Professional Employees Award [MA000065] pay guide: rates, allowances and overtime

If you employ engineers, scientists, IT professionals, quality auditors or medical researchers, the Professional Employees Award probably sets the floor for what you pay them. Engineering consultancies, IT services firms, testing labs and medical research institutes all sit comfortably inside it, and so do labour hire businesses whose employees work in those industries.

It also behaves unlike almost any other modern award, which is where the trouble starts. Minimum rates come as annual salaries rather than weekly ones, overtime pays at the ordinary hourly rate instead of time and a half, and a decent chunk of your workforce may be exempt from overtime and penalty rates altogether, based on a threshold that shifts every July whether you notice or not.

To make things easier, I’ve put together this Professional Employees Award pay guide. It walks through the current rates, what you owe on top of base pay, and the places employers most often get this award wrong.

Professional Employees Award minimum pay rates

The Professional Employees Award sets minimum annual salaries for full-time employees, with corresponding minimum hourly rates for part-timers. Casuals get that hourly rate plus the 25% casual loading on top.

Worth noting these rates sit separately from the national minimum wage set by the Fair Work Commission (FWC), so there's no cross-checking one against the other.

The rates below apply from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026.

Graduates move up through those four Level 1 pay points as they gain experience and demonstrate competency, which means someone can sit at 1.1 for a while and then move twice in short order. If nobody owns that progression, it stops happening, and you end up with a third-year graduate still being paid like a first-year one.

Rates rise from the first full pay period on or after 1 July each year, off the back of the FWC's Annual Wage Review. It's best to check yours against the current Fair Work pay and conditions tool before your next pay run rather than after it.

Professional Employees Award allowances

Compared with most modern awards, this one is remarkably thin on allowances. There are three, and once you've covered them, you're done:

• Travelling expenses: When an employee travels on business, you reimburse their reasonable expenses in full, including accommodation, meals and out-of-pocket costs. There's no cap and no set rate here, because you're covering what they actually spent, which is why the receipts matter.

• Travelling time: Excess travel time gets compensated at an amount you and the employee agree on. The award doesn't name a figure, and that vagueness is precisely why this is the allowance most likely to end up in a dispute. Agree the rate in writing before anyone travels, not after they've submitted the claim.

• Vehicle allowance: If an employee uses their own car for work by mutual agreement, you pay $1.00 per kilometre travelled. This one's indexed to CPI (the private motoring sub-group) and gets adjusted at each annual wage review, so it moves like the pay rates do and needs the same July check.

Separately, if a role requires special equipment or protective clothing, you provide it free of cost, and it stays your property. That's an obligation rather than an allowance, so it won't show up on a payslip, but it's a real cost worth budgeting for.

What you won't find in this award is a meal allowance, a tool allowance, a uniform allowance or a first aid allowance. None of them exist here. So if your payroll system is paying one, it's pulling a rule from a different award, and that's a thread worth tugging.

Professional Employees Award superannuation

Most of the superannuation rules you need here don't come from the award at all. They come from federal law, mainly the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992 and the National Employment Standards (NES), which means the award itself has very little to say on the subject.

• Contribution rate: You pay 12% of ordinary time earnings (OTE) into your employee's fund. OTE is the bit that catches people out, because it excludes overtime, and overtime under this award pays at the ordinary rate, so it can look identical to ordinary hours in your system.

• Who gets it: Everyone 18 and over, no matter how little they earn or how few hours they work. Under-18s only get super once they're working more than 30 hours in a week, so if you take on vacation students or cadets, that 30-hour line is the one to keep an eye on.

• When you pay it: Payday Super started on 1 July 2026, and it's changed the rhythm of this entirely. Super now has to land in your employee's fund within seven days of payday, so you're working to a seven-day clock rather than a quarterly one. And if you were using the Small Business Superannuation Clearing House, it's closed, so you'll need another route.

• Fund choice: Your employee picks their fund. If a new starter doesn't, you ask the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) for their stapled fund and pay into that. Don't assume you can fall back on a default fund named in the award, because this one doesn't name any.

• Paid leave and workers' comp: Super keeps flowing through paid leave. If someone's off with a work-related injury or illness, you keep paying for up to 52 weeks, as long as they're still employed and still receiving workers' comp.

• Extra contributions: Your employee can ask you in writing to salary-sacrifice or make after-tax contributions, and once they do, you've got 28 days from the end of that month to send it on.

Of all of these, Payday Super is the one most likely to bite. Annualised salaries make super feel predictable, almost like a background process, so it's easy to leave the schedule on quarterly and never think about it again. The seven-day clock doesn't care. It starts at payday whether or not anyone updated the settings.

Professional Employees Award overtime

This award handles overtime differently from most modern awards, and the difference costs employers money in both directions.

• Overtime pay: There are no penalty multipliers at all. You pay overtime at the employee's ordinary hourly rate for their classification, across every employment type.

• When it applies: For full-time employees, overtime kicks in beyond 38 hours a week, or an agreed average over a cycle of up to 13 weeks. For part-time and casual employees, it applies once they pass 38 hours in a week.

• What counts: Extra duties count too, including call-backs and remote work.

• Remote work: Employees have to record and report their hours when working remotely, otherwise there's nothing to pay overtime on.

• Exemption: Employees earning at least 25% above the minimum annual salary for their classification don't get overtime pay or time off in lieu.

The award doesn't require a rest period after overtime, which is unusual in itself. You'll still need to manage fatigue risk under Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws. The award staying silent doesn't make the obligation go away.

Time off instead of overtime (TOIL)

Employees can take time off rather than overtime pay, but the rules around it are strict:

• Agreement: Both parties agree in writing each pay period, and the agreement has to record how many overtime hours were worked and when.

• Taking the time: Within six months of working the overtime, at a time you both agree on.

• If unused: Any TOIL not taken inside those six months gets paid out at the overtime rate.

• On request: An employee can ask for banked overtime to be paid out whenever they like, and you pay it in the next pay cycle.

• Records: Every TOIL agreement stays on file.

• Protection: You can't pressure anyone into taking TOIL instead of pay.

Professional Employees Award penalty rates

Employees earn penalty rates for ordinary hours you direct them to work outside the standard span. These rates apply from 1 July 2026.

The casual rates already have the 25% loading baked in, so there's no adding it again on top. Keep accurate records of every hour that attracts a penalty, and remember that anyone on a salary 25% above the award minimum sits outside this table entirely.

Professional Employees Award leave

Most leave entitlements come from the NES, with the award adding rules on loading, shutdowns and excessive balances.

Annual leave

• Entitlement: Four weeks paid annual leave a year for full-time staff, pro rata for part-timers. Casuals don't accrue annual leave, since their loading covers it instead.

• Shiftworkers: Five weeks rather than four, but only for employees who regularly work Sundays and public holidays. That's a narrow definition, so very few people under this award will actually qualify.

• Leave loading: Add 17.5% on top of base pay during annual leave, unless weekend or shift penalties would have come to more, in which case you pay the higher of the two.

• Shutdowns: You can direct staff to take paid leave during a shutdown as long as you give 28 days' written notice. If they haven't accrued enough, you can agree to leave in advance, or they can take it unpaid.

• Excessive leave: Anything over eight weeks (10 for shiftworkers) counts as excessive. If you can't agree on bringing it down, you can direct leave, though the employee keeps at least six weeks and you can't direct more than four weeks in any 12 months.

• Cashing out: By written agreement only. The employee has to keep four weeks, and you can cash out a maximum of two weeks in 12 months.

• Termination: Unused annual leave gets paid out including loading, no later than seven days after employment ends.

Other leave

• Personal/carer's leave: 10 days paid personal or carer's leave a year for full-time staff, pro rata for part-timers. Casuals can take leave too, just not paid.

• Compassionate leave: Two days per occasion, paid for full-time and part-time employees, unpaid for casuals.

• Parental leave: Up to 12 months unpaid for employees with at least 12 months' service, regular casuals included, with a right to request another 12 on top.

• Community service leave: Paid for the first 10 days of jury duty for full-time and part-time employees, with other community service leave unpaid.

• Family and domestic violence leave: 10 days paid a year, for every employee including casuals.

Public holidays

• Full-time and part-time staff get paid time off when a public holiday lands on a normal workday, while casuals only get paid if they actually work it.

• Working a public holiday attracts 150% of the base rate, or 175% for casuals, with a minimum of four hours' pay even on a shorter shift.

• You can ask someone to work a public holiday if the request is reasonable, and they can refuse on reasonable grounds.

• You and the employee can agree in writing to substitute another day instead.

Where this award catches employers out

Most of the trouble under this award doesn't come from the rules being hard. It comes from them being different, in ways that don't announce themselves. Here's where it goes wrong, and what to do about it.

The exemption threshold moves every July, and the contract doesn't.

An employee sitting 25% above their classification minimum is exempt from overtime, TOIL and penalty rates. Set that salary in FY25, leave it alone, and the 4.75% increase from 1 July 2026 lifts the minimum underneath them until the exemption lapses. Nobody changed the contract, nobody took a pay cut, and yet the employee is now owed overtime that isn't being recorded, because someone flagged them as exempt three years ago and moved on.

My read: this is the highest-risk item in the whole award, precisely because the failure is invisible. There's no error message when an exemption stops applying. So recalculate the threshold against the new minimum every July, for every exempt employee, before the first full pay period rolls over.

Overtime at ordinary rates inverts the usual instinct

Most payroll teams treat overtime as expensive and watch it accordingly, which is exactly why this award causes problems. An extra hour here costs what a normal hour costs, so the usual cost signal never fires and nobody goes looking. Your exposure sits in the overtime you don't know about, and most of that is remote work that never made it onto a timesheet. If you've configured this award in a system built around penalty multipliers, check what it actually does with a 1.0 multiplier before you trust it.

Annualised pay hides small errors

When someone's on a salary, there's no per-hour figure to eyeball, so a misapplied rate or a missed progression doesn't jump out the way it would on an hourly timesheet. It just sits there, compounding, until someone runs the numbers properly. That's how a rounding-level problem turns into a back pay claim covering three years and forty people. An annual payroll audit against both the award and the NES is the cheapest version of finding out.

The award says almost nothing about how you pay wages

There's no clause here setting pay frequency or payslip requirements, which sounds like freedom right up until you realise the obligations still exist, they're just somewhere else. Pay frequency, payslips and final pay deadlines all come from the Fair Work Act 2009 and the Fair Work Regulations. Miss them and you're looking at penalties, interest, and potentially an FWO investigation, with accidental wage theft being the phrase nobody wants attached to their business.

Written agreements pile up faster than you'd think

TOIL, leave in advance, cashing out leave, public holiday substitution: that's four separate things this award requires in writing, and they tend to get agreed verbally in the moment and documented never. Keep them in your HRIS rather than someone's inbox, because the one you can't produce is the one that gets disputed.

Award rules leak between systems

Meal allowances, tool allowances and rest-break penalties all exist in other awards, and they show up in Professional Employees Award content and configurations where they've got no business being. If your system is paying an allowance this award doesn't contain, something upstream is applying the wrong rule set entirely. That's worth an audit on its own, because whatever produced that error almost certainly didn't produce only one.

Simplify Professional Employees Award pay with Rippling

This award asks you to track a lot of moving parts at once: annual salaries that reset every July, overtime at ordinary rates, an exemption threshold that shifts underneath your contracts, four different written agreements, and super that now runs on a seven-day clock.

Rippling helps you keep on top of all of it. Set an employee's classification and Rippling applies the right rates, penalties and overtime rules in your pay run, works out super and leave loading, and handles termination pay when someone finishes up. If something looks off, like an allowance that shouldn't be there or hours that don't match the roster, it flags it before you run payroll rather than after.

And because HR, payroll and time and attendance all sit on a single source of truth, approved hours and leave flow straight through without anyone re-keying them. Award updates flow through as well, so the July rate change doesn't need a manual sweep of your classification table.

Review, approve, run.

Frequently asked questions