Why your SCHADS Award roster is costing workers two hours of unpaid travel every day

Key Takeaways

• The SCHADS Award requires travel time between clients to be paid, but poor rostering means many disability support workers absorb up to two hours of unpaid travel daily.

• Broken shifts aren't the problem on their own. The real issue is rosters that ignore geography and force workers to criss-cross suburbs between participant homes.

• Clustering clients by location and building travel buffers into shift schedules can reduce most unpaid gaps without cutting service capacity.

• Rostering software that factors in travel distance (not just shift times) is the operational fix most providers are missing.

• Getting this right protects workers, helps reduce back-pay risk, and improves staff retention in a sector facing critical workforce shortages.

In this article:

1. The two-hour gap hiding in your disability support roster

2. What the SCHADS Award actually says about travel time

3. Why broken shifts make the travel problem worse

4. The real cost to your workers (and your business)

5. How rosters, not payroll, cause the problem

6. The geographic clustering fix

7. Building travel-aware rosters step by step

8. What to look for in NDIS rostering software

The two-hour gap hiding in your disability support roster

Picture this: one of your disability support workers finishes with a participant in Parramatta at 9 a.m. Their next client is in Penrith, 40 minutes away. They drive there, unpaid, then repeat the same trip in reverse after lunch.

By the end of the day, they've lost two hours to unpaid travel between clients.

This isn't a one-off scheduling hiccup. It's the daily reality for support workers whose rosters are built around availability and participant preference alone, with zero consideration for geography. When you schedule by "who's free" rather than "who's nearby," you force workers into costly, unpaid commutes between engagements.

The scale of this issue is growing fast. According to Deputy's AU Big Shift Report 2026, aged and disability carers represent one of the largest projected employment increases to 2030. More workers entering a system with broken rostering practices means the problem compounds, not improves.

Under the SCHADS Award, travel between clients during a shift is supposed to be paid time. Yet for many providers, disability support rostering still treats geography as an afterthought.

What the SCHADS Award actually says about travel time

Before you can fix the problem, you need to understand what the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award (SCHADS Award) actually requires.

Travel between engagements is paid time

Under the SCHADS Award, time a worker spends travelling between clients during a shift counts as time worked. This means you must pay your staff their ordinary hourly rate for inter-client travel.

This isn't limited to full-time employees. Casual workers, part-time staff, and every classification level under the Award all fall under the same requirement.

The distinction is straightforward: travel from home to the first client of the day is a regular commute and isn't covered. But the moment a worker finishes with Client A and drives to Client B, that SCHADS travel time is payable.

Many providers assume this obligation only applies when travel time is formally recorded. It doesn't. The obligation exists whether you track it or not.

How travel time interacts with minimum engagement periods

Under the SCHADS Award, minimum engagement periods apply to part-time and casual workers. Here's where it gets complicated.

Travel time between clients counts toward ordinary hours, but it doesn't satisfy the minimum engagement requirement for the next visit. If a worker drives 30 minutes to reach Client B, that 30 minutes is paid time worked, but Client B's engagement clock starts fresh on arrival.

This creates a grey zone that catches providers off guard during audits. You might think a two-hour window covers a 30-minute drive plus a 90-minute service visit. But the SCHADS Award treats these as separate obligations.

The travel is paid work. The minimum engagement for the next client is a standalone requirement. The two don't blend.

Why broken shifts make the travel problem worse

Broken shifts are common in disability support. They're also the structural feature that turns a small travel problem into a large one.

The anatomy of a broken shift in disability support

A broken shift under the SCHADS Award allows a worker's hours to be split across the day with unpaid breaks in between. In disability support, this typically looks like a morning client visit, a two-to-four-hour unpaid break, then an afternoon visit.

The problem isn't the split itself. It's what happens when those two visits are in different suburbs. The worker is technically off the clock during their "break," but they're spending that time driving from one side of town to the other.

A worker with two three-hour engagements and a three-hour break might spend 90 minutes of that break sitting in traffic. That leaves only 90 minutes of actual rest.

For workers doing sleepover shifts (where the SCHADS sleepover allowance applies), the pattern compounds further. A worker finishes an overnight stay, then travels to a morning client without adequate paid travel time built into the roster.

The broken shift and sleepover provisions under the Award don't address the travel gap between locations. The break between shifts becomes a driving commute that nobody pays for.

The broken shift allowance doesn't fix the geography problem

The SCHADS broken shift allowance compensates workers for the inconvenience of a split day. It's a flat payment on top of ordinary wages. But it doesn't cover travel costs, and it doesn't cover travel time.

Providers who pay the broken shift allowance and assume they've ticked all the boxes are missing the separate travel time obligation entirely. If your worker drives between clients during a broken shift, that travel time is still payable as ordinary hours worked.

The allowance and the travel time pay are distinct obligations that stack on top of each other. Paying one doesn't discharge the other. You owe both.

The real cost to your workers (and your business)

When travel time goes unpaid, somebody absorbs the cost. Right now, it's your workers.

What two hours of unpaid travel actually costs a support worker

Let's do the maths. Check the current SCHADS Level 2 pay rates, multiply by two hours per day, five days per week, and 48 weeks per year. The total adds up to thousands of dollars annually in time worked but not compensated.

On top of that lost income, workers absorb fuel costs, vehicle wear, and tolls. They're spending money to get to work they're not being paid for.

This drives turnover in a sector already facing critical workforce shortages. With aged and disability care among the fastest-growing employment sectors, losing experienced workers to avoidable pay disputes is a problem you can't afford.

The back-pay risk providers don't see coming

The cost doesn't only fall on workers. Fair Work requires employers to keep accurate records of hours worked and wages paid, and can pursue back-pay claims for underpayments.

Shift work in the services sector continues to grow. Deputy's AU Big Shift Report 2026 found services shift activity remains well above pre-2023 levels. More shifts means more travel between clients, which means more exposure every week you don't address the gap.

Most providers only discover the issue when a worker lodges a complaint or when an audit surfaces the shortfall. By then, years of accumulated liability may already be on the books.

Deputy helps reduce this risk by making travel time visible in rosters before payroll processes them. This gives managers the chance to review and correct gaps at the scheduling stage.

How rosters, not payroll, cause the problem

Most content about the SCHADS Award focuses on payroll interpretation. That misses the point entirely. The problem starts upstream, at the moment you build the roster.

Why payroll software can't fix what the roster got wrong

Payroll software calculates pay after shifts are worked. If travel time wasn't captured at the rostering stage, payroll can't retroactively add it. The data simply isn't there.

Most providers rely on workers to self-report travel time, which is inconsistent and often under-reported. Workers feel awkward logging travel. They round down, they forget, and the result is a payroll system that processes incomplete data with perfect accuracy.

The output? Underpayments that look correct on paper.

The fix has to happen at the point where shifts are assigned and sequenced. When you build a roster that ignores the 40-minute drive between Client A and Client B, no amount of downstream payroll logic can undo that decision.

Rostering software that factors in geography at the scheduling stage is the only way to prevent the gap from forming in the first place.

What a travel-aware roster looks like vs. a standard one

Here's the difference in practice.

Standard roster (geography-blind):

• Worker A: Client 1 in Parramatta (8 a.m.), Client 2 in Penrith (11 a.m.), Client 3 in Blacktown (2 p.m.)

• Total inter-client travel: roughly 90 minutes, unpaid

Travel-aware roster (geography-clustered):

• Worker A: Client 1 in Parramatta (8 a.m.), Client 2 in Merrylands (11 a.m.), Client 3 in Granville (2 p.m.)

• Total inter-client travel: roughly 25 minutes, paid and buffered

Same number of clients served. Same total hours worked. Dramatically less travel waste.

The difference is geographic awareness at the rostering stage, not a payroll fix applied after the fact.

The geographic clustering fix

If the problem is geography-blind rostering, the solution is geography-first rostering. Here's how that works.

How to group clients by location, not just availability

Start by mapping your client base by suburb or postcode. Identify natural clusters: groups of participants who live within 10 to 15 minutes of each other.

Then assign workers to clusters rather than individual clients. Each worker "owns" a geographic zone. This reduces travel time, increases effective paid hours, and improves continuity of care because participants see the same worker consistently.

You'll still need to account for participant schedule preferences within clusters. NDIS participant choice means you can't always cluster perfectly. But even imperfect clustering beats the current approach of scheduling by availability alone.

Deputy's scheduling tools allow you to filter and assign by location zones, making it simpler to build rosters around geography from the start.

The result: workers spend more time with participants and less time in traffic. Your disability support rostering becomes operationally tighter without reducing the number of clients you serve.

Handling the exceptions (regional, after-hours, specialist visits)

Not every shift can be neatly clustered. That's fine. The goal isn't zero travel, it's making travel visible, paid, and minimised.

Regional and rural areas where clients are spread across larger distances need different strategies. Pair these shifts with explicit travel time budgets built into the roster.

After-hours and emergency visits will break clusters by nature. Build them into the roster as named exceptions rather than letting them silently erode your zone structure.

Specialist workers (behavioural support, complex care) may need to travel further for specific participants. Account for this with dedicated travel time allocations rather than hoping the worker absorbs it. When you treat exceptions as planned outliers rather than invisible norms, your workers get paid fairly and your roster stays honest.

Building travel-aware rosters step by step

Here's a practical process you can start this week.

Step 1: Audit your current travel exposure

Pull your last four weeks of rosters. For each worker, map the postcodes of consecutive client visits.

• Calculate drive time between each pair of consecutive clients (Google Maps works).

• Total the unpaid travel time per worker per week.

• Flag any worker exceeding five hours of inter-client travel per week as high priority.

This audit gives you a baseline. You can't fix what you can't see. Deputy's reporting features can surface this data without manual mapping, showing you travel patterns across your team at a glance.

Step 2: Build location zones and assign workers

Once you know where the travel waste sits, create three to five geographic zones based on your client clusters.

• Assign primary workers to each zone based on where they live (this reduces commute time too).

• Set secondary workers for each zone as backup.

• Update your scheduling rules to prioritise zone-based assignment over pure availability matching.

Deputy allows location-based scheduling rules and worker-zone assignment, so you can build this structure directly into your rostering workflow rather than managing it manually in a spreadsheet.

Step 3: Add travel buffers between consecutive clients

Between consecutive client visits within a zone, add a paid travel buffer of 15 to 30 minutes depending on zone density.

This buffer appears on the roster as paid time. It flows through to payroll automatically. And it sets realistic expectations for workers who no longer need to rush between clients or absorb SCHADS travel time costs silently.

Review your buffers monthly and adjust based on actual travel data. If workers consistently arrive early, tighten the buffer. If they're rushing, extend it.

Step 4: Monitor, adjust, and communicate

Track travel time as a KPI alongside billable hours and staff utilisation. Communicate changes to your team clearly: explain that travel time will now be paid and rostered explicitly.

Review monthly. Are zones working? Are new clients creating travel outliers that need reassignment? Use the data to inform hiring decisions, focusing recruitment in areas where client density is growing fastest.

Deputy's dashboards and time tracking tools support ongoing travel time monitoring, so you can spot emerging patterns before they become expensive problems.

What to look for in NDIS rostering software

If you're evaluating NDIS rostering software, here's what separates tools that solve the travel problem from those that just schedule shifts.

Location-aware scheduling vs. basic shift assignment

Basic rostering tools assign workers to shifts by availability and qualification. They don't factor in geography at all. You end up with rosters that look fine on paper but hide 90 minutes of unpaid travel underneath.

Location-aware rostering factors in client addresses, worker home addresses, and estimated travel time between consecutive visits. The difference: one approach produces schedules that create problems downstream. The other prevents those problems at the source.

When you're choosing rostering software, look for map-based scheduling views, travel time estimates between shifts, and zone-based auto-assignment. If the software can't tell you how far apart two consecutive clients are, it can't help you build a travel-aware roster.

Award interpretation built into the roster, not bolted on after

Tools that interpret the SCHADS Award only at the payroll stage catch errors after they've already affected workers. The damage is done, the underpayment happened, and you're stuck in remediation mode.

Tools that surface Award requirements at the rostering stage help prevent issues from reaching payroll in the first place. Look for real-time alerts during roster building that flag shifts violating minimum engagement rules or missing travel time allocations.

This is the difference between catching errors after the fact and surfacing potential issues before rosters are published. Deputy's Award interpretation tools work at the rostering stage, helping surface potential scheduling issues for manager review.

They're configuration-based tools that display relevant pay rate information and flag gaps. You can make informed decisions before publishing a roster rather than discovering problems in next week's pay run.

If your disability support roster isn't accounting for travel time between clients, Deputy can help you build location-aware schedules that pay workers correctly and help reduce back-pay risk.

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