RDOs and the 36-Hour Week in Construction

What it is

The rostered day off is not a bonus and it is not leave. It is hours the crew has already worked, held back and paid out later. Get the accrual wrong and you carry a liability you cannot see until someone resigns.

The award is 38 hours, not 36

Clause 16.1 of MA000020 sets ordinary working hours at 38 per week, averaged over a 20 day four week cycle to allow for the accrual and taking of RDOs, worked between 7.00 am and 6.00 pm Monday to Friday. That sits on s62 of the Fair Work Act, which caps a full-time employee at 38 hours a week unless the additional hours are reasonable.

A 36-hour week is common in construction enterprise agreements, mostly in commercial work. It is not in this award. If MA000020 is your only instrument you owe a 38-hour average.

How the accrual works

Clause 16.2 does the whole job in two sentences: ordinary working hours are 8 hours each day, of which 7.6 are paid and 0.4 of one hour accrues towards an RDO.

Across a cycle:

• 19 days worked at 8 hours is 152 hours
• 19 days at 0.4 of an hour is 7.6 hours accrued, exactly one RDO
• 152 hours across four weeks is a 38-hour average

The award says it outright: an employee accrues 7.6 hours towards an RDO each 19 days of ordinary hours worked. The RDO is the twentieth day. The crew funded it out of 0.4 of an hour a day they were not paid, which is why failing to pay one is a plain underpayment rather than a scheduling argument.

Rostering the RDO, and the calendar myth

Clause 16.4(a) gives three ways to fix the day: one day in the cycle on which all employees take an RDO, under a written roster fixed by the employer and issued 7 days before the cycle starts; different days for different employees under the same kind of roster; or any other method agreed with the majority of your employees and recorded in writing.

A myth worth killing: the award does not set an industry-wide RDO calendar and the Fair Work Ombudsman does not publish one. The construction RDO calendars that circulate each year are enterprise agreement instruments. Under the award the obligation is yours, through clause 16.4.

Clause 16.4(c) adds a hard rule: a roster must not require an employee to take an RDO on a public holiday. Clause 16.8 lets you and the majority of your employees agree in writing to another way of arranging hours where an RDO in each cycle is genuinely not practicable.

Banking and working through

Clause 16.5 allows banking by agreement, with limits that matter: no more than 5 accrued RDOs banked at any time; a banked RDO is taken on an agreed day and you must not unreasonably withhold agreement; and you must keep a record of how many each employee has banked and the date each is taken.

Working someone on a rostered RDO is clause 16.6. You need agreement, or not less than 48 hours notice where the work is necessary because of unforeseen delays or emergency circumstances. Then the part that surprises builders: the employee is paid penalty rates as prescribed for Saturday work and retains the accrued RDO. You pay the penalty and still owe the day.

Public holidays, leave and daily hire

Clause 16.3(a) keeps the accrual running when nobody is on the tools. An employee accrues 0.4 of an hour towards an RDO for any public holiday they are not required to work and for each day of paid leave taken. It does not accrue on a day they take an RDO.

So annual leave does not pause RDO accrual. Neither does the Christmas break. This is the most commonly miscoded rule in construction payroll: systems built for other industries stop accruing on leave days.

Daily hire employees sit inside all of it: their hourly rate under clause 19.3(a) is built by dividing by 38. Part-timers are the real exception. Under clause 16.9(b) they may be paid for actual hours worked and accrue nothing.

What termination and bad accrual cost

Clause 16.7 is the reckoning. If employment ends for any reason then, on top of everything else, you must pay the value of any accrued RDO yet to be taken plus any banked accrued RDO, and the value of the hours and minutes accrued towards the next one.

That second limb is the one payroll misses. Someone who resigns 12 days into a cycle is owed 4.8 hours of part-accrued RDO. Small per person, wrong on every termination if the system does not track it.

The exposures worth naming:

• not accruing on paid leave or public holidays understates the balance on every termination
• rostering an RDO and not paying it underpays 7.6 hours
• working someone on an RDO at ordinary rates underpays the Saturday penalty and wrongly clears the accrual
• banking more than 5, or banking with no record, breaches clause 16.5

Reconcile the RDO ledger every cycle rather than every year, and re-check the rate the balance is valued at in the first pay period after 1 July. Award rates rose 4.75 per cent from 1 July 2026.