How to Calculate Public Holiday Pay for Australian Retail Staff (Under the General Retail Industry Award)

There's a public holiday on next week's roster. You've got two casuals down for a four-hour shift each, and you're sitting at the kitchen table wondering whether it's double time, double time and a half, or something else entirely. The award document is 80 pages long and you've got the shop to open in the morning.

Let's do the maths.

What the Award Actually Says

Under the General Retail Industry Award, work performed on a public holiday attracts a penalty rate of 225% of the ordinary hourly rate for casuals. That's it. That's the headline number.

A few things to get straight before we touch a calculator:

• The 225% is the all-up rate for a casual working a public holiday. It already includes the 25% casual loading rolled in with the 200% public holiday penalty — but how you build up to that number matters, because if you start from the wrong base, you end up underpaying (or overpaying) for the whole shift.
• Public holiday penalty rates are set separately from Saturday and Sunday penalty rates. If a public holiday falls on a Sunday, the public holiday rate applies, not the Sunday rate. They don't stack on top of each other.
• Casuals are entitled to a minimum engagement of three hours on a public holiday (same as any other day under the retail award), so even if you only need someone for two hours, you're paying for three.

For the full rate tables across the General Retail Industry Award, Hospitality Award, and Fast Food Award — including weekend penalties, evening loadings, and the full breakdown by classification level — head to our penalty rates guide. This piece is going to focus on one scenario, end to end.

The Two-Step Calculation: A Worked Example

Here's the scenario. You've got Sam, a casual Retail Employee Level 2, rostered for a four-hour shift on a public holiday — say, 9am to 1pm.

Step 1: Find the ordinary hourly rate.

The ordinary hourly rate for a Retail Employee Level 2 under the General Retail Industry Award is $24.98 per hour (using the rates that came into effect 1 July 2024 — always check the current Fair Work pay guide before you run payroll, because these update annually).

That's the base. That's what a permanent full-timer earns per hour on an ordinary weekday.

Step 2: Apply casual loading, then the public holiday penalty.

Casuals get a 25% loading on top of the ordinary rate. So Sam's casual ordinary rate is:

$24.98 × 1.25 = $31.23 per hour

Now apply the public holiday penalty. Under the award, the public holiday penalty for casuals is 150% on top of their casual ordinary rate — meaning the multiplier is 2.5 against the ordinary rate, or equivalently 200% against the casual ordinary rate. Let's do it the clean way and start from Sam's casual ordinary rate:

$31.23 × 2.00 = $62.46 per hour

Wait — and this is the bit that catches people — there's a second way the same award clause gets expressed: 225% of the permanent ordinary rate (because the casual loading is already absorbed into the public holiday multiplier in some readings). The Fair Work Ombudsman's published pay guide lists the casual public holiday rate as 250% of the ordinary rate, which works out to:

$24.98 × 2.50 = $62.45 per hour

Same number, give or take a cent of rounding. The point: don't try to apply casual loading and then a separate public holiday multiplier on top in a way that double-counts. Look up the published all-up rate, or compute it once cleanly. Cross-check against the Fair Work pay guide.

The shift cost:

$62.45 × 4 hours = $249.80

For comparison, that same four-hour shift on a normal Tuesday morning would cost you:

$31.23 × 4 hours = $124.92

So Sam's public holiday shift costs you almost exactly 2x what a normal weekday shift costs. Two casuals on the same shift? You're looking at roughly $500 in wages before super, before any other staff, before the till has rung up a single sale.

For the full rate tables across retail, hospitality, and fast food — including the current dollar figures by classification level and the weekend/evening penalty breakdown — see our penalty rates guide.

The Three Mistakes That Catch Operators Out

I've done this calculation wrong. Most operators have. Here are the three things that have bitten people I know.

1. Assuming casual loading and penalty rates don't stack.

They do. The casual loading is part of the casual's ordinary rate — it doesn't disappear when a penalty rate applies. The 250% figure already accounts for this, which is why the published casual public holiday rate is higher than the permanent one. If you ever find yourself paying a casual the permanent public holiday rate of 225%, you've underpaid them by 25 percentage points of the base. That adds up fast across a team.

2. Substituted day rules.

If an employee doesn't normally work on the day a public holiday falls, the question of whether they're entitled to public holiday treatment gets messier. Some operators try to roster a casual onto a public holiday they wouldn't normally work, thinking they can pay the ordinary rate. They can't — if the casual works on the public holiday, the public holiday rate applies. Full stop. The substituted day rules mostly affect permanent staff and their entitlement to a paid day off, not what you pay a casual who actually turns up.

3. Weekend public holidays that shift to Monday.

When Christmas Day or New Year's Day falls on a Saturday or Sunday, the public holiday is often observed on the following Monday (or sometimes both days are gazetted, depending on the state). Each state and territory sets its own gazetted public holidays — Victoria's list isn't Queensland's list. If you operate across states, check each state's gazetted holidays before you publish the roster. A casual working an unexpected Monday public holiday because Christmas fell on a Sunday is still owed the public holiday rate, whether you remembered or not.

This guide helps you understand and calculate — it is not payroll software, and it doesn't enforce award compliance. Run your numbers, then run them past your bookkeeper or HankHR before payroll closes.

What This Means for Your Roster

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you start: knowing the cost after payroll runs is too late. By then the shift has happened, the wages are owed, and you're either eating the margin or trying to reverse-engineer where the day went wrong.

Knowing the cost before you publish the roster is a different game entirely. If a four-hour public holiday shift for one casual costs you $250, and you've got three casuals on the floor, that's $750 in wages alone before you've sold anything. Is the foot traffic on that public holiday going to justify three on the floor, or do you cut to two and accept slower service for the morning rush?

That's the conversation worth having on Sunday night, at the kitchen table, while you're building the roster — not on the following Wednesday when payroll lands and you find out what the day actually cost.

Schedaddle shows you hours and projected labour cost in the same view where you build the roster. Drag a casual into a public holiday shift, see what the shift costs, decide if it's worth it. The number's there before you hit publish, not after.

We're per-location, not per-staff-member, so adding a sixth casual to handle the Christmas trade doesn't cost you more in software fees. One price per store. That's covered on the per-location pricing page if you want the detail.

So here's the question worth sitting with: when you publish next week's roster, are you going to know what the public holiday actually costs you — or are you going to find out on payday?