Qantas Pay Rates 2026: Ground Staff, Cabin Crew & EA Pay

Two modern awards set the pay floor across the Qantas group:

• Airline Operations—Ground Staff Award 2020 (MA000048) — ramp and baggage handling, check-in and customer service, freight, stores, and aircraft maintenance support.
• Aircraft Cabin Crew Award 2020 (MA000047) — flight attendants on Qantas, QantasLink, and Jetstar.

In practice most direct Qantas and Jetstar employees are paid under enterprise agreements negotiated with their unions, which sit above these award floors — see the EA section below. The award still matters: it is the legal minimum your EA must beat overall, and it applies directly at ground handlers and labour-hire firms working airside without their own agreement.

Adult minimum hourly rates from 1 July 2026, verified against the Fair Work Commission pay database:

The maintenance and engineering stream runs from Aircraft Worker 1 at $25.74/hr (the entry rate) through trade and licensed engineer classifications up to $34.46/hr for full category licence holders.

The cabin crew award has a deliberately flat structure — three classifications:

Note the cabin crew award doesn't use weekend penalty rates the way ground awards do — crew pay is built around duty and flying-hour rules instead, with overtime at 200% for domestic and international flying employees. Weekend work is priced into the structure, not paid as a separate Saturday/Sunday loading.

Under MA000048, permanent ground staff (using aviation transport Level 1 at $27.38/hr as the example):

• Saturday: 150% — $41.07/hr
• Sunday: 200% — $54.76/hr
• Public holiday: 200% — $54.76/hr (Christmas Day and Good Friday: 250% — $68.45/hr)
• Early morning or afternoon shift: 115% — $31.49/hr
• Night shift commencing after midnight: 130% — $35.59/hr
• Continuous afternoon or night shifts: 150% — $41.07/hr

Casuals get higher multipliers because the loading is folded in: Saturday 175%, Sunday 225%, public holidays 225% (Christmas Day and Good Friday 275%). Airport rosters are shift-heavy, so these loadings usually matter more to your take-home pay than the base rate does.

Most Qantas group staff are on EA rates above the award. Current agreements in our corpus include:

• Australian Services Union (Qantas Airways Limited) Agreement 13 — airport customer service and administrative staff, nominal expiry June 2029.
• Qantas Pilots (Short Haul) Enterprise Agreement 2024 (EBA9).
• Jetstar Airways Cabin Crew Agreement 2022.
• Qantas / QF Cabin Crew Australia Enterprise Agreement 2022 (EBA11).

We don't quote EA dollar figures here because each agreement has its own scales, allowances, and flying-pay structures — read the agreement that names your employing entity (Qantas Airways, QF Cabin Crew Australia, Jetstar, and so on), because the group deliberately employs crew through different entities on different agreements.

Watch for:

• Wrong entity, wrong agreement — your payslip names your legal employer; check the agreement that actually covers that entity rather than assuming the mainline EA applies.
• Shift penalties missing — early-start ramp and check-in shifts should carry shift loadings, not flat rates.
• Labour-hire on award minimums — if you work airside for a ground handler, the MA000048 rates above are your floor and the labour-hire "same job, same pay" rules may entitle you to the host's EA rate.
• Allowances — meal, uniform, and licence allowances are easy to drop off payslips.

Pull your roster and six months of payslips, run the numbers through our back-pay calculator, and raise discrepancies with payroll in writing. Unresolved after 14 days? The Fair Work Ombudsman (13 13 94) is free, and claims can go back six years.