How to Build an Aged Care Roster Aligned with Award and Care Minute Requirements
Key Takeaways
The Aged Care Award 2010 contains rules relating to shift lengths, break entitlements, and roster notice periods that may apply to many residential aged care employers.
Care minutes targets under AN-ACC require you to roster the right mix of registered nurses (RNs), enrolled nurses (ENs), and personal care workers (PCWs) to meet mandated hours per resident per day.
A roster that supports compliance starts with understanding your staffing obligations, then building shifts around qualification requirements, not just availability.
Rostering software that supports award-based pay and scheduling rules can help flag potential issues before they require further review.
Table of contents
What the Aged Care Award means for your roster
How to roster for care minutes under AN-ACC
Five steps to build an aged care roster that supports compliance
Common aged care rostering mistakes (and how to avoid them)
How rostering software supports your compliance efforts
Build your roster with confidence
FAQs
If you manage rostering for an aged care facility, you already know the stakes are high. Get it wrong, and you're looking at underpayment claims, audit failures, and gaps in care that put residents at risk. This guide outlines key rostering considerations that may help reduce those risks.
The problem? The rules are complex. The Aged Care Award 2010 sets out detailed conditions for shifts, breaks, and notice periods. On top of that, the Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) mandates specific care minutes per resident per day, with strict requirements around who delivers them. Juggling all of this across a 24/7 roster is one of the toughest operational challenges in the sector.
This guide walks through key considerations for building an aged care roster that supports compliance efforts, step by step. You'll learn what the Award requires, how to translate care minute targets into practical shift plans, and how to avoid the most common rostering mistakes that trip up facility managers.
What the Aged Care Award means for your roster
The Aged Care Award 2010 is the Fair Work instrument that governs minimum employment conditions for workers in residential aged care rostering. It covers nursing staff, personal care workers, and other employees in aged care facilities. If your workers fall under this Award (rather than the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award (SCHADS Award), which covers home care and disability services), these are the rostering rules you need to follow.
Minimum shift lengths are one of the first things to get right. Full-time employees must be rostered for a minimum of four hours per shift. Part-time and casual employees have a two-hour minimum. Rostering anyone for less than their minimum creates an immediate compliance issue.
Roster notice periods are equally strict. Under the Award, you need to display the roster at least two weeks before the first working period it covers. If you need to make changes after that, the Award expects seven days' notice, unless the employee genuinely agrees to a shorter timeframe. That agreement should be recorded in writing.
Ordinary hours for day workers fall between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Shifts that extend outside this span attract penalty rates, which need to be factored into your labour cost calculations from the start, not discovered at payroll.
Broken shifts are permitted under the Award, but only with the employee's agreement. A broken shift can include a maximum of two periods of work, and the employee receives a broken shift allowance. You can't simply split shifts to suit operational needs without the worker's consent.
Break entitlements are another area where facilities frequently slip up. Employees are entitled to an unpaid meal break of 30 to 60 minutes after five hours of continuous work. Paid tea breaks also apply, based on the length of the shift. Missing these in your roster design creates both compliance risk and tired, frustrated staff.
The Award is a long document, and it covers more than just rostering. But these provisions directly shape how you build every shift. If you don't design your roster around them from the start, you're patching problems after the fact.
How to roster for care minutes under AN-ACC
Beyond the Award, your roster also needs to meet the care minutes mandate set by the AN-ACC funding model. This is where aged care rostering gets particularly demanding, because your roster needs to put the right people, with the right qualifications, in the right shifts for the right number of hours.
The current target is 215 care minutes, with at least 44 of those minutes delivered by a registered nurse. Unlike general guidelines, these are auditable requirements that directly affect your facility's funding and accreditation.
To translate this into a roster, start with a simple calculation. Multiply your resident count by the required care minutes to get your total daily care hours. For a 60-bed facility, that's 12,000 care minutes (or 200 hours) of direct care to roster every day, with at least 2,400 of those minutes (40 hours) covered by RNs.
From there, you need to map your skill mix across every shift. RNs handle clinical oversight and contribute to the mandated RN minutes. ENs cover medication administration and clinical tasks. PCWs deliver the bulk of personal care. Each shift across your 24-hour cycle needs the right combination to keep your facility on track.
Residential aged care facilities also face a 24/7 RN coverage requirement. At least one registered nurse must be on duty at all times. This means your roster can't have any gaps in RN coverage, even during overnight shifts when overall staffing is lighter.
Under-rostering against these targets creates real consequences. Facilities that consistently fall short risk quality standard downgrades, funding penalties, and increased scrutiny during accreditation assessments. According to Deputy's Big Shift Report 2026, the primary constraint facing Australia's healthcare sector is workforce capacity rather than demand, which makes hitting these targets even harder when qualified staff are in short supply.
The care economy, including aged care, is projected to reach 110,000 workers short by 2030 and is expected to drive the largest share of net job creation through that period. That's good news long term, but right now it means you're competing for a limited pool of qualified workers. Your roster needs to account for that reality.
Five steps to build an aged care roster that supports compliance
Building an aged care roster isn't something you do once and forget. It's a repeatable process. These five steps give you a framework to follow every rostering cycle.
Step 1: Map your staffing requirements by shift and qualification
Start by listing every shift across your 24-hour cycle: morning, afternoon, and night. For each shift, define the minimum headcount per qualification level (RN, EN, PCW).
Divide your total daily care minutes by the number of shift hours to calculate per-shift staffing targets
Make sure at least one RN is rostered on every shift to meet 24/7 coverage requirements
Account for non-direct-care roles (administration, kitchen, cleaning) separately so they don't eat into your care minute calculations
Create a staffing template that you can reuse as your baseline each roster cycle
This template can serve as a baseline staffing framework for your rostering process. Every roster you build should meet or exceed it.
Step 2: Check employee availability and qualifications
With your template in hand, move to filling shifts with real staff. This is where things get complicated in aged care, because you can't just assign whoever is available.
Cross-reference each employee's
qualifications, certifications, and training status
against the shift requirements
Check leave balances and upcoming absences before you start building
Confirm that visa conditions and working-with-children checks are current for relevant roles
Build and maintain a pool of qualified casual staff for last-minute coverage
Deputy's qualification-based rostering lets you filter available employees by skill and certification, so you're only ever choosing from staff who are actually qualified to fill each role. This can help managers identify employees whose recorded qualifications align with the requirements configured for a role, reducing manual checking and supporting rostering processes.
Step 3: Apply award conditions to every shift
Once you've matched staff to shifts, layer in the Award conditions that constrain how those shifts can be structured.
Enforce minimum shift lengths: four hours for full-time staff, two hours for part-time and casual employees
Schedule breaks correctly. Employees get an unpaid meal break after five hours of continuous work, plus paid tea breaks based on shift length
Calculate penalty rates for shifts outside the 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. span, weekends, and public holidays
Check that there's a minimum
10-hour rest period
between consecutive shifts
Watch overtime thresholds. Ordinary hours are capped at 38 per week (or the equivalent over your roster cycle)
Manual rostering creates downstream problems: overstaffing on quiet days, last-minute callouts triggering penalty rates, and inaccurate time tracking leading to compliance risk with labour laws and award conditions. Deputy's break planning tools and overtime alerts can surface potential scheduling issues for manager review before you publish the roster, giving you a chance to fix issues while they're still easy to correct.
Step 4: Publish your roster with adequate notice
The Award requires you to post the roster at least two weeks before the first working period. Roster changes after that need seven days' notice, or genuine written agreement from the affected employee.
Publish on time, every time. Late rosters aren't just inconvenient for staff; they may also increase operational and compliance-related risk
Communicate changes in writing and keep a record for audit purposes
Make the roster accessible digitally so staff can view it from anywhere
Deputy's mobile app delivers rosters straight to your team's phones, with notifications when new rosters are published or shifts change. This gives your staff the schedule predictability that research shows is directly linked to higher worker satisfaction. According to the Shift Pulse Report 2025, roster predictability is a key trait of happy industry sectors.
Step 5: Monitor, adjust, and document changes in real time
Publishing the roster isn't the finish line. Compliance is ongoing, and you need to track what actually happens against what was planned.
Compare actual hours worked against rostered hours daily
Log every shift swap and last-minute replacement, with a qualification check to confirm the replacement is suitable
Run weekly reports to verify that your facility is meeting
care minute targets
Keep electronic records for a minimum of seven years (the legal requirement for employment records in Australia), in line with
workforce-related responsibilities
set by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission
Deputy's timesheets and analytics create an automatic audit trail, capturing roster changes, clock-in and clock-out times, and break records without manual paperwork. When an auditor asks for evidence of your rostering practices, you have it ready.
