How retail penalty rates work: a worked-example roster check before you hit publish

It's 9pm on a Sunday. You're in the back office, the roster for next week is nearly done, and there's a gap on Saturday afternoon. You're about to drop it into the team chat and offer it to whichever casual replies first — probably the uni student who always says yes. You just filled a Tuesday morning gap the same way. Same person, same hours, same job. Different day. One of those shifts is about to cost you 25% more per hour than the other. Do you know which, and by how much, before you publish?

What penalty rates actually are (and why casuals feel it most)

Under the General Retail Industry Award 2020, the base hourly rate is the floor. Penalty rates are loadings that sit on top for shifts worked at times the award treats as unsociable: weekends, public holidays, and evenings after 6pm. For casuals, the 25% casual loading sits on top of all of that — it doesn't replace the weekend or public-holiday loading.

Here's the maths on a Level 1 adult casual, using a base rate of roughly $24.10/hour (check the current figure — rates move every July):

• Monday–Friday day shift: $24.10 × 1.25 casual loading = $30.13/hour
• Saturday: $24.10 × 1.25 casual + 25% Saturday loading = ~$36.15/hour
• Sunday: $24.10 × 1.50 (casual + Sunday loading combined) = ~$36.15/hour
• Public holiday: $24.10 × 2.50 = ~$60.25/hour

Same casual. Same uniform. Wildly different cost lines.

What a real retail week looks like in penalty-rate terms

Let's roster a small homewares store, five staff, open seven days. Same five casuals, same eight-hour shift each.

Wednesday (a quiet trading day):

• 5 casuals × 8 hours × $30.13 = $1,205.20

Saturday (your biggest day):

• 5 casuals × 8 hours × $36.15 = $1,446.00
• That's 20% more labour for the same headcount.

Sunday:

• 5 casuals × 8 hours × $36.15 = $1,446.00

Public holiday (say, a Monday long weekend):

• 5 casuals × 8 hours × $60.25 = $2,410.00
• That single trading day costs double a regular Wednesday — and that's before anyone runs into overtime.

Now stack that across a week. A retailer who rosters identical shifts Mon–Sun pays roughly $1,205 on Wednesday and $1,446 on Saturday for the same five people doing the same work. A six-trading-day week with a public holiday lands you north of $9,000 in casual wages before super, before overtime, before anyone stays back ten minutes to cash out.

Most operators don't see this comparison until payroll day. By then the roster is locked, the hours are worked, and the bill is the bill.

Three rostering habits that quietly blow the labour budget

1. Filling weekend gaps with whoever replies first. Your most-available casual is often your most-available because they're newer, which usually means a lower classification level — fine on a Tuesday, but on a Sunday at $36+/hour you might be better off offering it to a more experienced casual who'll get through the work in 6 hours instead of 8. Availability isn't free.

2. Letting a shift slide into the evening loading. General Retail Award loadings kick in for hours worked after 6pm Monday–Friday. A casual rostered 11am–7pm picks up evening loading on the last hour. A casual rostered 10am–6pm doesn't. Same eight hours, different cost — and often the later finish wasn't necessary, it's just how the roster fell.

3. Forgetting that public-holiday shifts compound. Casual loading, public-holiday penalty, and any overtime stack. A casual who works ten hours on a public holiday isn't costing you 2× the Monday rate — they're closer to 2.5–3× once overtime hits. If the trading day doesn't warrant five staff, run three. The marginal cost of the fourth person on a public holiday is brutal.

Seeing the cost before payroll does — how Schedaddle fits in

Schedaddle is rostering software, not a payroll engine and not an award-compliance enforcer. It won't auto-block a non-compliant shift or calculate your final payroll figure — that's the job of HankHR (our sister product for HR and payroll) or your accountant. What Schedaddle does do is give you cost signals while you're building the roster, so you can see what Saturday looks like before you hit publish, not after the pay run.

Clock-ins from the built-in biometric time clock tie back to the rostered shifts, and the hours flow out to QuickBooks, Xero, or your payroll export — so what you saw on Sunday night matches what gets paid on Wednesday.

For the full rate breakdown — Saturday, Sunday, evening, public holiday, and casual loading — see our full rate reference for the General Retail Award. For how the rostering side works, here's how Schedaddle handles weekly rosters, and the per-location pricing page explains why hiring your sixth casual doesn't cost you more in software.

When you last published a roster, did you know the labour cost before payroll told you? If the answer is roughly, that's usually the gap worth closing — not next quarter, but next Sunday night.