Fair Work checked 28 venues and 22 were underpaying: the two lines to check on your payslip

Fair Work inspectors walked into 28 fast food outlets, restaurants and cafes around Hobart without warning. Twenty-two of them were breaking the law. The regulator recovered $129,674 for 180 workers, an average of about $720 a head, and the two things venues got wrong most were the two easiest lines for you to check: base rates (20 businesses) and penalty rates (18 businesses).

Hobart is a small city, but this isn't a Tasmanian story. The Fair Work Ombudsman keeps fast food, restaurants and cafes on its list of national priorities for exactly this reason, and Ombudsman Anna Booth named who is missing out: workers who are "often vulnerable young people or visa holders". If that's you, ten minutes with a payslip and a calculator is the best paid part of your week.

Short version: check two lines. First, your ordinary hourly rate against your classification level (casual rates already include the 25% loading). Second, whether Saturday, Sunday, evening and public holiday hours show up as separate lines at the right percentage. Which award covers your venue changes the answer, and a cafe and a pub legally pay different Sunday rates for identical work. You have 6 years to make a claim. This is general information, not legal or financial advice. All rates are award minimums applying from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026.

What the inspectors actually found

Those numbers add past 28 because most venues broke more than one rule at once. The FWO issued 31 Compliance Notices across the 22 non-compliant businesses, which is what produced the $129,674, plus 12 fines (Infringement Notices) worth $24,570 to eight of them for the record-keeping and pay slip breaches. The single largest recovery was $19,277 for 27 employees at one venue, roughly $714 each, where the breaches were minimum rates, overtime and penalty rates under the Restaurant Industry Award 2020.

The most useful detail is a return visit. One North Hobart business had already back-paid 55 workers $150,905 after an inspection in 2019. Re-inspected last year it met every obligation but one: four employees had missed an age-related pay increase, and it back-paid $2,199. The director's account of the original problem is the sentence worth remembering. The 2019 underpayment, he said, "arose due to wrong classifications".

Line one: your base rate

Your ordinary hourly rate is the number every other number is built from, so an error there multiplies quietly through your weekends and your overtime. Find your classification level, find the matching adult casual rate, compare. Casual figures below already include the 25% casual loading, so that is the number that should appear on your payslip for a normal weekday shift.

Levels go by the duties you actually perform, not your job title, your venue's internal titles, or how long you've been there. Pulling coffees and taking orders is generally food and beverage attendant grade 2 work; cocktails, silver service or supervising others sits higher. Our guide to the hospitality award levels walks the ladder, and misclassification is the most common way a base rate goes wrong in the first place.

If you're under 21, check your birthday too

Junior rates are a set percentage of the adult rate and they step up on your birthday. Nobody sends a reminder, which is precisely how four Hobart workers went unnoticed. Here's the ladder for a casual Level 1 in a cafe or restaurant.

• Under 17: 50% of the adult rate, $16.53 an hour
• 17 years old: 60%, $19.84
• 18 years old: 70%, $23.14
• 19 years old: 85%, $28.10
• 20 and over: 100%, $33.05

One exception is worth real money and almost nobody knows it. Both the Restaurant and Hospitality awards say a junior working as a liquor service employee must be paid as an adult, at the classification rate for the work being done. A liquor service employee is anyone employed to sell or dispense liquor in bars, bottle departments or shops, cellar staff included. So a 19-year-old on the beer taps should be on $33.05, not $28.10. On an eight-hour shift that's about $40.

Line two: your penalty rates

Eighteen of the 28 venues got these wrong, and it's the harder breach to catch because there is no single right answer. Three different awards cover the sector the inspectors swept, and they disagree with each other about Sunday. Same person, same level, same Sunday, different rate.

The same Sunday shift, worked by the same person at the same level, pays $39.66 an hour in a cafe and $46.27 in a pub. Neither figure is a mistake.

Two wrinkles follow from that table. In a cafe or restaurant the casual Sunday penalty jumps from 150% to 175% once you're Level 3 or above ($48.95 an hour), so moving up to grade 3 is worth far more on a Sunday than on a Tuesday. And evening penalties start at different times: in a pub the extra $2.95 an hour kicks in at 7pm, in a cafe or a fast food outlet not until 10pm. Public holidays are the one point of agreement, at 250% for casuals under all three awards, which we've broken down in our public holiday pay guide.

One week, 20 hours, two venues

Take an adult casual Level 2 food and beverage attendant working a Wednesday close, a Saturday day shift and a Sunday day shift. Identical hours, identical duties, identical classification. The only thing that changes is which award covers the building.

The $63.01 gap between the two venues is entirely legal. The gap underneath it is not. Across a 48-week year, that flat rate leaves $4,691 on the table in the cafe and $7,716 in the pub, and it never looks like theft on any single payslip. Nobody notices $97.73. That is the whole reason a flat all-in rate is worth arguing about before you agree to it, not after.

What to do if the numbers don't match

1. Confirm which award covers the venue. Pubs, hotels and motels are MA000009. Standalone restaurants, cafes, night clubs and roadhouses are MA000119, but a restaurant operating inside a hotel falls under the hospitality award instead. Branded fast food outlets are MA000003. The FWO's Find my award tool settles it in about two questions.
2. Run one real shift through the free [FWO pay calculator](https://calculate.fairwork.gov.au/). Feed it your award, level, age and actual start and finish times. It's the regulator's own tool, it costs nothing, and its answer is the one that counts.
3. Keep your own record of hours. The FWO's free Record My Hours app logs shifts and exports timesheets you can email to yourself. Seven of the 28 Hobart venues had record-keeping breaches, and when the employer's records are thin, yours become the evidence.
4. Ask in writing, once, politely. Most underpayments are a payroll setting nobody revisited, not a conspiracy. Email your manager the specific line, the rate you think applies and where you got it. A written trail matters later.
5. If that goes nowhere, contact the Fair Work Ombudsman. You can report anonymously, in a language other than English, with a free interpreter on 13 14 50. Visa holders have the same workplace rights as anyone else, and asking the FWO for help won't affect your visa.

Knowing what a shift is worth before you take it

All of this is only difficult because the pay is invisible until after the work is done. You accept a shift, you work it, and two weeks later you're reverse-engineering a number. Shiftly is free workforce management for venues with an on-demand staffing network built into the roster, so shifts that need filling get offered to nearby workers with the pay shown before you accept, and the money lands fast once the shift is finished. It's a rostering and calculation tool with award-aware timesheets, not a payroll provider, so it helps a venue estimate what a shift is worth and helps you see that figure up front. The two checks above are still yours to run on your own payslip. Find shifts on Shiftly.

Frequently asked questions

How do I work out which award covers my venue?

Ask your employer, then check the answer. Pubs, hotels and motels sit under the Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020 (MA000009). Standalone restaurants, cafes, night clubs and roadhouses sit under the Restaurant Industry Award 2020 (MA000119), though a restaurant operated inside hotel premises is covered by the hospitality award instead. Branded fast food outlets sit under the Fast Food Industry Award 2010 (MA000003). Your payslip, contract or roster software usually names one, and the FWO's Find my award tool confirms it for free.

My payslip shows one flat amount for the week. Is that allowed?

Not if you're paid an hourly rate. Every penalty rate, loading and allowance has to appear as a separately identifiable entitlement, so Saturday, Sunday, evening and public holiday hours each need their own visible line. A single blended number is the classic tell, and pay slip failures earned five of the Hobart venues a fine. Our line-by-line payslip walkthrough covers what else legally has to be on there.

I'm on a working holiday visa. Do the same rates apply to me?

Yes. Award minimums, penalty rates and the casual loading apply to migrant and visa-holding workers on exactly the same terms, and the FWO states that those protections continue regardless of migration status. It also says your visa won't be cancelled for contacting them. Tax is the separate question that trips people up, and we've covered that in our backpacker tax guide.

How far back can I claim if I've been underpaid for years?

An application under the small claims process has to be made within 6 years of the date of the contravention. That window is why your own record of hours matters so much: a few dollars an hour, six years deep, stops being a rounding error. Start with the Fair Work Ombudsman rather than a lawyer, because its advice and its pay tools are free.