Pay Slip Errors: What to Do If Your Overtime Is Missing

Two duties frame everything. Your employer must give you a pay slip within one working day of paying you for work performed (art. 536). And your employer must make and keep employee records for 7 years (art. 535). Both are civil remedy provisions — meaning a court can order consequences for breaching them.

The record-keeping rules go further for overtime specifically. Under the Fair Work Regulations 2009, where a penalty rate or loading must be paid for overtime hours actually worked, the employer must keep a record specifying the number of overtime hours worked during each day, or when the employee started and ceased working overtime hours (reg 3.34). In other words, overtime is meant to be recorded daily. If your pay slip has no overtime line, the underlying daily record is often missing too — and that gap matters.

Before you raise anything, protect your evidence. Write down, as close to the day as possible, when you started and finished, and the hours you actually worked. A timestamped, contemporaneous log is not a formality: it becomes your allegation of the hours worked. As we explain below, if your employer failed to keep the records the law required, your own dated log is what the burden shifts around.

Do not rely on memory reconstructed months later. The value of the log is precisely that it was made at the time.

Next, ask your employer — in writing — for your employee records and pay slips, referencing their duties to make and keep records (art. 535) and to issue pay slips (art. 536). Keep proof that you sent the request.

There are two possible outcomes, and both help you:

• They produce the records. You can now reconcile them line by line against your own time log and identify exactly which overtime hours were dropped.
• They cannot produce them — because the records were never kept. That failure is not a dead end. It triggers the rule in Step 3.

Here is the lever. If your employer was required to keep records or give pay slips and failed to do so, then in proceedings the employer bears the burden of disproving your allegation about the hours and amounts (art. 557C). You are not left trying to prove every hour against silence — the missing records put the onus on the employer to show your figures are wrong.

There is one limit: the rule does not apply if the employer shows a reasonable excuse (art. 557C(2)). But a simple failure to keep the daily overtime records that reg 3.34 requires is exactly the situation art. 557C is built for.

If the employer will not correct the pay slip or pay the missing overtime, contact the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO). It is the free, official body that provides information about your entitlements, can mediate, and has its own compliance powers. Many missing-overtime disputes resolve here without a court ever being involved. The FWO is separate from the Fair Work Commission, which sets wages and conditions.

If the matter still is not resolved, the value of your unpaid hours is recoverable in court. For most pay slip disputes the proportionate route is the small claims procedure, where the court may not award more than $100,000 (art. 548). Larger or more complex matters can go by ordinary application (art. 545). Either way, one deadline governs: an application must be made within 6 years after the contravention occurred (art. 544), and each unpaid pay period runs its own six-year clock — so the oldest hours fall away first.

A note on the numbers you claim. Without your applicable modern award or enterprise agreement identified, the certain figure is the value of hours you worked but were not paid for, at your ordinary hourly rate. Any overtime multiplier or penalty rate on top comes from your award or agreement, not the law — so treat those as depending on your award until it is confirmed.

• How to Recover Unpaid Wages in Australia: Step-by-Step Underpayment Claim
• Unpaid Overtime in Australia: Your Complete Rights Guide
• How to Check You're Being Paid at Least the Minimum Wage