Aged care underpayment 2026: Southern Cross Care's $11.7M bill and what workers should check

In April 2026, Southern Cross Care (NSW & ACT) signed an enforceable undertaking with the Fair Work Ombudsman under which it will rectify $11.7 million in underpayments to 5,500 staff (FWO media release). An enforceable undertaking is a negotiated alternative to court action in which the employer commits to back-pay staff and fix its systems; it is not a penalty.

It is one of several aged-care and health employers on the FWO's enforceable undertakings register in recent years:

• Southern Cross Care (WA) — approximately $5.4M including interest and superannuation, to nearly 2,000 staff (May 2026) — FWO media release
• Southern Cross Care (Tasmania) — almost $6.9M (September 2023) — FWO media release
• St Vincent's Health Australia — more than $4.4M to staff in NSW and Queensland (December 2023; healthcare) — FWO media release
• Calvary Administration — over $2.1M including interest and superannuation (October 2023) — FWO media release

The three Southern Cross Care entities are separate organisations operating in different states. Given the sector's scale and the complexity of its pay rules, every aged-care worker should know how to check their own pay.

Most aged-care workers in Australia are covered by the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award (SCHADS). The award is one of the most complex modern awards in the country — multiple classifications, different rates for in-home and residential, sleepover allowances, recall provisions, and a thicket of penalty rate rules covering Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays, broken shifts, and early-morning shifts. Every layer is a chance for payroll to get it wrong.

Many aged-care workers are also covered by an enterprise agreement that sits on top of the award, which adds another set of rates and rules to apply correctly. Workers who do weekend, evening or public-holiday shifts in aged care should check every line of their payslip against their award or agreement.

Five checks that take an hour total but routinely uncover hundreds or thousands of dollars in errors:

• Your SCHADS classification. Look up your role in the SCHADS award descriptors (Personal Care Worker Grade 1, 2 or 3; Home Care Worker Level 1, 2 or 3, etc.). Compare your assigned classification to your actual duties. If you supervise others, hold qualifications above entry level, or work without direct supervision, you may be undergraded.
• Weekend and public-holiday penalty rates. SCHADS sets specific penalty rates for full-time and part-time employees — Saturday 150%, Sunday 200% and public holidays 250% of the ordinary rate. Cross-reference your last six months of payslips with the days you worked and check whether the right multiplier applied.
• Broken shift allowance. If you work a broken shift (a shift split by an unpaid break of more than the usual meal break, typical in home-care visits), an additional allowance applies. Many home-care workers should be receiving this and aren't.
• Sleepover and recall provisions. Residential aged-care workers doing sleepover shifts are entitled to a specific allowance plus standard rates for any work performed during the sleepover period. Mistakes here are common.
• Travel time and kilometre allowance. Home-care workers travelling between client visits should be paid for that travel time and reimbursed for kilometres at the SCHADS rate. If you only get paid for visit time, you're being underpaid.

Run the numbers with our back-pay calculator if you find a gap. The payslip checker will tell you whether your payslip even meets the legal disclosure requirements, which is often a separate problem.

If your payslip doesn't match what your award and your hours say you should be paid:

1. Document. Keep copies of your last 6 months of payslips, your roster, and any communications about pay. The FWO can typically pursue underpayment back 6 years; you want a clean evidentiary trail.
2. Raise it internally first. Send a clear, dated email to your HR team or the relevant payroll contact identifying the issue and asking for a corrected pay run plus back-pay. Use the underpayment claim builder for a defensible template.
3. Escalate if needed. If the internal response is "no" or "we'll look at it" without action, the Fair Work Ombudsman has a free dispute-resolution pathway. You can also raise an anonymous tip to FWO if you'd prefer.
4. Know the criminal offence. Since 1 January 2025, intentional wage underpayment is a criminal offence with penalties up to 10 years' imprisonment and $9.1M corporate fines. Honest mistakes are still civil; intentional underpayment is now criminal.

For operators, manual award interpretation in spreadsheets or legacy payroll software is a common source of pay errors. The SCHADS award has more than a hundred individually-changeable variables for a single shift; expecting an HR officer to apply them correctly across thousands of pay runs each month, every month, indefinitely, is unrealistic.

Aged-care operators that have moved to automated award-interpretation payroll software have a substantially lower error rate — because the award rules are encoded into the platform rather than re-interpreted by hand each pay run. It's not a silver bullet, but it removes the most-common single source of regulator-visible mistakes.