Rostering student and working holiday visa staff: the caps, the checks and the fines a venue wears
A student visa casual is capped at 48 hours a fortnight, and the fortnight starts on a Monday whether your pay cycle does or not. Here is how to lay those hours across a roster, what a breach costs per worker, and the six month exemption most venues do not know hospitality has.
The four extra hours you squeezed out of your student visa casual last Saturday were worth about $162 of coverage. If those hours pushed her past 48 for the fortnight, the infringement notice starts at $87,360, priced per worker rather than per investigation. The cap sits on her visa. The fine sits on your business, and almost everything written about the 48 hour fortnight is addressed to her, not to the person building the roster.
Short version: a Student (subclass 500) visa holder can work up to 48 hours a fortnight while their course is in session, and the Migration Regulations define a fortnight as the period of 14 days commencing on a Monday. Working Holiday (subclass 417) and Work and Holiday (subclass 462) holders have no hourly cap, but they do have a six month limit per employer, and hospitality is exempt from it. Under the Migration Act it is an offence to allow a visa holder to work in breach of a work condition, and every penalty applies per worker. This is general information, not legal or migration advice.
The two caps, side by side
| Student (subclass 500) | Working Holiday (417) or Work and Holiday (462) | |
|---|---|---|
| The limit | 48 hours a fortnight while the course is in session | No hour limit. Six months maximum with any one employer |
| When it lifts | Scheduled course breaks: unlimited hours | Tourism and hospitality is an exempt sector, so it does not bite |
| Counts across other jobs? | Yes. Every employer added together | No. It runs per employer |
| Before they start | No work at all before the course commences | Full work rights from arrival |
| Who is exempt | Masters by research and doctoral students have no cap | Work in different locations for the same employer resets it |
| Where you check it | VEVO | VEVO |
The fortnight starts on a Monday, and that is the whole trap
Condition 8105 is two sentences long. The holder must not work more than 48 hours a fortnight during any fortnight when their course is in session, and then it defines the word: fortnight means the period of 14 days commencing on a Monday. Not your pay cycle. Not their uni timetable. Monday.
There is no published calendar telling you which Mondays start an official fortnight, so the only safe reading is that every Monday starts one. The number that has to stay under 48 is therefore not a fortnightly total, it is every rolling pair of Monday-to-Sunday weeks. Split the hours evenly and you can breach continuously while feeling reasonable. Alternate them and you can hand someone a genuine 30 hour week.
| Weeks, Monday to Sunday | Even split | Alternating |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | 26 hours | 30 hours |
| Week 2 | 26 hours | 18 hours |
| Week 3 | 26 hours | 30 hours |
| Week 4 | 26 hours | 18 hours |
| Fortnight starting week 1 | 52 hours, in breach | 48 hours, clean |
| Fortnight starting week 2 | 52 hours, in breach | 48 hours, clean |
| Fortnight starting week 3 | 52 hours, in breach | 48 hours, clean |
| Total over four weeks | 104 hours | 96 hours |
Read the bottom three rows before the total. The even split looks moderate, hands out eight more hours across the month, and is in breach on every single reading of the calendar. The alternating pattern is clean on all of them and still lets you put a five shift week into your busiest week. Worth setting up in November if you run a December surge, rather than discovering it in January.
Four extra Saturday hours is $162.48 of coverage at casual Level 2 rates. The company infringement notice for the same breach is $87,360. You are staking more than 500 times the value of the shift on nobody looking.
Three things that do not count the way you would assume
- A course-required placement is free. Condition 8105 exempts work specified as a requirement of the course when it was registered on CRICOS. A hospitality student's rostered placement does not eat into the 48. Ordinary paid shifts at your venue do.
- Yours is not the only ledger. The 48 hours is the combined total across every employer. If she does two shifts a week at a cafe in Newtown, you are rostering into whatever is left, and none of it shows on your timesheet.
- Exam weeks are still in session. A quiet fortnight with no classes is not a break. Only the scheduled course breaks on the enrolment lift the cap, and during those the cap comes off entirely.
What it costs when it goes wrong
Section 245AC of the Migration Act makes it an offence to allow a lawful non-citizen to work in breach of a work-related condition. Home Affairs prices it in penalty units, and a penalty unit rose from $330 to $364 on 1 July 2026, so every figure below moved about 10% this year with no announcement.
| Allowing work in breach of a visa condition | An individual (sole trader, director) | A company |
|---|---|---|
| Infringement notice | $17,472 | $87,360 |
| Civil penalty ordered by a court | $87,360 | $436,800 |
| Criminal conviction | $131,040 and/or 2 years imprisonment | $655,200 and/or 2 years imprisonment |
| Aggravated offence | $327,600 and/or 5 years imprisonment | $1,638,000 and/or 5 years imprisonment |
Home Affairs states plainly that all penalties are for each worker. Sitting behind the fines is the prohibited employer scheme: serious, deliberate or repeated breaches can get a business banned from hiring any new temporary visa holder for up to five years, with the name published on the Australian Border Force website. On 29 January 2026 a NSW operator was issued a record $540,000 infringement notice covering 50 alleged breaches, part of more than $3 million in infringements issued since the strengthened laws commenced on 1 July 2024.
The check that actually protects you
- Run a VEVO check before the first shift, not after it. Register the business for an ImmiAccount, get the worker's permission, and read the conditions rather than photographing a passport. Home Affairs points employers at VEVO precisely so they do not unintentionally allow illegal work.
- Record the condition, not just the visa type. "Subclass 500, condition 8105, 48 hours per fortnight, course in session to 21 November" is a note you can roster from. "Student visa" is not.
- Ask for the term dates and the other job. Term dates tell you when the cap lifts. The other job tells you how much of the 48 is already spent before you write a single shift.
- Put the cap in the roster, not in a manager's head. A limit that someone has to remember at 5pm on a Friday when the kitchen hand calls in sick is not a limit.
- Re-check at each visa grant and each new study period. Conditions change with a new grant, and a bridging visa can carry different ones again.
That last row of the checklist hides the real problem. VEVO tells you the cap. It cannot tell you the count. No government system knows how many hours your casual worked at the pub down the road, so the running total is yours to keep, built from your own roster plus what the worker tells you about everywhere else.
Hospitality is already exempt from the six month rule
Condition 8547 limits a 417 or 462 holder to six months with any one employer, and it catches full time, part time, casual, shift and even voluntary work. Plenty of venues still let a good backpacker go at the six month mark because they believe they have to. Since 1 January 2024 they have not: Home Affairs lists tourism and hospitality as a critical sector exempt from the limit anywhere in Australia, naming cafes and restaurants, takeaway, catering, pubs, taverns and bars, hospitality clubs, hotels and hostels, and event and entertainment venue workers. No permission request, no form. There is a separate exemption for the same employer across different locations, so a second venue in the group works too, as long as no single location runs past six months. If they are chasing a second year visa, what counts towards the 88 days is the other half of that conversation.
Rostering past the cap does not save you a dollar
This catches operators who half-think a visa breach comes with a discount. The Fair Work Ombudsman is explicit that migrant workers keep their full entitlements regardless of migration status, including where they have breached a visa condition or hold no work rights at all, and that a Migration Act breach does not affect whether the employment contract is valid. The over-cap hours are still paid at award rates with loading, penalties and super, and you carry the Migration Act exposure on top. Before you commit those hours, it is worth knowing what a casual shift actually costs per hour. Your staff are working the same problem from the other side, in how many shifts fit inside 48 hours.
Where Shiftly fits
Cap breaches are rarely decisions. They are a Friday night gap and the first person who picks up the phone, which is usually the student who has already done 44 hours this fortnight. Shiftly is free workforce management with an on-demand staffing network built in, so the roster fills itself: post the gap to nearby staff on the network instead of leaning on the one person you should not be calling. Visa conditions and course dates live on the employee record where whoever builds the roster can see them, and award-aware timesheets help you check what a shift costs before you approve it. It is a rostering and calculation tool, not a migration adviser and not a compliance guarantee, but it removes the moment where this particular mistake gets made. Get started with Shiftly.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to track the hours my student visa staff work at their other jobs?
You cannot see them, but the 48 hours is the combined total across every employer and it is your business that is exposed for allowing work in breach of the condition. The workable answer is to ask at hire and again at the start of each study period, write down what they tell you, and roster your own hours with headroom instead of to the ceiling.
What if the student says they are on a course break?
During a scheduled course break there is no cap at all, so it is a real answer and worth acting on. Get the dates from the enrolment or the provider's published calendar and put them on the file, because exam periods and quiet weeks with no classes are still treated as in session.
Does a VEVO check protect me if the worker is not straight with me?
A VEVO check is what Home Affairs tells employers to do and it is the record showing you took the condition seriously, which matters. It is not a shield you can stand behind while rostering someone 30 hours a week, and it will never show you what they worked elsewhere. Check VEVO, record the condition, roster with room.
Co-founder of Shiftly. Milan works with hospitality businesses across Australia to make rostering, timesheets and award-based pay radically simpler.
