SCHADS Break Between Shifts: The 10-Hour Rule

Clause 25.4(a) is short and absolute: "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."

Three things to notice in the wording:

• It applies between any two shifts or periods of work — not just between rostered shifts on consecutive calendar days. A late finish followed by an early start the same day is measured the same way.
• The break is measured end to start: from the moment work actually ends (including any overtime worked past the rostered finish) to the moment the next period of work begins.
• There is no general "by agreement" carve-out. The only variation the clause permits relates to sleepovers, below.

Clause 25.4 was substituted with effect from 1 June 2026 (as part of the same determination that reworked the sleepover provisions), so guidance written before then may describe the old wording.

Clause 25.4(b) allows one specific reduction. By agreement between the employee and employer, the break may be not less than 8 hours where it falls between:

• the end of a shift and the start of a shift directly preceding a sleepover; or
• a shift commencing after the end of a shift directly following a sleepover.

Two related rules stop this being read too generously. First, clause 25.4(c): a sleepover is not itself a break — the periods of work immediately before and after a sleepover are treated as part of the same shift, so an evening block, the sleepover, and the morning block form one shift, not three separated by "breaks". Second, the 8-hour reduction requires genuine agreement — it is not something a roster can impose unilaterally.

For how sleepovers themselves are paid (the $62.87 allowance, work performed during the night, and the 1 June 2026 changes), see our sleepover rules guide.

Where the squeeze is caused by overtime, clause 28.3 spells out the consequence for employees other than casuals. If an employee works so much overtime between the end of ordinary work on one day and the start of ordinary work on the next that they haven't had 10 consecutive hours off duty:

• they must be released after the overtime until they have had 10 consecutive hours off — without loss of pay for rostered ordinary hours that fall inside that absence; and
• if the employer instead instructs them to resume or continue without the full 10 hours off, they are paid double time until released — and are then still entitled to the 10 hours off without loss of pay.

Where a roster simply schedules two shifts less than 10 hours apart (with no overtime involved), there is no special penalty rate prescribed — the roster itself breaches the award, which is a contravention exposed to Fair Work recovery and penalties. Either way, the fix belongs in rostering, not in payroll after the fact.

Two neighbouring rules are easy to confuse with clause 25.4:

• Broken shifts on successive days — clause 25.6(g) requires a minimum 10-hour break between broken shifts rostered on successive days. Because a broken shift already spans up to 12 hours with unpaid gaps inside it, the measurement runs from the end of the last portion of one day's broken shift to the start of the first portion of the next. See the broken shift guide.
• Days off — clause 25.3 requires employees (other than casuals) to be free from duty for at least 2 full days each week, or 4 full days per fortnight, or 8 full days per 28-day cycle — consecutive where practicable.

Note that the unpaid gap inside a broken shift is not a "break between shifts" for clause 25.4 purposes — the broken shift is one shift. And a meal break during a shift is a different rule again: see meal breaks.

The rule is simple; the breaches are structural. The patterns we see most in real rosters:

• Late-to-early turnarounds — a shift finishing at 10.30pm followed by a 7am start is a 8.5-hour break. Legal only if it sits around a sleepover with a genuine 8-hour agreement; otherwise a breach.
• Overtime eating the break — the roster shows 10.5 hours between shifts, but an hour of overtime at the end of the first shift quietly shrinks the actual break below 10.
• Sleepover blocks treated as separate shifts — systems that split evening work / sleepover / morning work into three entries can "find" breaks that legally don't exist, and miss the ones that do.
• Two rostering systems, one worker — where a worker picks up shifts across programs or sites, neither roster sees the other's finish times.

CrossVault's Timesheet Validator reads actual start and finish times across a whole timesheet period, so short turnarounds surface from what was really worked — not from what the roster intended. For the full set of rostering requirements, see SCHADS rostering rules.