Payslip Requirements: What Employers Must Show (and When)

You have to give every employee a pay slip within 1 working day of paying them, in electronic form or on paper, and it has to itemise the pay period, the rate, the hours, the gross and net amounts, every deduction and the super. It's a legal obligation under the Fair Work Act, not a courtesy, and the penalties for skipping it are real. Here's what has to be on the slip, what doesn't, and where small employers usually come unstuck.

The one-working-day rule

The deadline is 1 working day after the day you pay the employee. Not "with the next pay run", not "at the end of the month" — one working day.

That deadline applies even if the employee is on leave. If you run a fortnightly pay while someone's away on annual leave, the pay slip still has to go out on time. It also applies to casuals, to part-timers who worked a single shift, and to employees you paid in cash. If money moved, a pay slip follows.

The obligation covers employees only. Genuine independent contractors invoice you and don't get pay slips — but "genuine" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and misclassifying a worker is one of the more expensive mistakes in Australian payroll.

What every pay slip must show

The required contents are set out in the Fair Work Regulations. Here's the full list.

Two of those trip people up regularly.

Loadings have to be broken out, not blended. If a casual is on the ordinary rate plus 25% casual loading, the slip can't just show one merged hourly figure. The same applies to Saturday and Sunday penalty rates, overtime, and award allowances like a first-aid or laundry allowance. Anything that can be separated from the ordinary rate must be separated. If you're unsure which loadings apply, start with minimum wage and penalty rates for 2026-27.

Deductions need a name and a destination. "Deduction: $45.00" isn't compliant. You need to say what it was and where it went. And the deduction itself has to be lawful and authorised in writing by the employee (or permitted by an award, agreement or law) before it belongs on the slip at all.

What you don't have to include

Leave balances aren't required. It's best practice to show them, and most payroll software does it by default, but there's no legal obligation — though you do have to tell an employee their balance if they ask.

You also don't have to show year-to-date figures, the employee's tax file number (don't — it's sensitive), or their address.

What you must never do is put something false or misleading on a pay slip, including by leaving something out so the slip creates a false impression. That's a separate contravention with its own penalty, and courts treat it far more seriously than a sloppy but honest slip.

A worked example

Say you employ a part-timer at $30.00 an hour ordinary rate, paid fortnightly, and the fortnight ending 11 September 2026 looked like this:

• Ordinary hours: 60 hours at $30.00 = $1,800.00
• Saturday shift at 125%: 8 hours at $37.50 = $300.00
• Gross: $2,100.00
• PAYG withholding (approximate, for an employee claiming the tax-free threshold on 2026-27 rates — your payroll software will produce the exact figure from the ATO tax tables): $308.00
• Authorised deduction, staff social club: $10.00
• Net: 2,100.00 − 308.00 − 10.00 = $1,782.00
• Super at 12% of qualifying earnings: 2,100.00 × 0.12 = $252.00

The pay slip has to show every one of those lines separately. Showing "$2,100.00 gross, $1,782.00 net" and nothing else fails the test, even though both numbers are correct — the ordinary rate, the hours, the penalty rate and the two deductions all have to be visible in their own right.

Super on pay slips since payday super started

The super guarantee rate is 12% (as at September 2026), and since 1 July 2026 payday super has changed the rhythm of how you pay it. Contributions now have to be paid at the same time as salary and wages, with the money reaching the employee's fund within 7 business days of payday, instead of the old quarterly cycle.

The pay slip rule itself lets you show either the contributions you actually made during the period, or the contributions you're liable to make for it — and you don't have to spell out which. Under quarterly super that gap mattered, because a slip could show super that wouldn't leave your account for months. With payday super, the slip and the money now line up within days.

You still need the fund name (or name and number) on the slip alongside the dollar amount. There's a narrow exception for a brand-new employee: if the slip is due within 14 days of the first payment, the employee hasn't chosen a fund and the ATO hasn't told you their stapled fund yet, you can leave the fund name off that first slip. It's a grace period, not a standing exemption.

If payday super is still new to you, payday super explained covers the 7-business-day deadline, qualifying earnings and the new charge.

Electronic pay slips are fine

Emailed PDFs and self-service portals both satisfy the obligation. Two conditions apply: the electronic slip has to carry exactly the same information a paper one would, and the employee has to be able to access and print it privately. A portal login works. A printed stack left on the shop counter doesn't.

Plain English helps too. Cryptic payroll codes technically comply if the required information is there, but they generate questions, and questions about pay slips have a habit of turning into Fair Work enquiries.

How long you have to keep pay records

Seven years. Employee records — including the pay records behind each slip — must be kept for 7 years under the Fair Work Act, and they have to be legible, in English, readily accessible to a Fair Work Inspector, and never altered except to correct a genuine error.

That's a longer window than the ATO's general 5-year rule for business records, so the seven-year mark is the one to plan your storage around. Record keeping for small business sets out how the two regimes overlap.

Note the trap in the reverse-onus rule: if you haven't kept records or issued pay slips and can't show a reasonable excuse, and an employee later claims they were underpaid, it's on you to disprove the claim in court. Without records, that's close to impossible. The pay slip you didn't bother sending becomes the evidence you can't produce.

What it costs to get this wrong

A Fair Work Inspector can issue an infringement notice — an on-the-spot fine, and an alternative to court — any time an employer breaches the pay slip or record-keeping rules, including on a first offence. Inspectors often start with a contravention letter for a minor first breach, but they're not obliged to.

If it goes to court, maximum penalties for pay slip and record-keeping contraventions run to 60 penalty units per contravention for an individual and 300 for a body corporate. At the Commonwealth penalty unit of $364, that's $21,840 and $109,200 respectively (as at September 2026). Serious contraventions — deliberate breaches forming part of a systematic pattern — attract ten times those maximums.

The word that hurts is per contravention. Every pay period where a slip was missing or non-compliant can be counted separately, so a small business that skipped pay slips for a year across four staff is not looking at one breach.

Separately, since 1 January 2025 intentional underpayment of wages has been a criminal offence, with a Voluntary Small Business Wage Compliance Code that gives employers with fewer than 15 staff a defined path to avoid criminal referral. Accurate pay slips and records are the evidence you'd rely on.

Common mistakes and how software prevents them

The recurring failures in small business payroll are boringly consistent:

• Merging the casual loading into a single hourly rate instead of itemising it
• Showing gross and net with no rate or hours breakdown for hourly staff
• Listing a deduction with no description or destination account
• Omitting the ABN, or naming the trading name instead of the employing entity
• Sending slips late, especially for staff on leave
• Never issuing slips for one-off casual shifts

Any compliant Australian payroll product handles the required fields automatically once you've set up the employee correctly — the errors above are almost always configuration mistakes, not software failures. See payroll software options for Australian small business if you're still running payroll off a spreadsheet.

One thing software doesn't do for you: reporting through Single Touch Payroll does not discharge the pay slip obligation. STP sends the data to the ATO. Pay slips go to the employee. They're separate duties and you owe both — Single Touch Payroll explained covers what STP does and doesn't replace.

Key takeaways

• Pay slips are due within 1 working day of payday, for every employee, including casuals, staff on leave and anyone paid in cash.
• The slip must itemise the pay period, payment date, gross and net, the rate and hours (or annual salary), every loading and allowance, every deduction with its destination, and super with the fund name.
• Leave balances aren't required but are good practice; false or misleading information is a separate, more serious contravention.
• Keep pay records for 7 years — longer than the ATO's 5-year rule — and remember that missing records shift the burden of proof onto you in an underpayment claim.
• Maximum penalties are $21,840 per contravention for an individual and $109,200 for a company at the $364 penalty unit (as at September 2026), and each non-compliant pay period counts separately.
• STP reporting doesn't replace pay slips. You owe both.

Where to get help

The Fair Work Ombudsman publishes a free pay slip template and a record-keeping and pay slips fact sheet at fairwork.gov.au, and the Fair Work Infoline on 13 13 94 will answer specific questions about your award and your obligations. For super timing and qualifying earnings under payday super, the ATO's payday super pages are the authoritative source. If you've discovered historical pay slips were missing or wrong, a registered BAS agent or an employment lawyer can help you work out the exposure and correct it before an inspector does.