Underpaid as a Support Worker?

Unions have called wage theft in the NDIS rampant, and the Fair Work Ombudsman keeps finding it — but the mechanism is rarely an employer deliberately shorting anyone. It's structural. A typical support worker's week contains events most payroll systems weren't configured for: a morning shift and an evening shift with the same client (a broken shift, which carries its own allowance), a night sleeping at a client's home (a sleepover, with a flat allowance plus rules about disturbances), a 45-minute community visit (which must still be paid at the 2-hour minimum), and driving between clients in their own car.

Each of those is a line on a payslip that simply won't appear unless someone configured it. When it's missing, it's missing every week — which is why support-worker underpayment compounds quietly into thousands of dollars, and why it's worth thirty minutes of your attention once.

Take your most recent payslip that includes a weekend, a sleepover or a split day, and check these against it:

1. Your base rate vs your classification. Every SCHADS classification has a published minimum, updated each 1 July — from $27.28/hr at the lowest adult home-care level to $71.19 at SACS Level 8.3. Find your level on your payslip or contract and compare against the current rate tables. No level stated anywhere? That's check one failed already — ask. And if your duties involve working unsupervised or handling complex support needs, it's worth reading what the levels actually require: classification is set by duties, not by what the roster system defaults to.
2. Weekend and public holiday hours. Saturday, Sunday and public-holiday hours carry penalty rates well above the weekday rate. If weekend hours appear on your payslip at the weekday rate — or the payslip doesn't break weekends out at all so you can't tell — that's the single most expensive error to leave unchecked. Current weekend rates here.
3. Casual loading. Casuals get 25% on top of the permanent rate for the same classification. Compare your rate against the permanent rate, not against what your colleagues say they earn.
4. Sleepover allowance. Every sleepover night carries a flat $62.87 allowance (clause 25.7(d)) on top of any hours worked — and if you were woken to help, that time is paid separately with a 1-hour minimum at overtime rates. Sleepovers missing from payslips, and disturbances never making it from progress notes to payroll, are two of the most common gaps we see.
5. Broken shift allowance. Two work periods in a day separated by an unpaid non-meal break is a broken shift: a flat $21.81 per shift (or $28.87 with two breaks). Casuals and part-timers are entitled to it too — a persistent myth says otherwise.
6. Kilometres in your own car. Using your own vehicle for work — driving a client, or travelling between clients during a broken shift — pays $1.01 per kilometre. If you log kms and your payslip has no vehicle allowance line, that's money each week.

We built a free payslip check for exactly this. Upload a payslip — PDF or a clear phone photo — and it reads the rates, hours and allowances printed on it, then compares each line against the current Fair Work minimums for the SCHADS Award: your classification's base rate, weekend and public-holiday rates, sleepover and broken-shift allowances, vehicle kilometres. You get a line-by-line answer: looks right, worth checking, or below the minimum, with the exact dollar figures.

It only checks what's actually printed on the payslip — nothing is guessed or estimated, and when something can't be verified from the payslip alone (overtime timing, enterprise agreement rates), it tells you so. It's a way to ask your employer informed questions, not a legal determination.

Start from the assumption that it's a payroll configuration error, because it usually is — and configuration errors get fixed fastest when you're specific. Write to your employer naming the exact line: the date, the hours, what you were paid, and what the award minimum is. Keep your payslips and rosters; you can also compare your numbers against the Fair Work Ombudsman's own P.A.C.T. calculator so the figure isn't just ours.

If the answer doesn't hold up, the Fair Work Ombudsman handles underpayment complaints free, and your union can run it for you. Claims reach back up to 6 years — and since January 2025, intentional underpayment is a criminal offence, so these questions get taken seriously. Asking about your pay is a protected workplace right; your employer cannot lawfully punish you for it.