Part-time employee entitlements

You can hire cleaning employees on a part-time basis to suit your business. Part-time work arrangements can be beneficial for both you and your employees. For example, your employees may be able to enjoy greater work-life balance, and you can roster them during your business’s busiest periods.

Wages & penalty rates

Important! Find out more about wages, loadings and penalty rates under the Cleaning Award on the wages & penalty rates section. It is important that you check this information as the Cleaning Award saves some wages, penalty rates and loadings from pre-modern awards and phases in other wages, penalty rates and loadings.

Unless your part-time employees’ wages are provided in Schedule A or Schedule B of the Cleaning Award, they are entitled to an hourly allowance of 15% of the base hourly rate. This allowance allows you to roster your part-time employees to work up to 7.6 hours per day, 5 days per week, or 38 ordinary hours per week, without having to pay overtime penalties. The allowance is paid on top of the relevant full-time hourly rate for the classification that they are working in.

You must pay your part-time employees overtime for any time they are required to work in addition to 7.6 hours per day, 5 days per week or 38 hours per week.

If your business doesn’t use a roster, and you require your part-time employees to work outside their agreed hours of work, then you must pay them overtime for these hours.

All time worked by your part-time cleaning employees on weekends and public holidays will attract penalty rates.

Your cleaning employees working Monday - Friday starting before 6.00am or finishing after 6.00pm will receive additional penalty rates. Visit the shiftwork section for more information.

Leave

Part-time employees also get a pro rata amount of paid annual leave and personal leave, which means a proportionate amount based on their hours of work.