Hospitality Award vs Restaurant Award — What's the Difference and Which One Applies?

Hospitality Award vs Restaurant Award — Key Differences

• Coverage: HIGA covers pubs, hotels, motels and accommodation venues. The Restaurant Award covers standalone restaurants, cafés and food-service venues.
• Penalties: HIGA uses flat dollar amounts for evening and night work. The Restaurant Award uses percentage-based loadings.
• Minimum shifts: HIGA has no daily minimum for full-time staff. The Restaurant Award requires a 6-hour daily minimum.
• Allowances: Both include split shift, meal, laundry and tool allowances — but trigger conditions and dollar amounts differ.
• Risk: Applying the wrong Award is a systematic underpayment exposing the venue to up to 6 years of back-pay liability and potential Fair Work Ombudsman penalties.

The Fair Work Ombudsman uses the "principal business activity" test when determining which Award applies during compliance audits and underpayment investigations. The single most important question is what your business is — not what your individual staff do.

Two Awards, One Industry — and a Lot of Confusion

The two Awards that cover most Australian food and beverage venues are the Hospitality Industry (General) Award MA000009 (commonly called "HIGA") and the Restaurant Industry Award MA000119 (commonly called the "Restaurant Award" or "RIA"). They both cover staff who serve food, pour drinks, work behind the pass, and run the floor — but they apply to different types of venues, with different rates, different penalty structures, and different allowance frameworks.

The line between them is not about what your staff do. It's about what your business is.

Get this wrong at the point of hiring, and every single shift worked is a systematic underpayment that compounds week after week. Back-pay liability runs up to six years under the Fair Work Act, and since the criminal wage theft laws came into effect in 2025, intentional underpayment can now expose directors personally.

Coverage — Which Award Applies to My Venue?

The starting point is always the principal business activity of the employer. Not the role of the individual staff member. Not what the venue calls itself. The actual nature of the business. The Fair Work Ombudsman applies this same test in audits, and it is also the test referenced throughout the coverage clauses of MA000009 and MA000119. For a deeper breakdown of MA000009 obligations once you've confirmed coverage, see the full Hospitality Award guide.

Here's how the two Awards split the hospitality landscape:

Where the Two Awards Actually Differ

Once you know which Award applies, the next question is what the practical differences look like in payroll. There are a handful that matter most — and they are the same handful that show up most often in Fair Work Ombudsman underpayment investigations.

1. Minimum Engagement Periods

This is one of the biggest practical differences and one of the most expensive to get wrong.

The Restaurant Award's 6-hour daily minimum for full-time employees is one of the most overlooked obligations. Even if a full-timer only works 4 hours on a Monday lunch service, they must be paid for 6 hours across that day. The Hospitality Award has no equivalent rule — full-time engagement is measured weekly, not daily.

2. Penalty Rate Structure

The Saturday and Sunday rates are broadly similar between the two Awards, but the structure of evening and late-night loadings is materially different — and this is the area where most payroll systems get it wrong.

3. Maximum Daily Hours for Part-Time

The Restaurant Award caps part-time daily hours at 11.5 hours per day. The Hospitality Award does not have an equivalent strict daily cap for part-time staff — though the standard 38-hour-week and overtime triggers still apply.

4. Allowances

Both Awards include split shift, meal, laundry, clothing, and tool allowances — but the dollar amounts and trigger conditions differ. For example, the split shift allowance under the Restaurant Award has different qualifying conditions than under HIGA. Copying allowance amounts from one Award to the other is a guaranteed underpayment risk.

5. Classifications

Both Awards use a five-level classification structure — but the role definitions are different. A "Level 3" cook under the Restaurant Award is not paid the same as a "Level 3" food and beverage attendant under HIGA, and the responsibilities at each level are framed differently. You cannot import a classification structure from one Award and apply it to the other.

The Mixed Venue Problem

The trickiest scenario is the venue that genuinely sits between the two Awards. A few common examples:

Pub with a bistro: covered by HIGA. The bistro is operated as part of the pub. Both bar staff and kitchen staff fall under MA000009. Don't try to classify front-of-house under one Award and kitchen staff under another.

Boutique hotel with an in-house restaurant marketed independently: still covered by HIGA. If the restaurant is operated by the hotel as part of its accommodation business, the principal activity is hospitality.

Restaurant that hires out a private function room with a bar: still covered by the Restaurant Award. The bar service is incidental to the restaurant's primary food service business.

Wine bar that serves substantial food: usually HIGA, particularly if liquor sales are the primary revenue driver. If food sales become the dominant revenue stream and the venue operates as a restaurant in everything but name, the Restaurant Award may apply — but this is a high-risk grey area worth getting checked.

How to Confirm Which Award Applies to Your Venue

If you're unsure which Award covers your venue, work through these five steps in order. They mirror the analysis the Fair Work Ombudsman applies when investigating coverage in compliance audits:

1. Identify your principal business activity — not the duties of individual staff. Is your business primarily licensed hospitality, accommodation, or food service to the public?
2. Check whether your venue is part of a hotel, pub or accommodation business. If yes, HIGA almost certainly applies — even to kitchen and café staff inside that venue.
3. Review the coverage clauses in MA000009 and MA000119 directly. Each Award sets out who is covered and who is excluded. The exclusions matter as much as the inclusions.
4. Confirm your classification structure aligns with that Award. The role definitions in MA000009 and MA000119 are not interchangeable. A Level 3 under one Award is not equivalent to Level 3 under the other. For a deeper breakdown of penalty structures under HIGA, see the hospitality penalty rates section, and for shift rules, the minimum engagement section.
5. Document your reasoning in writing. If a Fair Work Ombudsman investigator ever asks why you applied a particular Award, "we always have" is not an answer.

Example — Getting Award Coverage Wrong

What Not to Do With Award Coverage

These are the mistakes that turn an honest oversight into a six-figure back-pay claim:

Best Practice for Award Coverage

Confirm coverage in writing. Document which Award applies to your venue and the reasoning behind it. Keep this with your employment records. If a Fair Work investigator asks why you applied a particular Award, "we always have" is not an answer. The full Hospitality Award guide sets out the obligations under MA000009 in detail if HIGA is the answer.

Check coverage when the business changes. Adding accommodation? Closing the restaurant component? Pivoting from licensed venue to dry café? Coverage may shift — and if it does, the rates, allowances and minimum engagements all need to be reviewed.

Audit your payroll system for the right Award rules. Most rostering and payroll platforms have separate templates for HIGA and the Restaurant Award. Make sure you're on the right one. If your payroll system was set up by someone else and you've never checked, check now.

When in doubt, ask before you process. If you're not sure whether a function venue, a wine bar with food, or a hotel café falls under one Award or the other, get the answer before you process the next payroll cycle — not after the back-pay claim. The same logic applies to roster changes, terminations, and handling Fair Work complaints — every Award-driven decision starts with knowing which Award you're under.

Frequently Asked Questions

Award coverage is the foundation of every other compliance decision. If the foundation is wrong, every payroll cycle compounds the problem. The good news is that working it out takes minutes — and only needs to be done once for most venues.

Most venues only need to get this right once. Once your Award coverage is confirmed, everything else — pay rates, penalties, allowances — flows from that decision.