After years of scrutiny over the pay of nurses and other direct-care workers, aged care providers may be overlooking another part of their workforce: the people cleaning rooms, preparing meals and keeping facilities running.
The Fair Work Ombudsman’s aged care sector investigation report, released on 28 August 2026, drew attention for its headline figures: $5.3 million recovered for almost 3,600 direct care employees. Of the 22 providers investigated, 13 were found to be non-compliant and 16 compliance notices were issued.
The more significant development for practitioners sat further down.
The FWO has now commenced inspections of a further 30 employers, this time focused specifically on cleaning and catering employees, examining pay rates, pay slips and record keeping.
For many providers, this is a real blind spot as the past few years have understandably been dominated by major wage and classification changes affecting nurses and other direct-care employees.
The Aged Care Work Value Case delivered increases to direct care classifications in stages across 2024 and 2025, with a further increase for nurses from 1 August 2026, each accompanied by Commonwealth funding supplements and provider attestation obligations. Naturally, providers have had to focus heavily on direct-care cost modelling, grant applications and nursing classifications to ensure those changes were implemented correctly.
Indirect care sat outside that cycle at every stage.
But the Aged Care Award 2010 [MA000018] was also varied in ways that directly affect general services employees. From the first full pay period on or after 1 January 2025, laundry hands, cleaners and food services assistants moved from Level 2 to Level 3, recognising that their regular interaction with residents engaged skills analogous to direct-care work. However, head chefs and cooks received no equivalent uplift. Further increases took effect from 1 October 2025.
Giving effect to those changes requires more than checking a job title. Providers need to assess employees based on the actual duties set out in the classification schedule, rather than relying on job titles alone. Where that exercise has not been undertaken, underpayments may have been accruing for almost two years. Outsourcing the payroll function does not displace the employer’s obligation either.
That risk is not confined to classification. The FWO’s recent investigation into direct-care employees identified incorrect classification, overtime calculation, the application of broken shifts and minimum engagement periods among the leading causes of non-compliance.
Visibility can also be a problem. Citation Group’s 2026 Workforce Pulse Report found 58% of Australian businesses say getting a clear view of their HR, payroll and safety data takes significant effort or is fragmented, while 18% found a payroll error in the past 12 months.
For aged care operators employing a mix of care, nursing, administration, cleaning and food-services staff, fragmented systems can make it harder to spot whether the same compliance standards are being applied across every employee group. And the consequences can extend beyond back pay. Employers are required to maintain accurate employee records and payslips, and failure to do so can mean they may be required to disprove an employee’s allegations in a wage recovery claim. In a workforce characterised by casual engagement, high turnover and manual timesheets, that provision frequently determines the outcome of a claim before the substantive entitlement is argued.
Who is liable for an underpayment is also extended more widely than providers often assume. Individuals involved in contraventions can also face personal liability, while intentional underpayment or wage theft has been a criminal offence since 1 January 2025.
It’s important to note that the cost of identifying an underpayment has fallen substantially for employees, unions and applicant law firms alike because, according to Citation Group’s 2026 Workforce Pulse Report, AI is being used by employees to feed in payslips, time and wage records to identify employee underpayments. AI is then prompting letters of demand for employees to write to their employer. The result is underpayment errors now surface earlier and across larger cohorts quicker than our historical experience of industrial relations suggests.
So, for employers, the practical solution is straightforward: providers should be auditing the whole workforce, not only employee groups that have attracted the most regulatory attention. This means reviewing classifications against actual duties, checking overtime and minimum engagement rules, testing payroll configuration and ensuring records are up to date. Proactive reviews should be conducted under legal privilege where possible.
