Since the first of January 2025, intentionally underpaying staff is a criminal offence in Australia, carrying penalties of up to ten years in prison and fines in the millions. That changes the stakes for every restaurant operator, because most underpayments do not begin in the payroll system. They begin on the roster, in the ordinary decisions a manager makes when placing shifts for the week, and the Restaurant Industry Award has more of those decision points than almost any other award. This guide walks through the ones that most often go wrong, and shows where each quietly turns into a breach.
Why the Restaurant Award is so easy to get wrong
The Restaurant Industry Award covers most front and back of house staff in cafes, restaurants, and catering. It is a genuinely complex instrument, because a restaurant runs across the exact hours the award treats as expensive: evenings, weekends, and public holidays. Add high casual turnover, junior staff on age-based rates, and the daily reality of shifts that shift, and you have an award where a perfectly well-meaning roster can create underpayments no one notices until a reconciliation, or a claim.
The important thing to understand is that nearly all of these rules are decided the moment a shift is placed on the calendar. That is why compliance is really a rostering problem. By the time the hours reach payroll, the outcome is already set.
Minimum engagement
The award sets a minimum number of hours you must pay a person when you bring them in, regardless of how long you actually need them, and the figure differs by employment type. A casual called in for a short prep shift, or a part-timer asked to cover a two hour gap, can trigger a minimum payment well above the hours worked. Roster a shift shorter than the minimum and you either pay beyond the hours, which wrecks your labour cost, or you pay only the hours worked, which is an underpayment. Neither is something you want to discover after the fact, and both are decided at the moment you place the shift.
Overtime, and how it sneaks up
Overtime in the Restaurant Award is not only the long single day everyone pictures. It can be triggered by hours worked beyond the daily ordinary maximum, by weekly hours over the threshold, and by work outside the rostered ordinary span. The trap is that overtime accumulates across a week without anyone deciding it should. Lean on your two most reliable staff to cover a couple of gaps, and you can push them over the weekly threshold without ever meaning to, converting ordinary hours into overtime you did not budget for and, if it is missed, did not pay. Seeing each person's weekly hours build as you assign shifts is the only reliable way to catch this before it becomes real.
Penalty rates and the cost of the roster
The award loads evenings, weekends, and public holidays with penalty rates, and a restaurant lives in exactly those hours. This is less a breach to avoid than a cost to see clearly. The failure mode is not usually paying the penalty, it is not knowing what a given roster actually costs until the wage bill lands. When you can watch the labour cost of a week update as you place each shift, you make better calls about who works the expensive hours and whether the coverage earns its keep. Blindness here does not create a legal problem so much as a margin problem, and margin is what keeps a venue open.
Public holidays deserve their own mention, because they carry the highest penalties and the rules around substitution and entitlement are fiddly. A public holiday shift placed without thought is one of the most expensive lines on any roster, and one of the easiest to get wrong.
Split shifts
Split shifts are almost synonymous with restaurants, the classic lunch service, break through the afternoon, back for dinner. The award has specific rules about how split shifts can be structured and what they attract, and this is one of the most common places compliance slips, because the arrangement is so routine that no one re-checks it. A split shift rostered on autopilot, without accounting for the award's requirements, is a quiet and recurring source of underpayment across an entire team.
Breaks between shifts, and the close-then-open trap
The award requires a minimum rest period between the end of one shift and the start of the next. Break it, and the following shift can attract penalty rates, or the arrangement may not be permitted at all. This is the close-then-open trap, the same person finishing at midnight and starting again at eight, and it is nearly impossible to spot by eye across a full week, let alone across two venues where someone picks up shifts at both. Rest breaks within a shift matter too, and long or back-to-back days raise fatigue and work-health-and-safety obligations that sit alongside the award.
Casual loading and junior rates
Casuals are paid a loading in place of leave and other entitlements, and juniors are paid age-based percentages of the adult rate. Both are simple in principle and easy to misapply in practice, because they depend on correctly classifying each person and then applying the right rate to the right hours. Assign someone to the wrong classification once, and every shift they work is measured against the wrong number from then on. The error is invisible on the roster and only shows up when someone checks the maths.
Where the breaches actually hide
Reading the rules is the easy part. The reason Restaurant Award compliance is hard is that none of these breaches announce themselves. They hide in the last-minute swap a manager approves without re-checking the rest gap it just created. They hide across two venues, where no single roster shows a person's true weekly hours. They hide in the reliable employee who always says yes and quietly accrues overtime. And they hide in the gap between the person who builds the roster and the person who runs payroll, each assuming the other is checking.
None of these are failures of good intent. They are failures of visibility. Every piece of information needed to prevent them exists at the moment the roster is built, and is lost by the time payroll runs.
Turning the rules into something automatic
This is the case for building the award into your rostering tool rather than keeping it in a manager's head. When the Restaurant Industry Award lives alongside the roster, the checks stop being a weekly chore and become something the system does as you work. You assign the award and classification to each person once. From then on the roster can preview labour cost in real time, warn you when a shift breaks minimum engagement or a rest gap, show weekly hours climbing toward an overtime threshold, and run a single audit before you publish that surfaces every issue at once, while it is still cheap to fix.
Rosterio was built for exactly this. It ships with the Restaurant Industry Award and the current Fair Work rates, previews labour cost as you build, and runs a one-click weekly compliance audit that catches minimum engagement breaches, overtime, and rest-and-fatigue issues before payroll ever sees them. Given that underpayment is now a criminal matter, moving award compliance out of a spreadsheet and into the roster is the single highest-leverage change a venue can make.
If you want to see where your current roster stands, you can start a free trial and run an audit on this week in minutes, or read how the compliance features work first.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Award rules change and vary by role and employment type. Always check the current Restaurant Industry Award, or seek advice, before making pay decisions.