HIGA Hospitality Award Rostering: Complete Guide to Penalty Rates 2026

Why This Guide Does Not Publish a Rate Table

Most hospitality award pages lead with a penalty rate table. This one does not, and the reason is worth explaining because it affects how you should read every other page you find on this topic.

Hospitality penalty rates have changed substantially over recent years, and award wages are adjusted annually in the Fair Work Commission's wage review, generally effective from the first full pay period on or after 1 July. A rate table published in a blog post is a photograph of one moment, and it does not announce when it goes out of date.

An earlier version of this page carried rates that were wrong. Three other pages on this site quoted three different figures for the same award, which is a good illustration of how easily this happens once a number is copied between documents.

So the useful thing we can offer is not a number. It is the structure: which provisions apply, how they interact, and where each one tends to catch people out. Get the current percentages from the Fair Work Ombudsman's Pay and Conditions Tool, selecting your exact classification and employment type, or from the current HIGA pay guide. If you take one thing from this page, make it that habit.

What the HIGA Covers

MA000009 applies across hotels, motels, resorts, serviced apartments, restaurants, cafes, catering businesses, clubs and gaming venues. It covers food and beverage attendants, kitchen hands, cooks and chefs up to the classifications the award reaches, accommodation staff, gaming and front office roles, and related support positions.

It is among the more complicated awards to roster against, not because any single rule is subtle but because hospitality trading patterns collide with almost all of them at once. Late finishes, early starts, weekend peaks, public holidays, split shifts, and a workforce that is largely casual. Every one of those touches a different award provision.

The Provisions That Shape a Hospitality Roster

Three Places Hospitality Rosters Leak Money

The short Sunday cover shift. This is the most expensive unit of labour most venues buy, and it rarely feels like a decision. Someone drops out, you call a casual in for the lunch peak, and three things compound: the Sunday penalty, the casual loading, and the minimum engagement meaning you pay the full minimum regardless of how long you actually need them. An hour of help costs considerably more than an hour. Worth knowing before you make the call rather than when you reconcile the pay run. Open shift management at least reduces the time cost of finding that cover.

The split shift that was never labelled. The classic hospitality pattern, a lunch service and a dinner service with the afternoon off, attracts an allowance once the gap exceeds the award's threshold. It gets missed because the two halves are entered into the roster as two unrelated shifts, so nothing in the system recognises them as one split. That is a data-entry artefact rather than a decision, which is why telling managers to be more careful does not fix it. Note also that because the allowance turns on gap length, a break just over the threshold and a break just under it are materially different costs, which is worth knowing when you are designing the shift rather than discovering afterwards.

The break that was not taken. Meal and rest break entitlements depend on shift length. In a venue that gets slammed, breaks get postponed and then forgotten, and nobody records that they did not happen. That is both a pay issue and a work health and safety one, and it is invisible unless your time records capture breaks rather than assuming them.

All three share a pattern with underpayment generally in Australia. Nobody decided to underpay anyone. The roster looked fine as published, and the gap opened between what was planned and what occurred. That is precisely the gap accurate time records exist to close, and why section 557C of the Fair Work Act 2009 matters so much, as covered in Fair Work rostering requirements.

Rostering Practices That Hold Up

Check close-to-open pairings before publishing. The rest-between-shifts breach is almost always accidental and almost always involves the same small group of reliable people who close and then open. Scan for it deliberately, because the roster will not.

Roster breaks explicitly. If breaks are informal they are unrecorded, and unrecorded breaks are unprovable. Put them on the roster and capture whether they were taken.

Enter a split shift as a split shift. One shift with a gap, not two shifts. This single habit prevents the allowance failure described above.

Cost the weekend before you publish it. Weekend penalties are not an edge case in hospitality, they are most of the wage bill. Seeing the cost while the roster is still changeable is the only point at which the information is actionable. GetMyRoster shows shift cost against configured award rates on paid plans; the free plan covers up to 5 users at one location, with the web dashboard, mobile apps, notifications and certificate management.

Re-check your configured rates every July. Whatever system you use, rates set last year are wrong this year and nothing will warn you. Put it in the calendar and verify the first July pay run before finalising it. Approved hours should then flow to Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks with categories attached rather than being re-keyed.

A final caution specific to this sector. Hospitality has a high proportion of young and casual workers, high turnover, and managers who were promoted from the floor rather than trained in industrial relations. That combination is why the industry features so regularly in underpayment activity, and it is not evidence of bad intent. It is evidence that the award is harder than the systems most venues use to apply it. This article is general information, not legal advice; check your own circumstances with the Fair Work Ombudsman or a workplace relations adviser.

Reading the Award Yourself, Without Losing an Afternoon

Most hospitality operators never open the award, which is understandable and also the root of the problem. You do not need to read all of it. You need five answers, and they take about twenty minutes to find once.

Which classification is each of your staff? Everything else depends on this. Classification follows the work performed rather than the job title you use, so a person called a supervisor may not sit where you assume. Getting this wrong produces consistent errors that survive for years because nobody revisits the base rate.

What is the minimum engagement for that classification and employment type? Write it down. This single number changes how you think about short cover shifts.

What are the penalty rates for the days you actually trade? If you close Sundays, you do not need the Sunday rate. Look up only what applies to you, from the Fair Work Ombudsman's Pay and Conditions Tool.

What is the rest period between shifts, and what happens if you breach it? Usually the consequence is a payment rather than a prohibition, which is worth knowing because it turns an unclear rule into a costed decision.

What triggers the split shift allowance, and how much is it? Both the threshold and the amount, because the threshold shapes how you design shifts and the amount tells you what a mistake costs.

Write those five answers on one page, date it, and pin it wherever rosters get built. Review it each July after the annual wage review. That page is more useful than any software configuration, because it lets you sanity-check what a system tells you, and a manager who can recognise a wrong number is a far better control than one who assumes the software is right.

If you employ under an enterprise agreement, it governs instead, and the same exercise applies to the agreement. The failure mode there is configuring systems to award defaults while operating under an agreement that differs, which produces confident, automated, consistent errors. Related reading: casual and part-time scheduling.