change.

The practical effect: your wage floor just rose 4.75%, but your NDIS-funded revenue per hour of service generally didn't. That gap is what makes this increase a genuine margin event for NDIS providers, not just a payroll admin task — worth modelling line-by-line rather than assuming it nets out.

When wage cost rises and funded price limits don't move, the pressure shows up in how providers roster and staff, not just in the numbers on a spreadsheet. In practice, expect providers to respond in a few predictable ways over the months following 1 July 2026:

• Tighter rostering — fewer buffer or overlap hours, and more scrutiny on weekend and public holiday shifts where penalty rates already compress margin further.
• A shift toward lower classification levels where the work genuinely allows it, since Level 1 and 2 hours cost proportionally less than Level 3 to 5 hours for services that don't strictly require the higher classification.
• More pressure on allowances and overtime as the first place to find savings — which is exactly where underpayment risk also concentrates, since these are the figures most likely to be miscalculated when a base rate changes.
• Some providers exiting thin-margin service lines altogether, particularly short, high-travel visits where the cost of delivery is closest to the funded price limit.

None of this is a reason to under-comply — if anything, it's the opposite. Providers under margin pressure are the ones most likely to quietly under-apply an allowance or leave a penalty rate uncorrected, whether deliberately or simply because nobody re-checked it. That's the exact failure mode a timesheet compliance check is built to catch.

• Update every base rate for every classification and pay point your staff actually sit under — not just the one or two levels you check most often. A provider running SACS, Home Care and Disability Services staff side by side needs all three streams updated, not just the biggest one.
• Recalculate casual loading, penalty rates and overtime on the new base rather than assuming they auto-update; if any of these are stored as flat dollar figures in your system, they need a manual pass, and it's worth spot-checking a handful of recent payslips after the change to confirm the maths actually flowed through.
• Re-rate allowances individually. Percentage-based allowances (sleepover, broken shift) move with the base rate automatically; flat-dollar allowances like the vehicle/kilometre rate are indexed separately and won't move by 4.75% — treating every allowance the same way is the single most common mistake in a rate-change rollout.
• Confirm your first affected pay period. If a pay cycle starts before 1 July, the increase applies from the following full period, not partway through the current one — write the exact date down rather than relying on memory once the pay run is underway.
• Sort out Payday Super before 30 June 2026 — confirm your clearing house handles per-payday remittance and isn't the SBSCH, which closes that day, and test the first live remittance rather than assuming it will work first time.
• Check any enterprise agreement still clears the new award floor. An EA that beat the 2025-26 SCHADS rate by a cent can sit below the new 2026-27 rate once the increase lands — that's a breach, not a technicality, and it applies per classification, not just on average.
• Put the new rate in writing to staff before the first affected pay run, including the effective date and how Payday Super changes when they'll see contributions land — this also gives staff a reference point to check their own payslip against.

If you're a SCHADS-covered worker rather than the one running payroll, the same increase is worth checking from your side:

Before 1 July: confirm your classification and pay point from your payslip or contract, and work out your expected new rate by multiplying your current hourly rate by 1.0475 (for example, $34.58 × 1.0475 = $36.22). Also check when your own pay cycle's first full period after 1 July actually starts — if your fortnight begins on 29 June, the increase may not land until the following fortnight.

After 1 July: check your first payslip for the new base rate, and confirm casual loading and penalty rates were recalculated on it rather than left at the old figures. Separately, check your super fund statement — a contribution should now land within 7 business days of each payday, so it's worth checking the actual date it arrived rather than just the amount.

Five questions worth putting to your employer directly: What classification and pay point am I on? When does my first affected pay period start? Have my casual loading and penalty rates been updated on the new base? How are you handling Payday Super timing for me? And if we're on an enterprise agreement, does it still sit above the new SCHADS floor? If the answers are vague or the new rate doesn't show up on your first payslip after the change, that's worth raising in writing straight away rather than waiting to see if it corrects itself.

A 4.75% increase touches dozens of individual figures — base rates across every level, penalties, loadings, and allowances that don't all move the same way. It's easy to update the rates you remember and miss the ones you don't, and the vehicle/km allowance is the one almost everyone gets wrong by applying 4.75% to it anyway. CrossVault's Timesheet Validator checks every SCHADS rate, penalty and allowance on a timesheet automatically against the current award, so a rate that never got updated shows up as a flagged discrepancy before it becomes a real underpayment.