If you employ support workers, case managers or home care staff in Australia, someone in your organisation has almost certainly mentioned “SCHADS” without fully explaining what it is. That’s usually because the full answer is genuinely layered: it’s not one rate, it’s a structure of streams, levels and rules that combine differently depending on the role.
So what is the SCHADS Award, in plain terms? It’s the modern award, the legally binding minimum pay and conditions document, that covers most support work, home care and community services roles in Australia, and getting it wrong is one of the most common compliance issues NDIS and aged care providers run into.
This guide skips the legal phrasing and explains what is the SCHADS Award actually is, who it applies to, how pay is worked out under it, and where it stops applying and something else takes over, in plain language, written for people running an NDIS or aged care service, not people interpreting awards for a living.
What Does SCHADS Actually Stand For?
SCHADS stands for Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services. The full name is the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award 2010, known by its Fair Work code MA000100. It’s a modern award, a legally binding document made by the Fair Work Commission that sets the minimum pay rates and working conditions for a defined group of employees, and every provider operating in this sector needs to know whether, and how, it applies to their staff.
It isn’t specific to NDIS or aged care. It’s an industry award covering a broader sector, community services, crisis accommodation, home care and disability support, of which NDIS-funded disability services and in-home aged care are two of the largest parts in practice.
what is the SCHADS Award Covers, and Who It Doesn’t
The award groups covered work into four broad streams: Social and Community Services (SACS), which includes case workers, support coordinators, community development and welfare roles; Crisis Accommodation, covering refuges, shelters and transitional housing; Home Care, covering in-home personal care and support delivered in a client’s own home; and Disability Services, covering direct support work with people with disability, whether delivered in the community, in a residential setting, or in someone’s home.
For most NDIS providers, the SACS and Home Care streams are where almost every direct-service role sits, support workers, support coordinators and case managers. Crisis Accommodation and Family Day Care, sometimes listed as a fifth, narrower stream, generally only matter if a provider actually delivers those specific services.
Coverage has real limits, and they trip providers up as often as the streams themselves do. A support worker doing personal care in someone’s home sits under SCHADS. The same person moved into a residential aged care facility is generally covered by the Aged Care Award instead, not SCHADS, because SCHADS’s Home Care stream is built around in-home, community-based support rather than residential facility work.
Nurses on staff are covered by the Nurses Award. Allied health professionals, like speech pathologists or occupational therapists, usually fall under the Health Professionals and Support Services Award. what is the SCHADS Clerical and admin staff can sit under the Clerks Award depending on the sector they support. One organisation, several awards, all depending on where and what the work actually is, not the job title on the contract.
The safest way to confirm coverage for any specific role isn’t to assume from the job title or the department it sits in, but to look at the actual duties performed and where they’re performed, then check that combination against the award’s own classification definitions or the Fair Work Ombudsman’s coverage summary directly.
How Pay Actually Works Under the Award
Within each stream, employees are classified into levels, roughly eight across the award as a whole, with most levels containing multiple pay points that step up with experience, qualifications and time in the role. A Level 1 role and a Level 4 role in the same stream can be doing meaningfully different work with meaningfully different pay, so the classification level matters as much as the stream itself.
Employment type changes the calculation again. Full-time employees work standard weekly hours with the usual leave entitlements. Part-time employees have a set, agreed number of hours in writing. Casual employees are paid a 25% loading on top of the base rate in exchange for not having guaranteed hours or paid leave. All three sit on the same underlying pay point structure, just calculated differently.
None of these rates are fixed year to year. The Fair Work Commission’s Annual Wage Review updates SCHADS Award minimum rates every year, typically effective from the first full pay period on or after 1 July, which means a rate that was correct in June can be several percent out by August without anyone changing a system setting.
As a rough sense of scale rather than a figure to rely on directly, a Level 1 base rate sits around the high $27s per hour and a Level 2 SACS rate around the mid-to-high $30s per hour, as at 1 July 2026, before casual loading, penalty rates or allowances are added. The exact figure for a specific stream, level and pay point moves every year and varies enough between streams that it’s worth confirming against the current Fair Work pay guide rather than a remembered number from a previous role or a previous financial year.
How SCHADS Compares to Other Awards Providers Deal With
Most NDIS and aged care organisations aren’t dealing with just one award, even if SCHADS covers the majority of their workforce. Knowing roughly where the boundaries sit helps avoid the most common misclassification mistakes.
The Aged Care Award covers direct care staff working inside a residential aged care facility, personal care workers, catering and cleaning staff attached to a facility, where what is the SCHADS Award Home Care stream instead covers support delivered in someone’s own home or the community. The Nurses Award covers registered and enrolled nurses regardless of which sector employs them. The Health Professionals and Support Services Award generally covers allied health roles like occupational therapists, speech pathologists and physiotherapists. Clerical and administrative staff can sit under the Clerks Private Sector Award, depending on the specific sector and duties involved.
None of these awards are interchangeable, and none of them share SCHADS’s classification levels, pay points or rules like broken shifts and minimum engagement. A payroll system correctly configured for SCHADS tells you nothing about whether it’s also correctly configured for the Aged Care Award roles sitting in the same organisation.
The Five Rules That Do Most of the Work in Practice
Knowing the streams and levels gets a roster started. Five specific rules are where most of the actual pay complexity, and most of the underpayment risk, actually lives, and each one behaves as an independent triggerwhat is the SCHADS Award rather than a single combined check:
- Broken shifts — a rostered day split into two or three periods by an unpaid gap longer than a standard meal break attracts a separate flat allowance, on top of ordinary pay for each period
- Minimum engagement — a floor on how few hours a single rostered visit can be paid for, regardless of how short the actual task was, applied per portion in a broken shift
- Rest breaks and overtime bands — minimum time required between shifts, and how hours are sequenced across a roster, not just totalled at the end of the week
- Penalty rates — higher rates for weekend, evening, overnight and public holiday work, which stack differently across streams and classification levels
- Allowances — separate payments for things like travel, on-call availability and sleepovers, on top of the base classification rate, each with its own trigger conditions
Each of these behaves as a distinct trigger inside an otherwise ordinary-looking roster, which is exactly why they’re worth understanding individually rather than as a single “the award says so” concept. A roster can get the stream, level and base rate exactly right and still be wrong, because one of these five rules applied to a specific shift without anyone checking for it.
Is the SCHADS Award the Same as NDIS Pricing?
No, and conflating the two is one of the more common points of confusion for NDIS providers specifically. The SCHADS Award sets the minimum a worker has to be paid. The NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits set the maximum a registered provider can charge a participant’s plan for a given support.
They’re related but separate systems. The gap between what the award requires a provider to pay a worker and what the NDIS price limit allows the provider to charge is meant to cover overheads, superannuation, insurance, training, administration and everything else that keeps a service running. A provider can be fully SCHADS-compliant and still be running an unsustainable margin if that gap is too thin, and equally, being within NDIS price limits says nothing about whether the underlying roster is actually paying staff correctly.
A Worked Example: Same Job Title, Different Award Outcome
Consider two employees, both with the job title “support worker,” at the same organisation. The first spends their week visiting NDIS participants in their homes for personal care and community access. The second works shifts inside the organisation’s residential aged care facility.
The first is almost certainly covered by SCHADS, likely the Home Care or Disability Services stream depending on the exact duties, with broken shift rules, minimum engagement periods and SCHADS-specific allowances all potentially in play. The second is likely covered by the Aged Care Award instead, a different award entirely, with its own classification structure, penalty rates and entitlements that don’t map one-to-one onto SCHADS.
Same job title, same employer, two different awards, because what determines coverage is the nature of the work and the setting it’s delivered in, not the title on the position description. What Is the SCHADS example is illustrative, not a specific client outcome, but the underlying distinction is the actual rule, not a simplification of it.
What NDIS and Aged Care Providers Get Wrong Most Often
A short list of the mistakes that come up repeatedly, in outline rather than exhaustive detail:
✅ Assuming one award covers the whole organisation, rather than checking coverage role by role and setting by setting
✅ Applying SACS rates to a Home Care role, or the reverse, when the two streams have genuinely different rates and rules
✅ Treating last year’s pay rates as current without checking the Annual Wage Review outcome each July
✅ Assuming residential aged care staff are covered by SCHADS, when the Aged Care Award is usually the correct one
✅ Missing that the SCHADS-specific rules, broken shifts, minimum engagement, allowances, apply per shift, not as a general policy applied loosely across the roster
Conclusion
What is the SCHADS Award : isn’t complicated because any single rule is hard to understand. It’s complicated because it’s four streams, multiple classification levels, three employment types and five or more compounding rules, all needing to be matched correctly to the actual work being done, not just the job title on a contract, and because at least one other award is usually operating somewhere in the same organisation alongside it.
Getting the plain-English version right is the starting point. Getting it right on every roster, every shift, every time it changes, is where most of the real risk sits, which is exactly the problem VisiCase’s award-intelligent rostering was built to solve. If you want to see how it checks SCHADS Award coverage and rules at the point a shift is built, book a walkthrough with our team.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does SCHADS stand for?
Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services. The full title is the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award 2010, Fair Work code MA000100.
It’s a modern award made by the Fair Work Commission, meaning it’s a legally binding document setting minimum pay and conditions for a defined group of employees, not a voluntary industry guideline.
Which employees does the SCHADS Award cover?
Broadly, employees in four streams: Social and Community Services, Crisis Accommodation, Home Care, and Disability Services.
For most NDIS providers, coverage concentrates in the Social and Community Services and Home Care streams. Whether a specific role is covered depends on the actual duties and setting, not the job title, and some roles at the same organisation, like nurses or allied health staff, fall under a different award entirely.
Is the SCHADS Award the same as the Aged Care Award?
No. SCHADS’s Home Care stream covers in-home, community-based aged care and disability support. Direct care staff working inside a residential aged care facility are generally covered by the separate Aged Care Award instead.
This distinction catches out providers who run both home care and residential services, since staff can sit under two different awards depending purely on where the work is delivered, even with an identical job title.
How many classification levels does the SCHADS Award have?
Roughly eight levels across the award, with most levels containing multiple pay points that step up based on experience, qualifications and time in role.
The exact classification definitions, and which duties sit at which level, are detailed in the award’s own classification schedules. Confirm the exact level against the current Fair Work Ombudsman guidance rather than a job title alone, since two similarly titled roles can sit at different levels depending on actual responsibilities.
How often do SCHADS Award pay rates change?
At least once a year, through the Fair Work Commission’s Annual Wage Review, typically effective from the first full pay period on or after 1 July.
Rates can also change mid-year following other Fair Work Commission decisions affecting specific provisions. Treating a rate as fixed for more than 12 months at a time is one of the more common sources of underpayment across the sector.
Does the SCHADS Award apply to NDIS providers?
Yes, for most direct-service roles. NDIS support workers, support coordinators and case managers generally fall under the SACS or Home Care streams of the SCHADS Award.
Some NDIS-funded organisations also employ nurses, allied health professionals or admin staff who fall under different awards entirely, so “we’re an NDIS provider” doesn’t automatically mean every employee is on SCHADS.
What's the difference between the SCHADS Award and NDIS pricing?
The SCHADS Award sets the minimum a worker must be paid. NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits set the maximum a provider can charge a participant’s plan for a support.
They’re connected but distinct systems. Being compliant with one says nothing about the other, a provider can pay correctly under SCHADS while still running an unsustainable margin against NDIS price limits, or vice versa.
Are casual employees covered differently under the SCHADS Award?
The SCHADS Award sets the minimum a worker must be paid. NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits set the maximum a provider can charge a participant’s plan for a support.
They’re connected but distinct systems. Being compliant with one says nothing about the other, a provider can pay correctly under SCHADS while still running an unsustainable margin against NDIS price limits, or vice versa.
Does every employee at an NDIS or aged care organisation fall under SCHADS?
No. Coverage depends on the actual duties and setting of each role, not the organisation’s overall industry.
Nurses generally sit under the Nurses Award, allied health professionals under the Health Professionals and Support Services Award, some clerical and admin roles under the Clerks Award, and residential aged care direct care staff typically under the Aged Care Award. Checking coverage role by role, rather than assuming one award applies organisation-wide, is the safest starting point.
10. Where can I check the current SCHADS Award pay rates?
The Fair Work Ombudsman’s official SCHADS Award pay guide, updated whenever the Annual Wage Review or another Fair Work Commission decision changes the rates.
Because the award has thousands of possible rate combinations once stream, level, pay point and employment type are factored in, treat any third-party summary, including this article, as a starting point and confirm the exact figure for a specific classification against the current official guide before running payroll.
