SCHADS Award 2025 to 2026: What NDIS Providers Need to Know

The Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award (MA000100), commonly known as the SCHADS Award, is the modern award that governs pay and conditions for most workers in the disability, community services, and home care sector across Australia. If you employ support workers, coordinators, team leaders, or administrative staff in an NDIS registered business, you are almost certainly covered by this award.

The October 2025 rate increase brought new pay rates into effect that every provider must implement correctly. Getting SCHADS wrong is not just an administrative inconvenience. It creates underpayment liability, exposes your business to Fair Work compliance action, and can result in significant back pay obligations.

What Is the SCHADS Award

The SCHADS Award (MA000100) is a modern award made under the Fair Work Act 2009. It covers employers and employees in the social and community services, home care, and disability services industries throughout Australia. The award sets minimum pay rates, hours of work, overtime, penalty rates, allowances, and leave entitlements.

The award applies to organisations that provide social and community services including disability support, home care, aged care in the home, youth work, family support, housing assistance, crisis accommodation, and related services. If your organisation is an NDIS registered provider delivering participant supports, your support workers are covered by SCHADS unless they are covered by a different applicable award or enterprise agreement.

Understanding which stream your workers fall under is the first step. Getting this classification wrong flows through to every pay calculation you make.

The 4 Award Streams

SCHADS covers four distinct streams, each with its own classification structure and pay scale. Providers must identify the correct stream for each role in their organisation.

Home Care (Disability Services): This is the stream most NDIS providers use. It covers workers providing personal care, community access, daily living support, and similar disability services in participants' homes or in the community. Levels range from Home Care Employee Level 1 (entry level, no qualifications required) through to Level 5 (advanced roles with significant autonomy).

Home Care (Aged Care): Covers workers providing home care services to elderly clients. While structurally similar to the Disability Services stream, the pay rates and classification descriptors differ. Providers delivering both NDIS and aged care services need to ensure workers are classified under the correct stream for each type of work.

Social and Community Services (SACS): Covers workers in broader community service roles including coordinators, case managers, team leaders, and administrative staff in community service organisations. This stream typically applies to your office based and coordination staff rather than direct support workers.

Crisis Accommodation: Covers workers in crisis accommodation, emergency shelters, and similar facilities. The classification and pay rates reflect the specific demands of crisis work including irregular hours and the need for rapid response capability.

Pay Rate Structure

Each stream is divided into levels, and each level may have multiple pay points that reflect years of experience at that level. Understanding this structure is essential for correct pay calculations.

For the Home Care (Disability Services) stream, which covers most NDIS support workers, the structure works as follows:

• Level 1: Entry level workers performing basic support tasks under direct supervision. No formal qualifications required.
• Level 2: Workers who have completed relevant training or gained experience. Level 2.1 is the most common classification for experienced support workers. This is where the majority of NDIS support workers sit.
• Level 3: Workers with Certificate III or equivalent, performing more complex support tasks with greater autonomy.
• Level 4: Senior workers, team leaders, or workers with Certificate IV performing specialist roles.
• Level 5: Advanced practitioners with diploma qualifications or equivalent experience, often supervising other workers.

Full time and part time employees receive the base hourly rate for their level and pay point. They are entitled to paid leave, notice of termination, and redundancy provisions.

Casual employees receive a 25% loading on top of the base hourly rate in lieu of paid leave entitlements. This casual loading is applied to the ordinary hourly rate before any penalty rates are calculated. This is a critical distinction that many providers get wrong.

Penalty Rates Explained

Penalty rates are where SCHADS calculations become complex and where most errors occur. The rates are expressed as multipliers of the ordinary hourly rate.

Saturday: 150% of the ordinary hourly rate (effectively 1.5 times the base rate). For a Level 2.1 worker on $35.95/hr, the Saturday rate is $53.93/hr.

Sunday: 200% of the ordinary hourly rate (2 times the base rate). For the same worker, the Sunday rate is $71.90/hr.

Public holidays: 250% of the ordinary hourly rate (2.5 times the base rate). The public holiday rate for a Level 2.1 worker is $89.88/hr. Workers also have the right to refuse public holiday work in certain circumstances.

Overtime: Overtime applies when a full time employee works beyond 38 hours per week (or 76 hours per fortnight). The first 2 hours of overtime are paid at 150%, and subsequent hours at 200%. Overtime on Sundays is 200% and on public holidays is 250%. Part time employees trigger overtime when they work beyond their agreed hours without sufficient notice.

Evening and night work: Ordinary hours worked between 8pm and 6am attract a shift loading. The specific loading depends on the shift pattern and whether the worker is permanent or casual.

Common Mistakes

Across the NDIS sector, certain SCHADS calculation errors appear repeatedly. Each one can result in significant underpayment or overpayment liability.

Applying casual loading on penalised rates: This is the single most common error. The casual loading of 25% is applied to the ordinary hourly rate only. It does not compound with penalty rates. A casual worker on a Sunday does not receive (base rate + 25%) x 200%. They receive (base rate x 200%) + (base rate x 25%). The casual loading and the penalty rate are both calculated from the base rate, not from each other.

Broken shift miscalculation: A broken shift occurs when a worker's ordinary hours on a single day are split into two or more periods of work with an unpaid break between them. The SCHADS Award provides specific allowances for broken shifts: $20.82 for a shift broken into two periods and $27.56 for a shift broken into three or more periods (October 2025 rates). Many providers either overlook this allowance entirely or calculate it incorrectly.

Sleepover rate errors: Sleepover shifts (where a worker is required to sleep at the workplace and be available to respond if needed) are paid at a flat rate of $60.02 per sleepover (October 2025 rate). If the worker is called to perform work during the sleepover, they must be paid their applicable hourly rate (including any penalty rates) for the time worked, with a minimum payment of one hour. Providers frequently miscalculate the transition from sleepover rate to active work rate.

Overtime threshold errors: For full time employees, overtime kicks in after 38 hours per week or 76 hours per fortnight. For part time employees, overtime applies when they work beyond their agreed ordinary hours. Providers who roster part time workers for extra shifts without updating their contracted hours can inadvertently trigger overtime rates that were not budgeted.

Travel time omissions: Workers required to travel between clients during their shift (not to and from their first and last client) are entitled to be paid for that travel time. This is particularly relevant for community access and in home support workers who visit multiple participants in a single day.

Key Allowances

Beyond base rates and penalties, the SCHADS Award includes several allowances that must be correctly applied.

• Vehicle allowance: $0.99 per kilometre for workers required to use their own vehicle for work purposes. This applies to travel between clients, not commuting.
• Sleepover allowance: $60.02 per sleepover shift. Workers called to active duty during a sleepover receive their applicable hourly rate with a minimum one hour payment.
• Broken shift allowance: $20.82 for a shift broken into two periods, $27.56 for three or more periods.
• Meal allowance: $16.62 when a worker is required to work overtime exceeding one hour and was not notified 24 hours in advance.
• First aid allowance: A weekly allowance for workers designated as first aid officers at their workplace.

How Automated SCHADS Compliance Works

Manual SCHADS calculations involve looking up the correct stream, level, and pay point, then applying the appropriate penalty rate for the day and time of the shift, adding any applicable allowances, and checking whether overtime thresholds have been reached. Doing this manually across a roster of 20 or more workers, each with different employment types and classification levels, is time consuming and error prone.

Automated SCHADS compliance integrates the full award rate structure into the rostering system. When you create a shift, the system automatically calculates the correct pay rate based on the worker's classification, employment type, shift day, shift time, and any applicable penalties or allowances. Overtime thresholds are tracked in real time across the pay period, with warnings appearing before a worker reaches the threshold.

The system can also generate payroll ready exports that show the breakdown for each worker: ordinary hours, Saturday hours, Sunday hours, public holiday hours, overtime hours (at 150% and 200%), allowances, and total gross pay. This eliminates the manual calculation step entirely and provides an auditable record of how each pay figure was derived.

For providers managing casual workers, the system correctly separates the casual loading from penalty rate calculations, avoiding the compounding error that affects so many providers. For part time workers, the system tracks agreed hours against actual hours worked and flags any discrepancies that could trigger unintended overtime.