For many NDIS and aged care providers, the broken shift allowance is one of the most misunderstood — and most frequently underpaid — entitlements under the SCHADS Award.
A broken shift occurs when an employee works two or more separate periods of work within a single day, with an unpaid break between those periods that exceeds the standard meal break. Under the SCHADS Award (clause 34), a broken shift is specifically defined as a shift that is interrupted by a non-paid, non-working period other than a standard meal break.
This is particularly common in community care and SIL settings. A support worker who assists a participant with their morning routine from 7:00am to 9:00am, has several hours off, then returns to provide evening personal care from 5:00pm to 8:00pm — that is a textbook broken shift, and it attracts an allowance above ordinary or penalty pay for those hours.
The broken shift allowance applies to employees under the SCHADS Award working in the Home Care or Social and Community Services streams. It does not apply to all award classifications. Key conditions that trigger the allowance: the employee works two or more separate work periods in a day; the gap between periods is not a standard meal break; and the employee is covered by the SCHADS Award.
The most frequent error is simply not knowing the allowance exists. Providers who migrated from older state awards or who rely on outdated payroll templates often have no broken shift line item in their pay runs at all. A second common mistake is misclassifying broken shifts as two separate ordinary shifts. Third, some providers apply the allowance inconsistently. Finally, broken shift allowances must flow through to superannuation calculations as ordinary time earnings in many cases.
Audit your current roster patterns for any employee working two bookings in a single day with a gap greater than a standard meal break. Configure your payroll system to include a broken shift allowance pay component that triggers automatically when qualifying conditions are met. Train your roster coordinators to understand that certain patterns carry additional cost.
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