How we source and check every rate

Every pay figure on AwardScale comes from a single source: the Fair Work Commission's Modern Awards Pay Database, the official record of modern-award minimum rates. We do not estimate, average, or infer. If the database publishes it, we show it; if it does not, we do not.

Each figure is the Commission's published minimum, rendered to the cent as it appears in the official source. We do not round it into a tidier number, and we do not dress it up.

Where an award sets casual, junior, or penalty rates, we show those published rates directly rather than multiplying a base rate by a loading. The way casual loading and penalty rates interact is award-specific, so reproducing the published figure is the accurate approach and back-calculating from a base rate is not.

Annual figures shown on the site are the weekly rate multiplied by the standard number of pay-weeks in a year, and they are labelled as such. They are a guide to yearly earnings at the minimum weekly rate, not a separately published annual salary.

Every rate carries the date it took effect. Rates refresh each year when the Annual Wage Review takes effect, with the new figures operative from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026. When that happens, we update the datasets and re-date every affected figure.

AwardScale currently covers 25 awards and 422 classifications, and the coverage grows over time.

Corrections are welcome and are logged. If a reader flags a figure, we check it against the official database, fix it if it is wrong, and keep a record of the change.