Construction award pay rates: the admin lesson

Posted on October 7, 2026
Calum
0

A builder has been ordered by a court to pay the Fair Work Ombudsman after refusing to accept the court papers, with the judgment landing a little over $5,000. Reported by onnotice.com.au, and worth two minutes of any Australian builder's time, because the mechanism is the interesting part. Refusing service does not stop a case. It removes the only person in the room who could argue about the numbers. If you are not sure your construction award pay rates are right, that is the one scenario you want to avoid, because a default judgment is decided on the regulator's arithmetic and nothing else.

Nobody plans to get here. It starts with an envelope on the ute dash.

Ignoring the paperwork is still a decision

Courts do not require you to agree to be sued. Once service is established, silence is treated as no defence and the applicant's figures go through. The Fair Work Ombudsman does not have to prove much when the other side does not show up, and the amount claimed becomes the amount owed.

This is the same shape as every other piece of admin that gets shoved to the side of the desk. An unsigned variation still gets built. An unanswered defect notice still ends up at VCAT or QBCC. The paperwork you did not read is the paperwork that gets decided without you.

Construction award pay rates move every July, and your quote does not

Most on-site work sits under the Building and Construction General On-site Award 2020 (MA000020). Two things about it catch out good operators who have never knowingly underpaid anyone.

First, minimum rates change with the annual wage review, effective from the first full pay period on or after 1 July. So a rate you set in March is stale in August, and a quote you wrote in May for a job starting in September was priced on the old number. Second, the base hourly rate is rarely the actual rate. On top of it sit the industry allowance, tool allowance, and the daily fares and travel pattern allowance, plus site allowances, overtime, and 25% casual loading where it applies. Apprentice and adult apprentice rates run on their own schedule.

Get the current figures from the Fair Work Ombudsman pay guides rather than from what you paid last year. They are published as a PDF per award, updated each July, and they take about five minutes to read.

The records are the defence, and there is a rule about that

Here is the part most builders have never been told. Under the Fair Work Act, if an employer has not kept the required time and wage records or has not issued payslips, and cannot give a reasonable excuse, the employer carries the burden of disproving an underpayment allegation. The usual position flips. You are not asked to poke holes in their claim. You are asked to prove what you actually paid.

So the practical rules are boring and they matter:

Employee records kept for seven years
Payslips issued within one working day of payday
Hours recorded for anyone on overtime, penalties or casual loading
Written records of the allowances you paid, not just a lump "labour" figure

If your time records live in a group chat and three notebooks, you do not have records. You have recollections, and recollections lose.

What this costs a quote, not just a court

Underpaid labour is not a legal problem first. It is a pricing problem that becomes a legal problem later. If you priced a chippy at the base award rate and the real cost was base plus industry allowance plus travel plus super, currently 12% of ordinary time earnings, then every hour on that job carried a loss you never saw. The job came in "on budget" against a budget that was wrong.

The fix is to quote labour at a fully loaded cost rate: the award rate, the allowances the job will actually attract, super, leave loading where relevant, and workers comp. Then add margin on top of that, and quote the client ex GST with GST shown separately. A rate you can trace back to a current pay guide is a rate you can defend twice over, once to the client and once to a regulator.

This is exactly the sort of number that goes wrong in a spreadsheet that was copied from last year's job. Good construction estimating software lets you set a labour cost per trade once and have every estimate inherit it, so the July increase is one edit and not thirty. The same argument applies to hours: if your crew's time is captured against a job in the tool you already use to run the job, the wage record and the job cost are the same record. Most decent best construction project management software does that part for you.

Wage theft is criminal now, so the sloppy version is riskier

Since 1 January 2025, intentional underpayment of wages or superannuation is a criminal offence, not only a civil one. Honest mistakes are not the target, and small business that follows the Small Business Wage Compliance Code is protected from criminal referral. But "I never checked" is a weaker position than it was two years ago, and the protection depends on being able to show what you did to get it right. Which brings it back to records.

The five-minute jobs

Download the current MA000020 pay guide and check your top three trade rates against it
Confirm payslips are going out within one working day, with allowances itemised
Set a calendar reminder for late June to reprice labour before the July increase
Open the envelopes

None of that is interesting work. All of it is cheaper than a judgment you were not in the room for.

If you want your labour rates, crew hours and job costs sitting in one place instead of four, Built Simple is free to start and the calculators work on your phone without a signup. Have a look at builtsimple.com.au next time you are waiting on a delivery.