Most underpayment in Australia is not deliberate. It comes from awards that are genuinely complex, applied by payroll teams who are busy and under-resourced. But since January 2025, intentional underpayment is a criminal offence, and the honest-mistake version still ends in back-pay, interest and penalties. So the practical question for any employer is simple: how do you actually know your staff are being paid correctly? Here is a straightforward way to check.
Start with the right award or agreement
Every employee should be mapped to the correct Modern Award or Enterprise Agreement, at the correct classification level. This is where a surprising number of errors begin. A role that changed over time, or someone doing more than one job, can quietly sit on the wrong classification for years. Confirm the award, the level, and the employment type for each person before you check a single rate.
Know where underpayment hides
Once the award is right, errors tend to cluster in the same places:
- Penalty rates for weekends, public holidays and night work.
- Casual loading, and how it interacts with penalties. On a Sunday the 25 percent loading and the Sunday penalty apply together, and the wrong order throws out every Sunday shift.
- Overtime thresholds and multipliers, such as work beyond 38 hours.
- Allowances like first aid, laundry, tools, travel and meals. Individually small, they compound across a team and a year.
- Multi-role and split-classification staff. A school teacher might take a class in the morning, run a conference session in the afternoon, and supervise boarding on the weekend, each at a different rate. Nurses, aged care and hospitality have the same problem.
If your workforce includes any of these, hand-checking is where compliance quietly breaks down.
Check a sample of real payslips
Pick a recent pay period and your trickiest employees, not your simplest. For each, work out what they should have been paid, line by line, from the award: base rate, penalties, loadings, overtime and allowances. Then compare that to what the payslip actually shows. A pay calculator built on live Fair Work data does this in seconds instead of an afternoon, and removes the risk of your own spreadsheet carrying the same error your payroll does.
Look for patterns, not one-off cents
A single shift being a few dollars short is easy to dismiss. Underpayment becomes a serious liability through repetition: the same misconfiguration repeats every pay run, for every affected employee, going back as far as the error does. So when you find something, ask how long it has been happening and how many people it touches. That is what turns a minor error into a back-pay figure.
What to do if you find an error
Do not panic, and do not bury it. Document what you found and how. Correct it going forward, calculate the shortfall, and rectify it. A clear, dated record of the check and the fix is exactly what a business needs if Fair Work ever asks, and it is the difference between a handled mistake and an unhandled one.
Move from checking to monitoring
A one-time check tells you where you stand today. It does not stop the next misconfiguration, or the next award update, from creating a new error next quarter. The businesses getting ahead of this are shifting from reactive audits to continuous checking: every pay run tested against the correct award before anyone is paid.
General information, not legal advice. Awards, rates and obligations change; confirm your obligations with the Fair Work Ombudsman or a qualified adviser.