The Clerks—Private Sector Award 2020 [MA000002]: Employment types, rostering, and breaks

The Clerks—Private Sector Award 2020 outlines the minimum conditions for clerical and admin staff in the private sector. It covers people in roles such as reception, office admin, billing, payroll, customer service, call centres, and general back-office support across a wide range of industries.

If you employ clerical staff under this award, this article can help you get three things right:

• how you classify them (full-time, part-time, or casual)

• how you set and roster their ordinary hours

• how you manage meal breaks, rest breaks, and shiftwork.

Clerks Award employment types

The Clerks Award only recognises three employment types: full-time, part-time, and casual. On-hire workers, trainees, and apprentices may still come under this award, but they use one of those three categories in practice.

Full-time employees

Full-time clerks work on an ongoing contract. You engage them as full-time when the role needs full-time hours on a continuing basis.

Part-time employees

Part-time clerks work fewer hours than full-time employees on a predictable pattern. Before they start, you and the employee must agree in writing on their regular pattern of work, including:

• how many hours they work each day

• which days they work

• their start and finish times for each day.

Once you lock that pattern in, treat it as the baseline for rostering. When you want to vary it, you need the right process and records (covered later in this article).

Casual employees

Casual clerks work on an as-needed basis with no guaranteed hours. They receive the minimum hourly rate for their classification plus a 25% casual loading.

You still need to roster and pay casuals correctly, including minimum engagement rules and overtime triggers. Eligible casuals also have a National Employment Standards (NES) pathway to request conversion to full-time or part-time work.

On-hire workers

If you use a labour-hire agency, the agency employs the worker. In practice, you still need to make sure the role sits in the right Clerks classification and the conditions match what a direct employee would receive for the same work.

Trainees and apprentices

Where a trainee or apprentice falls under the Clerks Award, their training contract usually sets whether they work full-time or part-time. From there, you manage their hours and rosters using the same rules that apply to that employment type.

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Ordinary hours and rostering: day workers (non-shiftworkers)

This section covers ordinary hours and rostering for day workers. Shiftwork has its own rules, so we've kept it separate.

Ordinary hours and spread of hours

For day workers, the award sets a standard spread of hours for ordinary time:

• 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Friday

• 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday.

You can move the spread by up to 1 hour earlier or later by agreement. This agreement can be with an individual employee, a work group, or most employees at the workplace.

If most employees in your workplace fall under a different modern award with a different spread of hours, you can align clerks’ spread of hours with that other award.

Daily limits and continuity

• Ordinary hours for day workers can’t exceed 10 hours in a day (not counting unpaid meal breaks).

• Ordinary hours must run continuously, except for the breaks the award allows.

Note, if employees work outside the ordinary spread of hours, exceed 10 ordinary hours in a day, work beyond full-time weekly limits, or (for part-time employees) work outside their agreed written pattern, overtime applies.

Minimum engagement rules

Even though clerical work often looks flexible, minimum engagement rules still apply:

• You must roster part-time employees for at least three consecutive hours per shift.

• You must pay casual employees for at least three hours per engagement, even if they work less.

These minimums apply whether the employee is on site or working remotely.

Make-up time

This lets someone take time off during ordinary hours and make it up later during ordinary hours, instead of using leave. Make-up time has to sit within ordinary hours and must be agreed, not imposed.

Part-time patterns and roster changes

Part-time rosters should match the written pattern agreed at the start. When changes come up:

• changing daily hours or start/finish times needs written agreement

• you can change which days a part-time employee works with seven days’ notice.

Consultation for major changes to hours or rosters

The Clerks Award includes a consultation requirement when you plan major changes that affect employees’ hours or rosters. This goes beyond day-to-day tweaks. You must consult affected employees if you’re proposing changes like:

• new operating hours

• a roster restructure

• changes to how work is organised that affect hours or days worked.

Consultation means:

• telling employees what’s changing

• explaining the likely impact

• giving them a genuine chance to provide feedback

• considering that feedback before finalising the change.

You don’t need agreement to proceed, but you do need to show that consultation really happened.

Rostered days off and banking

The award allows for a rostered day off (RDO) system where employees work longer days and accrue rostered days off across a cycle.

Key points to manage properly:

• you need to give four weeks’ notice of a scheduled RDO

• employees can swap an RDO by agreement

• some limited substitutions can apply in genuine exceptions (for example, breakdowns or emergencies)

• employees can bank up to five RDOs and take them later, with at least five days’ notice before taking a banked day.

Flexible working requests

Separate from the award, the NES allows eligible employees to request flexible working arrangements. This includes employees who are parents or carers, aged 55 or over, living with disability, or dealing with family or domestic violence (or supporting someone who is).

You must consider these requests properly and can only refuse on reasonable business grounds.

Right to disconnect

The award also includes right-to-disconnect terms that sit alongside the Fair Work Act changes. In practical terms, don’t treat after-hours messages as 'normal' just because someone works in an office role.

Breaks for Clerks Award day workers

Break rules under the Clerks Award depend on whether someone is a day worker or a shiftworker. This section covers day workers only.

Meal breaks

Paid rest breaks

You can choose the timing, but they should give the employee a real chance to rest.

Shiftwork rostering and ordinary hours under the Clerks Award

Shiftwork has its own rules and should be handled separately from day work. An employee counts as a shiftworker under the Clerks Award if they work:

• an afternoon shift finishing after 7 p.m. and at or before midnight

• a night shift finishing after midnight and at or before 7 a.m.

• a permanent night shift that does not rotate and runs for four consecutive weeks or more.

Ordinary hours and rosters for shiftworkers

Ordinary hours average 38 hours per week. You can average hours over:

• a four-week period, or

• a roster period of up to 12 months, by agreement with most affected employees.

• Maximum ordinary hours per day are 10 hours, including paid breaks.

• You can roster up to six shifts per week.

• A Sunday can form part of ordinary hours.

You can change shift start and finish times by:

• giving seven days’ notice, or

• agreement at any time.

Breaks for shiftworkers

Shiftworkers have different break rules to day workers.

Keep shiftworker break rules separate in your policies. They don’t line up with day-worker meal breaks.

Rest period after overtime (shiftworkers)

If a shiftworker works overtime, they must get at least eight consecutive hours off before their next shift.

If they don’t get that break:

• they must be released from duty until they’ve had eight hours off

• you can’t deduct pay for any ordinary hours they miss

If you direct them to keep working, you must pay 200% until they can take the rest break.

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Practical tips for complying with Clerks Award rostering rules

The Clerks Award is detailed, but most issues don’t come from people ignoring it. They come from small, repeat behaviours that slowly drift out of compliance. These tips focus on avoiding that drift:

How Clerks Award rostering goes wrong (and how to fix it)

Casey manages a clerical team in a mid-sized professional services firm. The workload shifts constantly, from quiet mornings to busy afternoons, and big spikes around billing and reporting deadlines.

When things get chaotic, Casey starts making small roster changes to keep the team afloat. Over time, those changes push the roster outside the award without her realising.

What went wrong

1. Part-time patterns stopped matching reality: To cover peak periods, Casey regularly asked part-timers to start earlier or stay later than their agreed pattern. The changes felt minor, but they happened often and never made it into a revised written agreement.

2. Short shifts crept in to cover busy windows: Casey began rostering casuals for short blocks to cover call spikes. Even when the work only lasted an hour or two, the minimum engagement still applied, driving up costs.

3. Meal breaks slipped during deadline days: On reporting days, staff worked through lunch to 'get it done.' A few missed meal breaks quickly turned into a compliance issue.

How Casey fixed it

1. Reset part-time patterns to match actual needs: Casey sat down with part-time staff and updated their written patterns so start and finish times reflected how the business really ran.

2. Grouped coverage into cleaner blocks: Instead of micro-shifts, she rostered fewer people for longer, more productive blocks of time. That reduced minimum engagement issues and improved continuity.

3. Built break markers into the roster: Meal breaks and rest breaks now show clearly on the schedule, so busy days don’t push them out by accident.

The easiest way to manage Clerks Award rostering and breaks

When Clerks Award compliance falls apart, it's usually at the handover points. Someone changes their hours. The roster updates, but payroll doesn’t. Breaks get missed on busy days. And errors only show up when someone queries their pay.

Rippling's all-in-one workforce management software reduces that risk by keeping rosters, time tracking, and payroll connected. When a part-time pattern changes, or someone moves onto shiftwork, for example, the same change flows through the roster and into pay.

That means you can:

• see part-time patterns clearly before you roster

• spot minimum engagement issues before shifts are approved

• catch meal break risks before someone works past the limit

• apply different rules for day workers and shiftworkers without manual checks

• pay people based on the hours you approved

This results in fewer fixes at the end of the week, fewer pay disputes, and way less time double-checking award rules when things get busy.

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