Full-time vs part-time employees and how the Australian classification works

Every Australian business that takes on permanent staff makes a classification decision, full-time or part-time, often without thinking much about it. On the surface it looks like a question of hours: how many days a week the person works. In practice the classification drives how leave accrues, when overtime and penalty rates are triggered, how rosters can be changed, and what happens if the employment ends. An error made at the hiring stage can resurface months later as an underpayment claim or a Fair Work dispute.

This article explains how the full-time and part-time classification works under the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) (the FW Act) and the National Employment Standards (the NES): what triggers it, the rules that apply at each stage of the relationship, and where small businesses typically get caught out.

The three layers of rules

The classification is not set by a single rule. Three layers of rules stack on top of each other, and each one can change the answer:

The National Employment Standards: the statutory minimum floor in Part 2-2 of the FW Act that applies to most employees in the national system, covering maximum weekly hours, leave, public holidays, notice and redundancy pay.
Modern awards: industry or occupation rules made by the Fair Work Commission that sit on top of the NES and can set minimum hours, part-time pattern requirements, overtime triggers, penalty rates and consultation obligations.
The employment contract: the agreed terms between employer and employee, which must not undercut the NES or an applicable award.

Two institutions sit behind these layers. The Fair Work Ombudsman (the FWO) investigates underpayments and non-compliance, and the Fair Work Commission makes and varies modern awards and resolves disputes. Both start from the same place as an employer should: the classification of the role and the hours that were actually agreed.

What makes an employee full-time or part-time

The FW Act benchmark is 38 hours. Under s 62, an employer must not request or require an employee to work more than 38 hours in a week, unless the additional hours are reasonable. For an employee who is not full-time, the cap is the lesser of 38 hours and their ordinary hours of work.

The Fair Work Ombudsman describes a full-time employee as one who works on average 38 hours per week. A part-time employee works less than 38 hours per week, with hours that are usually regular each week, and is usually employed on a permanent basis or on a fixed-term contract.

Two points follow from that. First, part-time is not a casual arrangement. Under s 15A of the FW Act, an employee is casual only if the relationship has no firm advance commitment to continuing and indefinite work, assessed on the real substance, practical reality and true nature of the relationship. A part-time employee who works a set pattern each week is a permanent employee entitled to paid leave, notice and, potentially, redundancy pay. If you roster someone "as needed" with no agreed pattern, the question becomes whether they are genuinely casual, or a permanent part-time employee who is not being paid correctly.

Second, ordinary hours matter more than the label. Section 20 of the FW Act sets the default for award-free employees: 38 hours for a full-time employee, and for anyone else the lesser of 38 hours and their usual weekly hours, where no agreement exists. That default is why the written agreement at engagement matters: if there is no agreement, the law supplies one, and it may not match the roster you had in mind.

Hiring: agreeing the hours up front

The classification takes effect at engagement, and the contract should record three things: the employment type (full-time or part-time), the agreed ordinary hours, and for part-time employees the pattern of work, for example three days per week on set days.

Many modern awards go further. The FWO notes that many awards, enterprise agreements and other registered agreements have record-keeping arrangements for part-time employees about their hours of work. In practice that commonly means an agreed number of hours per week or per roster cycle, set days of work, set start and finish times, and a written record of the arrangement with rules about how it can be changed.

Where an award requires a written part-time agreement and you do not have one, hours worked outside any identifiable pattern can trigger overtime and penalty rates, and an underpayment can accumulate quietly before anyone notices. The "we will sort the roster out later" approach is the single most common source of part-time disputes. Fluctuating hours without an agreed pattern do not create a compliant part-time arrangement; they create a classification risk.

Running the relationship: how leave accrues

The pro-rata principle is the heart of the part-time distinction. Under the NES, part-time employees receive the same minimum entitlements as full-time employees, calculated in proportion to their ordinary hours:

Annual leave: Section 87 of the FW Act gives employees four weeks of paid annual leave per year (five weeks for shiftworkers defined as such in an award or enterprise agreement), accruing progressively according to ordinary hours of work. A full-time employee on 38 hours per week accrues 152 hours per year (4 x 38). A part-time employee working 19 hours per week accrues 76 hours per year, exactly half. The same entitlement, proportionally calculated.
Personal/carer's leave: Section 96 provides 10 days of paid personal/carer's leave per year, again based on ordinary hours. The FWO's example makes the arithmetic clear: Suzanne, full-time on 38 hours across five days, gets 76 hours (10 days) of paid sick and carer's leave per year, while Rebecca, part-time working an average of 19 hours per week, gets half. This matters when leave is actually taken. A part-time employee who works five-hour shifts is paid five hours for a sick day, not a full day.
Family and domestic violence leave: Paid family and domestic violence leave of 10 days per year is the exception to pro-rating. It is available in full to part-time employees as well.
Public holidays: Section 114 gives employees the right to be absent from work on a public holiday in the place where they are based, subject to reasonable requests to work and reasonable refusals. Under s 116, if the public holiday falls on a day the employee would otherwise have worked, the employee must be paid at their base rate for those ordinary hours. If a part-time employee's pattern does not include that day of the week, no payment is due. This is the point where part-time schedules cause the most confusion: an employer pays a public holiday to someone who does not work Mondays, or forgets to pay someone who does.
Superannuation: Since 1 July 2022 the $450 per month threshold for the superannuation guarantee has been removed for most employees, so employers generally must pay super regardless of how much a part-time employee earns. The main remaining exception is employees under 18, who are only eligible if they work more than 30 hours in a week. The guarantee rate rose from 10.5% from 1 July 2022 to 12% from 1 July 2025, so the cost of each additional part-time hour has been climbing with it.

When hours change: overtime, rostering and additional hours

The maximum weekly hours rule in s 62 does more than set the 38-hour benchmark. It also caps additional hours: an employer must not request or require hours beyond the cap unless they are reasonable, and an employee may refuse additional hours that are unreasonable. Working out what is reasonable takes into account health and safety, the employee's personal circumstances, the needs of the workplace, and whether overtime or penalty rates are paid.

For part-time employees, the overtime question turns on the agreed pattern. Hours worked outside that pattern can attract overtime or penalty rates under the applicable award, depending on the classification level. This is why awards insist on a written pattern: without one, ordinary hours are hard to identify, and every shift can become a dispute about what should have been paid.

Changing the pattern is where employers most often slip. Awards commonly require notice or consultation before a roster change, and the Fair Work Commission has repeatedly stressed that part-time employment is meant to be predictable and stable. Unilaterally cutting a part-time employee's days, or moving shifts around week to week without the required process, can amount to a change the employee never agreed to. The consequences can range from an underpayment claim to a dispute about whether the change effectively terminated the employment.

Ending the arrangement: notice and redundancy

Permanent employees, full-time and part-time, sit on the same side of the termination rules. Both are entitled to notice and, in some cases, redundancy pay, while casual employees are not:

Notice of termination: Section 117 requires written notice of the day of termination, with a minimum period based on continuous service: one week for up to one year, two weeks for one to three years, three weeks for three to five years, and four weeks for more than five years. The period increases by one week if the employee is over 45 and has at least two years of service. Payment in lieu of notice is available if you want the employment to end immediately, calculated at the full rate for the hours the employee would have worked during the notice period.
Redundancy pay: Section 119 requires redundancy pay where the employer no longer requires the job to be done by anyone, or the employer becomes insolvent, calculated on years of continuous service and rising to a maximum of 16 weeks for nine or more years of service. Two exclusions matter for small businesses. No redundancy pay is required if the employee has less than 12 months of continuous service, or if the employer is a small business employer, meaning fewer than 15 employees at the relevant time, with casual employees counted only if they are regular casuals (ss 23 and 121).

A restructure that moves a full-time employee to part-time is not a neutral administrative change. Reducing hours without genuine agreement, or without the consultation an award requires, can turn an intended cost saving into an adverse action, redundancy or unfair dismissal claim. The safer path is to treat it as a variation of the contract: explain the change, obtain written agreement to the new hours and pattern, and update payroll and leave accrual settings at the same time.

Where a lawyer can help

Most full-time versus part-time problems are not about the headline definitions. They are about the details, and a lawyer's role is usually at one of four points:

Hiring: checking which modern award applies and whether the contract records the employment type, ordinary hours and part-time pattern correctly before the first pay run.
Restructures: advising on consultation obligations, genuine agreement to a change in hours, and whether the change triggers redundancy or termination entitlements.
Disputes: responding to a Fair Work Ombudsman investigation, an underpayment claim, or a Fair Work Commission application about classification, hours or roster changes.
Terminations: getting notice, payment in lieu and redundancy calculations right, and documenting the process so it can be defended.

Getting advice early is cheaper than defending a claim. A contract review or classification check can be done before the arrangement is locked in, when the fix is a document change rather than a back-pay calculation.

The pattern you set on day one

The detail that concentrates most of the risk in this area is the part-time pattern: whether it exists, whether it is in writing, and whether it matches the award. The hours agreed in the contract feed directly into leave accrual, overtime triggers, public holiday pay and notice, and every subsequent change to the roster tests that agreement. Writing the pattern down and checking the award at engagement costs an afternoon. Reconstructing what the pattern "really was" after an underpayment or termination claim costs considerably more. If you are not sure your current contracts hold up, that is the question worth putting to a lawyer before the next hire or restructure, and a free initial conversation is usually enough to find out whether the problem is real.