Summary
Construction is the only major Australian industry where the standard award roster does not fit in a week. The Building and Construction General On-site Award 2020 builds in rostered days off accrued over a four-week cycle, which means an employee working ordinary hours accrues time towards a day off they have not taken yet — and a payroll system that thinks in weeks cannot represent that.
Add site allowances that vary by project, inclement weather, follow-the-job loading for daily hire employees, and a portable long service leave scheme in every state, and you have an industry where getting the hours right is genuinely harder than the trade work being recorded.
RDOs: the mechanism most systems get wrong
Under the on-site award, ordinary hours are typically worked so that a portion of each day accrues toward a rostered day off, producing the familiar 19-day month. The consequence is that an RDO is not leave. It is time already worked, banked, and taken later.
That distinction drives three things people get wrong:
- An RDO balance is a liability. Accrued and untaken RDO time is owed. It is not a scheduling nicety and it does not evaporate at year end.
- It must be paid out on termination. Anyone leaving with banked RDO time is owed it in their final pay.
- Accrual depends on hours actually worked, so absences, site shutdowns and short days all affect it. Treating it as an automatic monthly entitlement drifts from the real balance quickly.
The practical requirement is that you can state, for each employee at any moment, how much RDO time has accrued and how much has been taken. If that number lives in a spreadsheet maintained by one person, it is a risk rather than a record.
Site allowances and follow-the-job loading
Two features make construction pay project-dependent rather than person-dependent.
Site allowances attach to the project — its value, its conditions, sometimes an enterprise agreement covering that site. The same employee on two sites in one week can attract different allowances on different days. Which means hours have to be recorded against a site, not just against a person, or the allowance cannot be calculated at all.
Follow-the-job loading applies to daily hire employees under the award, compensating for the industry's inherent insecurity. It is a standing feature of the wage, not an occasional extra.
Beyond those, the award carries a long list of allowances tied to conditions and tasks — height, confined spaces, wet work, tools, travel and fares. Most are triggered by what happened on a particular day at a particular site, which again is a record-keeping question before it is a payroll one.
Inclement weather
The award provides for what happens when work stops for weather: when employees must remain on site, when they may be transferred to other work, and how the stoppage is paid. It is one of the few provisions that is invoked frequently and recorded almost never.
The record you want is unglamorous — the time work stopped, the reason, and what employees did for the remainder. Reconstructing a rain day six months later, across a crew of twenty, is not realistic, and it is exactly the kind of gap that becomes an underpayment claim.
Portable long service leave applies everywhere
Construction has a portable long service leave scheme in every state and territory. Service follows the worker across employers within the industry, funded by employer levies.
Two obligations follow: register with the scheme in each jurisdiction you work in, and lodge returns and pay levies based on ordinary wages. Because levies are calculated from wages, an inaccurate hours record produces an inaccurate return — and the schemes audit.
This is also the reason a construction employer cannot reason about long service leave the way other employers do. A first-year apprentice may already carry years of scheme service from previous employers. See our long service leave guide.
The site attendance problem
Construction shares cleaning's evidence problem for a different reason: work happens across multiple sites with no central office, and the person who knows who was on site is a leading hand who is also working.
Three consequences:
- Allowances cannot be calculated without knowing who was where.
- Job costing is guesswork if hours are not attributed to a project. Labour is the largest variable cost on most jobs, and a project that is losing money is invisible until it is finished.
- Site inductions and white cards are per-site compliance requirements, and knowing who attended which site is what makes them auditable.
Location-stamped clock-in per site addresses all three at once, and it does so without anyone filling in a docket. It also produces something safety regulators increasingly expect: a record of who was on a site at a given time, which after an incident is the first question asked.
NestedClock records clock events per location with GPS, so hours attribute to the site they were worked on rather than to the business as a whole, and a worker moving between two sites in a day produces two records. Our guide to GPS location tracking covers what is captured and what is not.
Apprentices
Apprentice wage rates step by year of apprenticeship and, under the current structure, by competency progression rather than time alone. Two things follow: the progression date is a payroll event that must be actioned, and an apprentice who has progressed but is still being paid the previous rate is being underpaid from the date of progression, not from the date someone noticed.
Keep the commencement date, the stage, and the next progression point against the person, and treat progression as a scheduled change rather than a request.
A short checklist
- Track RDO accrual and balance per employee, driven by hours actually worked.
- Record hours against a site, not just against a person.
- Map site allowances to projects so they follow the work.
- Record inclement weather stoppages on the day.
- Register with the portable scheme in every jurisdiction you operate in, and reconcile returns to hours.
- Diarise apprentice progression dates.
- Compare labour hours per project to the estimate while the job is still running.
Where to check the detail
The Building and Construction General On-site Award 2020 is on the Fair Work Commission website; enterprise agreements covering specific sites may displace parts of it. Portable long service leave authorities are separate in each jurisdiction. Apprenticeship arrangements are administered by your state or territory training authority.
This article is general information, not legal advice.