Underpayment: how to check and recover what you are owed

Your minimum pay and conditions are built from a stack of sources, and a contract cannot pay you below them. The floor is set by:

Start with your payslips, your roster and the classification in your award. The Fair Work Ombudsman runs a free Pay and Conditions Tool (PACT) that calculates the correct base rates, penalties, overtime and allowances for most awards, and you can call the Fair Work Infoline on 13 13 94. Comparing what you should have been paid against what you actually received, pay period by pay period, is the foundation of any underpayment claim.

To recover an underpayment through a court you generally have 6 years from the day the underpayment occurred (section 544 of the Fair Work Act). Because each short-paid pay period is treated as a separate breach, the 6 years runs separately for each one, so it is worth acting rather than assuming an old shortfall is out of reach.

Do not confuse this 6-year window with the very short deadlines for dismissal claims (21 days). They are different things: the 6 years is for recovering money you were owed.

There are several routes, from free and informal to formal court action:

From 1 January 2025, intentionally underpaying wages or entitlements can be a criminal offence under the Closing Loopholes reforms. The key word is intentional: honest mistakes, miscalculations and accidental underpayments are expressly not crimes, and the offence is not retrospective. There is also a voluntary compliance code that can shield very small employers from criminal referral. Most underpayments remain civil matters about recovering the money, not criminal cases.

Unpaid super is mostly chased through the Australian Taxation Office rather than the Fair Work system, although superannuation is now also a National Employment Standards entitlement in limited circumstances. If super is your main issue, the ATO is usually the first port of call.