Minimum Shift Length and Breaks Under the Hospitality Award

There's no single "minimum shift" in hospitality. Casual, part-time and full-time staff each have their own floor, and breaks change the number again once a shift runs long enough. Here's what the Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020 and the Restaurant Industry Award 2020 actually set, with the Fair Work source for each one.

I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice. If you're setting up a roster for the first time, or your situation doesn't match what's below, check with the Fair Work Ombudsman or an employment adviser before you rely on it.

The minimum per shift, by employment type

A casual employee has to be engaged and paid for at least 2 consecutive hours every time you call them in, even if the job is done in forty minutes. That's the floor. Roster a casual for a one-hour job and you're still paying for two.

A part-time employee's floor is higher: at least 3 hours on any day they're rostered. Part-timers also have an agreed weekly pattern of hours in writing from when they started, so the 3-hour minimum sits inside shifts you've already committed to, not on top of them.

Full-time staff don't really have a "minimum shift" question in the same sense. They're rostered to an agreed pattern of ordinary hours across the week, usually an average of 38, so the question for them is whether the week adds up, not whether any one day is long enough.

Both awards cap a casual's hours too: up to 12 hours in a single shift, and up to 38 hours a week, or an average of 38 over a roster cycle of up to 4 weeks. Go past either limit and you're into overtime territory, which is its own set of rules.

Which award you're rostering under

The Hospitality Award covers pubs, bars and taverns, plus accommodation, catering and function venues. The Restaurant Award covers restaurants and cafés and other venues mainly serving food for people to eat on site. The minimum engagement figures above are the same under either award. Where they start to differ is breaks, which is the part worth slowing down for.

I've gone into the casual, part-time and full-time split in more detail in an earlier post on rostering under the Hospitality Award, including the paperwork a part-time employee is owed. This post sticks to shift length and breaks.

The meal break you can't roster around

Both awards require an unpaid meal break of at least 30 minutes once a shift runs long enough. Under the Hospitality Award, an employee who works more than 6 hours without that break is owed an extra 50% of their ordinary hourly rate, paid from the point the break was due until they actually get it. The Restaurant Award carries the same 30-minute unpaid break and the same extra-50% penalty for missing it, but the shift length that triggers the requirement is shorter than the Hospitality Award's. If you're rostering under the Restaurant Award, check the break table on the award page rather than assuming the Hospitality Award's 6-hour mark applies to you.

What that means on a roster: a double shift that runs through lunch or dinner service without a proper break isn't just bad for the person working it. It's a wage cost you didn't plan for, because the penalty starts accruing automatically once the shift passes the trigger point, whether or not anyone notices on the night.

Paid rest breaks

On top of the meal break, both awards give paid rest breaks on longer shifts, with the number and length set out in a table that scales with how many hours someone's rostered. A short shift might get none. A long one can get two. Rather than guess at the exact minutes for your venue's shift lengths, the award page for Hospitality and Restaurant both set this out by shift length, and it's worth checking against the actual roster you're building rather than a rule of thumb.

Why this trips up venues that roster by the week

This rarely comes from a manager deliberately rostering someone for ninety minutes. It comes from a roster built on a spreadsheet where someone's shift got shortened to cover a gap, or a split shift turned one block into two without anyone checking either half still clears the minimum. Breaks slip the same way: a short-staffed Friday makes it tempting to let the meal break slide "just this once," and that once is the one that costs 50% extra from the point it should have happened.

The fix isn't more paperwork. It's being able to see the shift length and the break sitting next to each other while you're still building the roster, not after someone's clocked out and the timesheet lands on your desk. That's a big part of why we laid Kaslu Work's roster out by section rather than as one long list: a two-hour casual shift or a nine-hour shift with no break marked on it looks odd next to the rest of the floor roster, and it's easier to catch before you publish than after. Kaslu Work doesn't work out award pay or check your roster against the award for you. It's still on you, or your payroll software, to get the minimums and the breaks right. What a roster laid out by section does is make the odd shift visible while you can still fix it.

If you're building this week's roster now, our free roster template lays shifts out by section the same way, with a column for breaks so a long shift without one stands out before you publish.

What to check before you publish

Before a roster goes out, it's worth running through three things: does every casual shift clear 2 hours, does every part-timer's day clear their 3-hour minimum, and does anyone working past the meal-break trigger actually have a break rostered in. None of that is complicated once you're looking for it. It's just easy to miss on a roster that's been copied from last week and tweaked in a hurry.

We're building Kaslu Work for hospitality groups who want a roster that makes this visible venue by venue, not hidden in a spreadsheet. Early access is opening a few groups at a time, and the waitlist is on the home page.