Employee Record-Keeping in Australia: What You Must Keep, and for How Long

Most Australian employers know there is a rule about keeping employee records. Far fewer can say exactly which records, in what form, or for how long — and that gap is expensive, because the burden of proof in a wage dispute now falls on the employer who cannot produce them.

This guide covers what the Fair Work Act and Regulations actually require, the rule that catches most businesses out, and a practical checklist you can work through in an afternoon.

The seven-year rule

Under the Fair Work Regulations 2009, employee records must be kept for seven years. Three details matter more than the number itself:

• Seven years from when the record was made — not seven years from when the employee left. A timesheet from an employee's first week is kept seven years from that week.
• Former employees count. Someone who resigned four years ago still has records you are required to hold for another three.
• The obligation survives the business changing hands. In a transfer of business, records for transferring employees go to the new employer.

Seven years is a floor, not a ceiling. Other obligations — tax, superannuation, workers compensation — run on their own clocks, and some run longer.

What counts as an employee record

The Regulations set out specific categories. You need whichever apply to each employee:

• General — employer name and ABN, employee name, start date, and basis of employment (full-time, part-time or casual; permanent, temporary or fixed term).
• Pay — rate paid, gross and net amounts, deductions, and any bonus, loading, penalty rate, allowance or other separately identifiable entitlement.
• Hours of work — see the next section, because this is the one that trips people up.
• Leave — leave taken and the balance remaining, for each type of leave.
• Superannuation — contribution amounts, dates paid, the fund, and why that fund.
• Individual flexibility arrangements — a copy of the agreement, and of any termination of it.
• Guarantee of annual earnings — the guarantee and the date it was revoked, where one applies.
• Termination — how employment ended, whether notice was given, and who acted to end it.

The hours-of-work rule that catches people out

Plenty of employers assume that salaried staff on predictable hours need no time records at all. That is only sometimes true, and the exceptions are common ones.

You must record hours worked where:

• A penalty rate or loading applies to overtime hours — you need a record of the overtime actually worked, or of the hours that attract the penalty.
• The employee is casual or irregular part-time and paid by reference to hours worked — you need a record of those hours, and the employee needs to sign off or otherwise acknowledge them.

In practice, if anyone in your business earns a weekend rate, a public holiday rate, an overtime rate, or a shift loading, you are recording hours whether you planned to or not. Australian award coverage is wide enough that this includes most hospitality, retail, care and trades employers. Our guide to penalty rates covers which hours attract which loading.

Pay slips are a separate obligation

Pay slips are not the same duty as record-keeping, and the deadline is much tighter. A pay slip must be issued within one working day of payment — even if the employee is on leave, and even if they have since left.

It must be in writing (electronic is fine) and include the employer and employee names, the ABN, the pay period, the date of payment, gross and net pay, and the detail behind those numbers: hourly rate and hours worked, or the annual salary; any loadings, allowances, bonuses or penalty rates; deductions and who they were paid to; and superannuation contributions with the fund. Pay slips must also be kept for seven years.

Form matters as much as content

A record that exists but cannot be used is not compliance. Records must be:

• Legible and in English.
• Readily accessible to a Fair Work Inspector.
• Not false or misleading — knowingly making one is a serious contravention in its own right.
• Not altered, except to correct a genuine error.

That last point deserves attention. Correcting a mistake is expressly allowed and entirely normal — someone forgets to clock out, an admin fixes it the next morning. What matters is that the correction is genuine, and that you can explain it later. Retrospectively reshaping a timesheet to suit a pay run is a very different thing, and it is exactly what an inspector looks for.

Employees and former employees can ask for a copy of their own records, and you must provide it. Building that on a self-service basis, rather than as an email request someone has to action, removes a whole category of friction.

The part that changed the stakes: reverse onus of proof

Since the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Vulnerable Workers) Act 2017, an employer who fails to keep or produce the required records — without a reasonable excuse — carries the burden of disproving a wage claim made against them in court.

Read that again, because it inverts the usual position. Ordinarily an employee alleging underpayment has to prove it. If your records are missing, the allegation is effectively taken as correct unless you can show otherwise. An employee's recollection of the hours they worked, unrebutted, can become the number you pay.

This is the single strongest commercial argument for accurate time records. It is not about avoiding a fine for poor filing. It is about being able to answer, three years later, "how many hours did this person actually work on this day?" with evidence rather than memory.

Where businesses most often fall short

• Records held only by a departed manager — spreadsheets on a personal laptop, or a paper book kept in one location that nobody else can find.
• Rosters kept instead of actual hours. A roster is what you intended; a time record is what happened. They are not interchangeable, and only one of them is a record of hours worked.
• Deleting records when someone leaves, or when a system is switched off. The obligation follows the record, not the employment.
• Losing history when changing providers. Export your data before you cancel anything — the duty stays with you, not with the vendor.
• Unwritten corrections. An adjusted timesheet with no explanation attached is hard to defend even when the adjustment was correct.

A practical checklist

1. List everyone who worked for you in the last seven years, including casuals and leavers.
2. For each, confirm you can produce pay records, hours where required, and leave balances.
3. Check your pay slips carry every required field, and that they go out within one working day.
4. Confirm records are in English, readable, and retrievable by someone other than one person.
5. Make sure corrections carry a reason.
6. Write down where records live and who can reach them — then test that by actually retrieving one.
7. Diarise a yearly review, so this does not quietly drift again.

How NestedClock helps

NestedClock is built for these obligations rather than around them:

• Seven-year retention is the floor, not a setting. Time and wage records are retained for at least seven years to meet the Fair Work minimum — and that floor still applies after you cancel, so leaving does not destroy the evidence you are legally required to hold.
• Actual hours, not intended hours. Clock-ins record the real time, the location worked, and optionally a photo or GPS position — so the record reflects what happened.
• Corrections are controlled and explained. Editing a time entry is restricted to admins and managers, and each correction carries a note describing it. See how time adjustments work.
• Pay slips on demand — generate PDF pay summaries per staff member, so the one-working-day deadline is not a scramble.
• Staff can see their own records through the self-service portal, which quietly satisfies the access obligation.
• Your data stays in Australia. Records are held in Sydney — see data sovereignty.

The bottom line

Record-keeping is unglamorous and it is the compliance obligation most likely to be quietly neglected — right up until it is the only thing that matters. Seven years, in English, unaltered except to fix genuine errors, and retrievable by more than one person. Get that right and a wage dispute becomes a matter of producing a file. Get it wrong and you are arguing from memory against a statutory presumption.

For the wider compliance picture, read our Fair Work compliance overview. To see how NestedClock captures and keeps these records, explore the features or start a 14-day free trial.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Record-keeping obligations vary with your award, agreement and circumstances. For advice on your situation, consult the Fair Work Ombudsman or a qualified workplace relations adviser.