Hospitality Award Penalty Rates in 2026: What Your Weekend Roster Actually Costs

Ask a venue owner what they pay their staff and you will get a number. Ask what Saturday actually costs, once casual loading, weekend penalties and super are stacked on that number, and most owners are guessing. Not because they are careless, but because award maths is genuinely fiddly, it changed again on 1 July, and nobody opens the Fair Work pay guide for fun. 

So this article does the unglamorous thing: it walks one ordinary weekend roster through the Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020, usually shortened to HIGA, line by line, in dollars. By the end you will know what your weekend really costs, where the common costing mistakes hide, and why the gap between what owners think they pay and what the award requires is where most hospitality underpayments start. 

Two ground rules before the numbers. First, everything here is general guidance based on the published rates current at the time of writing, not legal or payroll advice; your venue's classifications, agreements and circumstances are yours, and the Fair Work pay guide and your adviser outrank any blog, this one included. Second, all figures below are from the Fair Work pay guide for MA000009 effective from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026, and award rates change every July, so check the current guide before you rely on a single number. 

What changed on 1 July 2026 

The Fair Work Commission's 2026 annual wage review lifted award minimum rates by 4.75 percent, one of the larger increases in recent years. Under HIGA, that puts the introductory Level 1 adult base rate at 26.44 dollars an hour, which also matches the new national minimum wage. Higher classification levels, your cooks, senior food and beverage staff and supervisors, sit progressively above that. 

The increase applies from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026, not necessarily 1 July itself, which is its own small trap: if your pay week started on 29 June, the old rates ran to the end of that pay period, and any system or spreadsheet that flipped on the 1st was briefly wrong in the other direction. 

The same pay run carried a second change that has nothing to do with the award but everything to do with your weekend costs: Payday Super. Since 1 July 2026, the 12 percent super guarantee must be paid at the time you pay wages rather than caught up quarterly. Super stopped being a deferred cost and became part of every roster's immediate price tag, which is exactly how we will treat it in the numbers below. 

The penalty rates that build a weekend 

Under HIGA, penalties are multipliers on the base rate for the employee's classification. Here are the ones that shape a typical venue week, for permanent and casual staff: 

Turn those multipliers into dollars for a Level 1 adult and the shape of the weekend appears. On the 26.44 dollar base: a casual is 33.05 an hour on a weekday, 39.66 on Saturday, 46.27 on Sunday, and 66.10 on a public holiday. That last number is the one that ambushes people. A public holiday casual hour costs two and a half times the base rate, and it arrives attached to the busiest trading days of the year. 

Two important footnotes to that table. Higher classifications scale every one of those figures up, so a kitchen full of Level 3 and 4 staff runs meaningfully hotter than this example. And the exact loadings for late and early work vary by classification and circumstance, so treat the table as the pattern and the pay guide as the letter. 

One weekend roster, costed line by line 

Now the part nobody does on paper. Take a suburban cafe running a standard busy weekend with Level 1 casual staff: three closers on Friday evening, four on the floor Saturday, four on Sunday. 

Now run the same roster the way it quietly gets run in a thousand venues: everyone costed at the flat weekday casual rate of 33.05. That version totals about 2,611 dollars in wages, roughly 674 dollars short every weekend before super is even considered. Across fifty trading weekends, the gap is over 33,000 dollars. If it was budgeted, it is a planning error. If it was paid, it is an underpayment, and hospitality underpayment cases have a habit of starting exactly here: not with malice, but with a flat rate that never actually covered the penalties it was supposed to absorb. 

One trap before the mistakes: which award are you actually under? 

A surprising number of venues cost their roster under the wrong award entirely. HIGA covers hotels, pubs, bars, casinos and most broad hospitality operations, but many stand-alone restaurants and cafes fall under the Restaurant Industry Award, MA000119, instead, and its penalty structure differs: Saturday plus 25 percent and Sunday plus 50 percent for permanents, with casual weekend rates of 150 percent on both days and 250 percent on public holidays, plus its own late-night loadings. The multipliers rhyme but they are not identical, and neither are the classification definitions. Five minutes with the Fair Work award finder settles which one covers you, and every number in this article should be read through that answer. 

Where the costing mistakes actually happen 

The weekend maths above is mechanical. The mistakes are almost always structural, and they cluster in five places. 

1. Wrong classification. A staff member doing Level 3 work on Level 1 pay is underpaid even if every penalty was calculated perfectly. Classification drift is normal in small venues, where people quietly absorb responsibilities; reviewing levels twice a year is the fix. 

2. Flat rates that stopped covering the award. Paying above award with a flat hourly rate is legitimate only while that rate genuinely compensates for every penalty the person would have earned. A flat rate set in 2023 has been eroded by three annual increases since; the annual check against the current pay guide is not optional. 

3. The forgotten evening loading. Weekend penalties are famous. The Monday to Friday evening loading after 7pm is not, and closes are exactly the shifts owners cost from memory. 

4. The public holiday ambush. At 250 percent for casuals, a public holiday shift costs what two and a half ordinary shifts cost. Trading that day can still be the right call, but it should be a decision made with the number in front of you, not a surprise in the pay run after. 

5. Super timed like it is 2024. Under Payday Super, the 12 percent lands with every pay run. Rosters costed without it understate labour by an eighth, and late super now compounds pay run by pay run instead of quarter by quarter. 

What this means for the roster, not just the payroll 

Here is the practical shift: penalty rates are not a payroll problem, they are a rostering decision. The moment a Sunday hour costs 40 percent more than a Tuesday hour, the questions change. Does the Sunday quiet period need four staff or three? Does the public holiday justify a surcharge, reduced hours, or closing? Should the prep that always lands on Saturday move to Thursday? None of these have universal answers, but all of them have numerical ones, and venues that see the cost of a roster before publishing it make different, better calls than venues that discover the cost at payday. 

This is the whole argument for award interpretation living inside the rostering tool rather than in a spreadsheet afterwards. When rosters, timesheets and payroll run in one system with the award rules applied to every shift as you build it, the weekend above stops being an estimate: the 3,679 dollars is on the screen before you hit publish, next to the revenue it is meant to serve. And because the same system runs the POS for the venue, labour sits against sales live, which is the number that actually decides whether Sunday's roster was right. 

See what your weekend costs before you publish it 

Allvio applies the award rules, penalties included, to every rostered shift and shows the cost next to the sales. Payroll, Single Touch Payroll and payday super run from the same system. 

Start your free 30-day trial   |   Talk to us about switching payroll 

A note on rostering tools and the award 

Plenty of venues run a standalone scheduler for this job, and the popular ones are genuinely competent at it. The structural question is what happens after the roster: hours still have to become award-correct pays, pays still have to reach the ATO through Single Touch Payroll, and super still has to move on payday. Our Allvio vs Deputy comparison walks through that boundary honestly, including where a dedicated scheduler is the better choice. The short version: the fewer systems the award rules have to survive passing between, the fewer places the weekend maths can quietly go wrong. It is the same logic that applies to payment systems and their percentages: the costs you see are rarely the problem; the ones that live between systems are. 

The numbers to pin above the desk 

• Award rates rose 4.75 percent from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026; Level 1 adult base is 26.44 dollars an hour. 

• Casual loading is 25 percent, always, on top of the classification base. 

• Saturday 125 or 150 percent, Sunday 150 or 175 percent, public holidays 225 or 250 percent, permanent or casual respectively. 

• Evenings after 7pm on weekdays carry a loading that flat-rate memory reliably forgets. 

• Super is 12 percent, paid with every pay run since 1 July 2026. 

• Rates change every July. The Fair Work pay guide for MA000009 is the source of truth, and fifteen minutes with it each July is the cheapest compliance work you will ever do. 

FAQs 

What are the penalty rates under the hospitality award? 

Under the Hospitality Industry (General) Award for 2026-27, full-time and part-time staff receive 125 percent of their base rate on Saturdays, 150 percent on Sundays and 225 percent on public holidays. Casuals, whose rates include a 25 percent loading, receive 150 percent on Saturdays, 175 percent on Sundays and 250 percent on public holidays, with an additional loading for weekday evening work. Exact dollar figures depend on classification level; the current Fair Work pay guide has the full table. 

How much does a public holiday shift cost? 

For a Level 1 casual in 2026-27, a public holiday hour costs 66.10 dollars at 250 percent of the 26.44 dollar base, before the 12 percent super paid with wages. A single eight-hour casual shift therefore costs around 592 dollars all in, roughly two and a half times an ordinary shift, which is why trading on a public holiday should be a costed decision rather than a default. 

What happens if I underpay an award rate? 

Underpayments must be back-paid, and they attract Fair Work scrutiny, penalties and, in serious cases, prosecution, regardless of whether the underpayment was intentional. The most common causes are wrong classifications and flat rates that no longer cover the penalties they were meant to absorb. If you find a discrepancy, quantify it, back-pay it and fix the setting that caused it; your adviser or the Fair Work Ombudsman can help with the process.