The SCHADS Award, explained without the headache
SCHADS is where a lot of good providers accidentally underpay good workers. Not out of malice, but because disability support is full of short visits, split days, overnight stays and driving between houses, and the award has a rule for every one of them.
On rates: check the live source, not a blog
Award rates change, usually after the annual wage review. This guide deliberately does not print dollar figures, because a stale number is worse than none. For current rates, use the Fair Work Ombudsman's Pay and Conditions Tool, which is the authoritative source.
The short version
- SCHADS is the award covering most disability support and home care workers in Australia.
- The money is rarely in the base rate. It's in broken shifts, sleepovers, travel, penalties and minimum engagement.
- Short visits are where minimum engagement bites. Paying "one hour of work" for a 45-minute visit may not be enough.
- Travel between clients is a classic underpayment. So is the vehicle allowance.
- Get it wrong at scale and it compounds quietly across every worker, every week.
What SCHADS actually is
SCHADS is the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award. It sets the minimum pay and conditions for most Australian disability support workers, home care workers and community services staff, which includes a large share of the NDIS workforce.
It is not NDIS pricing. That's a separate thing: the NDIS Price Guide caps what you can charge, while SCHADS sets what you must pay. Providers get squeezed between the two, and the squeeze is exactly why the details below matter.
The NDIS Price Guide governs your revenue. SCHADS governs your cost. Almost every margin problem in disability support lives in the gap between them.
The five places providers get caught out
1. Minimum engagement
If you call someone in, you must pay them for a minimum period, even if the actual task is shorter. In disability support, where a 30 or 45-minute visit is completely normal, this catches people constantly. A worker doing three short visits in a day may be owed considerably more than the sum of those visits.
2. Broken shifts
The classic support-work day: an hour in the morning, an hour at lunch, two hours in the evening. That is not one shift, it is a broken shift, and the award treats it differently, with allowances attached. Paying it as though it were a single continuous shift, or as three unrelated ones, is usually wrong.
3. Sleepovers and overnight support
An overnight stay is not simply "hours worked". The award has specific provisions for sleepover arrangements, and separate treatment if the worker is actually woken and has to provide support during the night. Those two things are not paid the same way.
4. Travel time and vehicle allowance
If a worker drives from one client to the next during their shift, that time is not free. The award provides for it, and for an allowance when the worker uses their own car. Back-to-back home visits with unpaid driving in between is one of the most common underpayments in the sector, and one of the easiest for a regulator to spot.
5. Penalties and overtime
Evenings, weekends, public holidays and overtime all carry loadings. Care doesn't stop on a Sunday, so this is not an edge case, it's a large share of a typical roster.
Why it goes wrong, structurally
Almost nobody sets out to underpay a support worker. It goes wrong because the roster lives in one place, the timesheet in another, and the pay run in a third, usually a spreadsheet. Someone types hours across, the award's rules are applied from memory, and a small error is repeated every fortnight across an entire team until it becomes a large one.
Two habits that prevent most of it:
- Let the roster be the source of truth. If the shift is recorded accurately at the point of care, with real start and finish times and real travel, the award conditions can be applied from facts rather than recollection.
- Check the live rates, every review. Rates change, and a hardcoded figure in a spreadsheet from two years ago is a slow-motion underpayment.
Common questions
Is SCHADS the same as the NDIS Price Guide?
No. SCHADS is an employment award that sets what you must pay your staff. The NDIS Price Guide sets the maximum you can charge for supports. They are different documents from different bodies, and you need to work within both.
Does SCHADS pay for travel between clients?
The award provides for travel time between clients within a shift, and for a vehicle allowance when a worker uses their own car for work. Unpaid driving between back-to-back visits is a frequent and avoidable underpayment.
Where do I find the current rates?
The Fair Work Ombudsman's Pay and Conditions Tool. It is the authoritative, current source. Do not rely on a figure from a blog post, including this one, which is exactly why there aren't any here.
Get the roster right and payroll follows
CiaraLink records shifts, travel and notes at the point of care, and applies SCHADS-aware rates to what actually happened, not to what someone remembered a fortnight later.
This guide is general information, not legal, industrial-relations or payroll advice, and it does not state pay rates because those change. Always confirm your obligations against the current SCHADS Award text and the Fair Work Ombudsman's Pay and Conditions Tool, and seek professional advice for your circumstances. CiaraLink is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the Fair Work Ombudsman, the NDIA or the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission.