On-Call and Standby: Are You Being Paid Correctly?

On-call and standby allowances — and the rules for whether time spent on standby counts as working time — are set by the modern award or enterprise agreement that covers your classification. The Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) fixes no percentage, no flat standby allowance and no general rule converting "available" hours into paid hours.

This is the same structure that governs overtime and penalty rates in Australia: the law sets the floor (the National Minimum Wage and the National Employment Standards), and the instrument fills in the rates. So until your award is identified with its dated version, no standby allowance can be calculated for you — it is not a number the law supplies.

Here is the part that does not depend on your award. When you are called out and actually perform work — you answer the call, log in, drive in, resolve the problem — those hours are payable at your ordinary hourly rate at minimum, on a 1:1 basis. You are entitled to be paid for time worked.

That ordinary rate is checked against a floor. From 1 July 2026, the National Minimum Wage is $26.44 per hour ($1,004.90 per week), following the Fair Work Commission's Annual Wage Review 2026 ([2026] FWCFB 3500). No covered employee's ordinary rate can sit below it. What we do not do is assume a standby multiplier or a minimum call-out payment — those are award features we flag as likely due, not figures we invent.

The practical trap: on-call work is often short, scattered and undocumented — ten minutes here, an hour there, late at night. Those minutes add up across a six-year window, and they are frequently the hours that never make it onto a pay slip.

The NES do give you one lever over excessive on-call: the maximum weekly hours standard. An employer must not request or require you to work more than 38 hours a week (for a full-time employee) unless the additional hours are reasonable, and you may refuse additional hours that are unreasonable (art. 62). Whether hours are reasonable is judged against factors including risks to your health and safety, your personal and family circumstances, the needs of the workplace, the notice given, and whether you are actually compensated for the extra hours (art. 62(3)).

Article 62 is a standard about hours, not a pay rate — it does not tell you what an on-call hour is worth. But it frames the reasonableness of a heavy on-call roster and can support a refusal where standby demands become excessive.

Because on-call work is so easily lost, the record-keeping rules matter. Your employer must make and keep employee records for 7 years (art. 535) and give you a pay slip within one working day of paying you (art. 536); where a penalty rate or loading must be paid for overtime hours, they must record the overtime hours worked each day (reg 3.34).

If your employer was required to keep those records and failed to do so, then in proceedings the employer bears the burden of disproving your allegation about the hours you worked (art. 557C), unless they show a reasonable excuse. So keep your own timestamped log of every call-out — the time you started, the time you finished, what you did. That log becomes your allegation, and the missing records shift the onus to your employer.

The window to act is 6 years from the contravention (art. 544; a court cannot order an underpayment for a period more than 6 years before proceedings commenced, art. 545(5)).

• Unpaid Overtime in Australia: Your Complete Rights Guide
• Night Shift and Shift Work Penalty Rates in Australia
• How to Recover Unpaid Wages in Australia