Monday 21 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL)

The SCHADS Schedule E Increase Now Starts 1 December, Not 1 October. Spend the Extra Ten Weeks Building the List You Don't Have.

A percentage applies to a headcount. Almost nobody has the headcount — and the 2027 translation depends on it even more than December does.

On 11 September 2026 the Fair Work Commission's Expert Panel issued [2026] FWCFB 232, finalising the SCHADS Award matter in the gender-based undervaluation priority awards review. It confirms the interim increase of around 15 per cent for employees currently engaged under Schedule E — but moves the start from 1 October 2026 to 1 December 2026.

The June decision, [2026] FWCFB 137, had put 1 October forward as a provisional view. Employer groups argued for later: ABLA for 1 January 2027, the Ai Group for no earlier than 1 July 2027. Their central point was that when aged care home care workers received the same interim 15 per cent in 2023, the Commonwealth had committed to fund it — and this time it has made no such commitment. The Panel held that Schedule E employees should not have to wait until October 2027, but accepted that providers need time to change arrangements, including with clients, and settled on December. The new classification structure for the whole award stays at 1 October 2027.

If your FY27 budget has 1 October in it, move it this week. That is two months of uplift out of this year's cost line. Welcome, but not a reason to relax.

Because the number was never the news. Most providers modelled something close to 15 per cent months ago, and we have written about the cost twice already. What almost nobody has done is the unglamorous thing the number requires: establish, employee by employee, who is in Schedule E — and, as this decision makes plain, which kind of Schedule E employee they are.

What is now settled

Two events, both now dated, and easy to confuse.

1 December 2026 is narrow. It lifts rates for one cohort — employees currently under Schedule E — by 15 per cent for most classifications, applied to rates already revised for the 2026 Annual Wage Review. It is a pay-rate change your system can carry once the right people are flagged.

1 October 2027 is wide. Schedules B, C, E and F are replaced by one integrated structure, every employee on the award is translated, and no existing employee's minimum rate goes down on translation. For Schedule E employees, the Panel chose not to add a second interim step: the remaining increases land with the new structure.

1 Dec 2026 Operative date of the interim ~15% increase for current Schedule E employees, deferred from 1 October. Levels E.4.2 and E.5.2 receive 14.96% and 13.31%.

1.97–6.97% Remaining Schedule E increases set out in the June decision (median 3.7%), applied when the new structure commences on 1 October 2027.

The part of the decision that changes the job

Today, Schedule E covers home care work for a person with disability in a private residence — and that has included personal care, not just domestic assistance and home maintenance. The Commission itself has found the award's split of disability work between Schedules B and E is not readily explicable, and that some employers pay disability support workers doing private-residence work under Schedule B while others pay them under Schedule E.

From 1 October 2027, that ambiguity is removed by definition. Home care disability work becomes domestic assistance or home maintenance only. Disability support work — including personal care — sits in the social and community services stream, regardless of where it is performed.

So your current Schedule E population is really two populations. Both receive the December increase. They translate differently in 2027. Under the published translation tables, a Schedule E Level 2 employee doing domestic assistance translates to Level 2.2; a Schedule E Level 2 employee doing disability support work translates to Level 3.1 or above. Same schedule today, different level — and a different rate — next October.

Which makes the December list and the 2027 list one piece of work. Do it once, now, with duties in it.

Why you almost certainly don't have the list

Ask payroll for "everyone on Schedule E" and the answer usually arrives as a number, derived from a pay level or a cost centre rather than the schedule itself. Three ordinary reasons:

Most payroll systems don't store the schedule as a field. They store a classification code and a rate. The schedule is an inference someone made during configuration, sometimes years ago, sometimes by a person who has left.

Cost centres are organised around services, not awards. A home care team and a community access team can share a cost centre, a manager and a roster, and be on different schedules.

Duties drift, records don't. Someone hired for domestic assistance who now mostly provides personal care is a classification question with a real answer, and it is not the answer written on their file.

Four columns, and a tolerable way to fill them

The deliverable is one table, one row per employee, four columns: the classification recorded in payroll; the schedule that classification belongs to; the duties performed in the last full month, taken from rostering rather than the contract — personal care, or domestic assistance and home maintenance only; and a flag where the first two disagree with the third.

That last column is the whole point. The rows that agree are administration. The rows that disagree decide your December pay run and your 2027 translation.

This is tedious, and a reasonable place to use an AI tool for the mechanical portion — pulling stated duties from position descriptions into consistent fields, normalising two exports that don't share a schema, and listing where roster and contract data diverge. What you must not do is let it decide which schedule a disputed row belongs to. That call sits with whoever signs the pay run, and it needs the award text, not a summary of it.

On the data: this exercise involves names, pay rates and rosters — employee data, not anonymous figures. If you use an AI tool on it, confirm first whether the vendor trains its models on customer inputs. The safest posture is a tool where your data is not retained for training, and where you know that from the contract rather than from the marketing page.

Three things the December pay run can get wrong

The effective date is a pay period, not a calendar date. Award wage variations take effect from the first full pay period starting on or after the operative date. For a fortnightly cycle that can be well into December, and a system configured to change the rate on 1 December itself will overpay the tail of November. Ask your payroll provider how the system will apply it, and get the answer in writing.

Two levels are not 15 per cent. E.4.2 and E.5.2 receive 14.96 and 13.31 per cent. A blanket 15 per cent uplift overpays both and creates a reconciliation problem in a schedule you are already unsure about.

Read the rates, don't calculate them. The Schedule E determination is revised for the 2026 Annual Wage Review, so the uplift sits on top of July's 4.75 per cent, not beside it. Take the published rates from the determination and the award, not from multiplying last year's figure. Rounding alone can put a calculated rate a few cents out, and across a year that is an underpayment.

Related reading: we covered this increase twice while it was still provisional — once as one of three FY27 cost lines set by people you will never meet, and once as an input when rebuilding the FY27 forecast around dates you don't control. The date moving is exactly what that second post was about. Both treated the percentage as the object; this post is about the population it lands on. For the register that makes obligations like this visible early, see the funding obligation register.

The funding gap is the reason for the delay — and the delay doesn't close it

The Panel moved the date explicitly because there is no Commonwealth funding commitment. Two months does not create one. Your wage costs are now fixed by a final determination; your NDIS revenue is set separately, through the NDIA's pricing arrangements, and nothing links the two automatically.

So the useful board paper this month is not "wages are going up." It is: here is the Schedule E headcount, split by duties; here is the confirmed cost from 1 December; here are the rows we could not classify with confidence and what we are doing about them; and here is the same list run through the 2027 translation tables, where every employee is in scope.

Ten weeks is enough time to build the list properly. It is not enough time to build it after the first December pay run.

This post is general commentary based on publicly available information and does not constitute legal or tax advice. Always seek independent professional advice before acting.

Can you produce your Schedule E list, employee by employee and split by duties?

If the answer is a number rather than a list, the budget figure is an estimate wearing a calculation's clothing. PFL provides senior-level outsourced finance, management reporting, and AI automation for Australian NFP, NDIS, and SME organisations — including the unglamorous data work that has to happen before a cost figure means anything.

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Timothy, CPA is Managing Director of Professional Financelink (PFL), providing senior-level outsourced finance, management reporting, and AI automation for Australian NFP, NDIS, and SME organisations. 20+ years in finance leadership across NFP, NDIS and SME.

Sources
Fair Work Commission — Gender-based undervaluation: priority awards review (including [2026] FWCFB 232, 11 September 2026, and [2026] FWCFB 137, 1 June 2026)
Fair Work Ombudsman — Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award 2010 (MA000100)
Fair Work Ombudsman — Pay and allowances in the SCHADS Award
McCullough Robertson — Fair Work Commission decision overhauls SCHADS Award framework and pay rates (June decision)

Tomorrow: Microsoft shipped a way to make your modelling conventions machine-readable three months ago. Almost nobody has used it as a control.