What a casual shift really costs you per hour in 2026, and what an agency charges for the same shift

A Level 2 casual on a Tuesday day shift in Sydney earns $33.85 an hour. By the time that shift is paid, it has cost your pub $40.95. An agency will quote you somewhere between $38 and $58 for the same person on the same day, and almost none of them will show you which of those two numbers they are actually beating.

The short version: a casual's fully loaded cost is their award rate for that day plus about 15% if your venue sits under the NSW payroll tax threshold, or plus about 21% if you are over it. That covers 12% super, workers compensation and payroll tax. Agency charge-out rates run $38 to $58 an hour on a margin usually quoted at 15% to 25%, so the only honest comparison is against the loaded number, never the award rate. This is general information, not financial or legal advice.

What one casual hour actually costs

Take a Sydney pub, a food and beverage attendant grade 2, ordinary daytime hours on a Tuesday. Under the Hospitality Award (MA000009) the adult Level 2 minimum is $1,029.10 a week, which is $27.08 an hour, from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026. Here is what happens to that number on its way out of your account.

That is 21% on top of the rate you wrote in the roster, and 51% on top of the award base. Two of those four lines are worth knowing properly, because they are the ones every generic labour hire article gestures at without ever printing a number.

$33.85 goes on the roster. $40.95 leaves the account. Nothing in between is optional.

Workers comp is not one rate, and hospitality is not one industry

NSW prices workers compensation by industry classification, and hospitality is carved into five. The 2025-26 rates were held for the 2026-27 policy year under the state's reform legislation, so these are current for the full year.

A club pays 64% more workers comp on the same wage bill as a cafe. Your own premium then moves with size and claims history, so treat the table as the starting point rather than the invoice. Payroll tax is the bigger swing: NSW charges 5.45% on Australian wages above $1.2 million a year, and super counts towards that total. A single cafe on a $600,000 wage bill pays none of it. A three-venue group pays it on every hour.

One thing changed on 1 July 2026 that makes the super line feel different even though the rate did not move. Under Payday Super, your contribution has to reach the fund within 7 business days of paying the worker, not by a quarterly deadline. The cost was always there. Now the cash goes with it, and your staff noticed.

The same casual, priced across the week

Casual penalty rates in MA000009 already include the loading, so a Saturday hour is 150% of the base, Sunday 175% and a public holiday 250%. Weekday evenings are the one most people forget: from 7pm to midnight a casual gets their rate plus a flat $2.95 an hour, and from midnight to 7am it is plus $4.42. Apply the on-costs to all of it and the spread gets wide quickly.

A Sunday hour costs a payroll-tax-paying pub $57.32. A public holiday hour costs $81.88, which is why the public holiday roster is the one worth building slowly. And whatever the day, MA000009 requires a casual to be engaged and paid for at least 2 consecutive hours, so a 45-minute favour still costs you two hours at the loaded rate. If you are not sure which classification level someone sits on, fix that before anything else here is worth calculating.

How to reverse-engineer an agency quote

Published Australian labour hire rates for 2026 sit between $38 and $58 an hour, on an agency margin usually described as 15% to 25%. One Sydney provider lists $52 an hour as its standard rate. Those figures are close to useless on their own, because the same margin applied to a Tuesday and a Sunday produces wildly different quotes. Here is how to take any quote apart in five steps.

1. Ask which award classification the worker is on. Level 1 to Level 2 is only 64 cents an hour at the base, but every penalty rate multiplies it.
2. Work out the casual rate for the actual day and time, not an average week. Level 2 is $33.85 weekday daytime, $36.80 weekday evening, $40.62 Saturday, $47.39 Sunday, $67.70 public holiday.
3. Multiply by 1.15, or by 1.21 if your business is over the $1.2 million payroll tax threshold. That is what the identical hour costs you directly.
4. Subtract that from the quote. What is left is the agency's gross margin, in dollars, on that specific shift.
5. Divide the margin by your own loaded cost. Under 15% is sharp, 15% to 25% is the market, and above 30% usually means you are being charged a weekend margin for a weekday shift.

Run that and the $38 to $58 band stops looking like a quality spectrum. A $38 quote is roughly a Level 1 casual weekday hour at a small operator's own cost, with almost nothing left over. A flat $58 is about an 18% margin on a Saturday hour, but a 42% margin on the identical Tuesday. The range is not agencies charging differently. It is the same margin sitting on different days of the week.

The day the agency stops being expensive

Put that published $52 flat rate beside your own Level 2 casual, at a pub over the payroll tax threshold.

The crossover sits between Saturday and Sunday, and that is the finding worth keeping: a genuinely flat agency rate is a poor deal five and a half days a week and a bargain on the other day and a half. Most hospitality agencies know exactly this and load their weekend and public holiday rates, which is fair enough. But if you have been quoted one number for the whole week, that number is quietly telling you which days to use them on.

What neither number includes

Both sides of this ledger carry costs that never appear in an hourly rate, and honest maths counts them.

• On your side: recruiting and trial shifts, induction hours paid in full at partial output, roster and payroll admin every single week, and the one that is hardest to price, the shift you could not fill at all.
• On the agency's side: minimum booking lengths (a four-hour minimum turns a three-hour gap into four hours of charge), cancellation windows that bill you anyway, and a worker who has never seen your bar and will be slower through the first hour of it.
• The due diligence one: NSW has no labour hire licensing scheme, unlike Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and the ACT. Nobody has vetted your provider for you, so asking how they classify and pay the worker is an entirely reasonable question.

Where an agency genuinely earns its margin is speed and risk transfer. Nothing to recruit, no payroll to run, a replacement if someone drops out, and no employment relationship to carry. On a Tuesday you are paying about $11 an hour for that. In a real emergency it is cheap, because running a shift short is almost always the dearest option on the board.

Where Shiftly fits

Most venues pay an agency margin for one reason. At 4pm on a Saturday they have no other way to reach a qualified worker who can be on the floor by six. Shiftly is free workforce management for Australian venues, rostering plus award-aware timesheets that help you check what a shift should cost before you pay it, with an on-demand staffing network built into the same roster. It is the roster that fills itself: post the open shift and nearby vetted hospitality workers see the venue, the hours and the pay before they accept. You set the rate, and the worker comes onto your books at your loaded cost, not at a charge-out rate with someone else's margin sitting on top. Keep the agency for the shifts genuinely nobody else can cover, and stop paying a weekend margin on a Tuesday gap. Get started with Shiftly.

Frequently asked questions

What is the real hourly cost of a casual employee in Australia?

Take the award rate for the actual day and time, add 12% super, then add workers compensation and, if you are above the state threshold, payroll tax. In NSW that lands at roughly 15% on top of the casual rate for a venue under the $1.2 million payroll tax threshold, and roughly 21% for one above it. A Level 2 casual on $33.85 an hour costs a Sydney pub between $38.88 and $40.95.

How much do labour hire agencies mark up hospitality staff?

Published Australian figures for 2026 put agency margins at 15% to 25% of the fully loaded cost of the worker, which is where the $38 to $58 an hour charge-out band comes from. Because the margin sits on the loaded cost rather than the award base, the dollar figure roughly doubles between a Tuesday and a public holiday even at an identical percentage.

Is it cheaper to hire my own casuals than to use an agency?

On ordinary weekday hours, almost always. On Sundays and public holidays a flat agency rate can genuinely undercut your own loaded cost, because your penalty rates climb faster than a fixed charge-out does. The three variables that flip the answer are your payroll tax position, the worker's classification level, and whether the agency loads its weekend rates.

Does a venue pay super on casual loading and penalty rates?

Yes. Casual loading and shift penalties, including public holiday penalties, count as qualifying earnings for super guarantee, so the 12% applies to the loaded rate rather than the base. Overtime is the main exclusion. Since 1 July 2026 the contribution also has to reach the worker's fund within 7 business days of payday.