Summary
Cleaning has a problem almost no other industry has: the work happens where nobody is watching. Staff let themselves into empty offices at 5am or locked-up retail at 9pm, work alone, and leave. There is no supervisor, no manager on shift, and usually no client present.
Every difficulty in running a cleaning business flows from that one fact. You cannot confirm attendance by looking. You cannot confirm a site was actually serviced. And when a client says "nobody came Tuesday", you are relying on your cleaner's recollection against the client's.
This guide covers what the Cleaning Services Award 2020 actually requires around broken shifts, travel and minimum engagements, the evidence problem and how to solve it without treating your staff as suspects, and the portable long service leave obligation many operators do not know they have.
The award features that shape the roster
Read your own award — clauses vary with each annual variation — but the provisions that shape cleaning rosters are these:
Minimum engagement
Part-time and casual employees are entitled to a minimum number of hours each time they are engaged. This is the provision that makes a portfolio of small sites expensive: three 40-minute sites are not two hours of pay, they are potentially three separate minimum engagements unless they are worked as one continuous shift with travel between them.
Which means the economics of your run depend on how sites are grouped, not just how long each takes. Two runs of four adjacent sites cost dramatically less than eight scattered ones, and the difference is invisible until you cost it properly.
Broken shifts
Cleaning naturally splits — an early morning run and an evening run. Where the award permits broken shifts it typically limits how many breaks a shift may contain, sets a span within which the whole shift must fall, and provides an allowance for working one. A broken shift is not simply two shifts; it is a defined arrangement with its own conditions and cost.
Travel between sites
Time spent travelling between sites during a shift is generally working time and is paid. Ordinary travel from home to the first site, and from the last site home, generally is not. Vehicle and travel allowances may apply where an employee uses their own car.
The practical failure is subtle: businesses pay for time at each site and treat the gaps as unpaid, which understates the shift. If a cleaner is required to be at site B at a set time after finishing site A, the time in between is not their own.
Penalties for early morning and night work
Cleaning happens outside ordinary hours by definition, so penalty rates are not an exception in this industry — they are most of the payroll. Which makes the actual start and finish times, not the rostered ones, the thing that determines the wage bill.
The evidence problem
Because nobody supervises the work, three questions have no natural answer:
- Did they attend? A client disputing an invoice for a night nobody can vouch for is a commercial problem, not just a payroll one.
- How long were they there? Which determines both the wage and the profitability of that contract.
- Were they at the right site? On a multi-site run, clocking on once at the start understates nothing and proves nothing.
The traditional answers are all weak. Paper sheets left at site are filled in from memory at the end of the week. Phone calls to a supervisor depend on someone answering at 5am. Client sign-off requires a client to be present, which is the thing that is not true.
The fix, and how not to get it wrong
Location-stamped clock-ins solve this, and they solve it for the staff member as much as for the employer — a cleaner accused of skipping a site has, for the first time, a record that says otherwise.
Two things determine whether staff accept it or resent it, and both are choices you make:
- Capture location at the clock event, not continuously. A record of where someone was when they started and finished a shift is proportionate to the dispute it resolves. Tracking their movements between shifts is not, and it will poison the whole arrangement.
- Tell people plainly what is recorded and why. Framed as "this is how we prove you were there when a client claims otherwise", it is protection. Framed as nothing, it is surveillance.
Australian privacy law and the surveillance legislation in several states impose notice requirements on workplace monitoring, and the requirements differ by state. Get advice for your jurisdiction before switching anything on, and put the notice in writing regardless.
NestedClock records GPS location with each clock event and shows it on a map per shift, with photo verification available at clock-in for sites where identity matters. Staff clock in and out per site, so a five-site run produces five records rather than one — which is what makes both the invoice and the timesheet defensible.
The obligation most operators miss: portable long service leave
Contract cleaning is covered by portable long service leave schemes in several jurisdictions — the ACT, Queensland and Victoria among them, with coverage having expanded in recent years.
Where a scheme applies you must register and pay levies on your employees' ordinary wages. This is an obligation independent of the underlying entitlement, and non-registration is a breach in itself. It is also easy to miss for years, because nothing in ordinary payroll prompts you about it.
Two consequences follow. Check whether your jurisdiction's scheme covers you — and if it does, your levy return is calculated from ordinary wages, so accurate hours records are what make it correct. Our long service leave guide covers how the schemes work.
Costing a contract properly
Cleaning is a thin-margin business quoted by the site and paid by the hour, and the gap between those two is where contracts quietly go underwater. Three inputs are routinely wrong:
- Actual time on site versus quoted time. A site quoted at 45 minutes that consistently takes 70 is losing money every night, and nobody notices because the invoice does not change.
- Travel time inside the shift, which is paid and is rarely in the quote.
- Penalty rates, which for early-morning and night work are the majority of the cost rather than a surcharge.
Once clock-ins are per site, this becomes measurable: actual minutes per site per visit, over time, against what you charge. That single comparison usually reprices two or three contracts immediately.
A short checklist
- Confirm minimum engagement and group sites into runs that respect it.
- Check whether your rosters are broken shifts under the award, and whether the allowance is being paid.
- Pay travel between sites as working time.
- Record clock-in and clock-out per site, not per run.
- Give written notice of any location recording, and take advice on your state's surveillance law.
- Check portable long service leave registration in every jurisdiction you operate in.
- Compare actual site minutes to quoted minutes quarterly.
Where to check the detail
The Cleaning Services Award 2020 is on the Fair Work Commission website — read the current version, as minimum engagement, broken shift and allowance clauses are varied regularly. Portable long service leave authorities are separate bodies in each jurisdiction. Workplace surveillance obligations sit under state legislation and differ materially between them.
This article is general information, not legal advice.