What is the Cleaning Services Award MA000022?

MA000022, the Cleaning Services Award, is the modern award that applies to employers in the contract cleaning industry and to the employees they engage to do cleaning work. If a business engages a commercial cleaning contractor, the cleaners who attend the site are almost always covered by this award unless they sit under a registered enterprise agreement that has been approved by the Fair Work Commission.

The award is the floor, not the ceiling. It sets minimum hourly rates, overtime, penalty rates, allowances, breaks, notice, and rostering rules. An employer can pay above it. An employer cannot pay below it, and cannot use an ABN or a subcontracting arrangement to avoid it where the working relationship is genuinely one of employment.

This matters to the buyer as much as the employer. When a commercial cleaning quote is priced below what the award costs to deliver, something has to give: hours get cut, the scope quietly shrinks, staff turnover climbs, or the contractor is underpaying. Understanding the award is the fastest way for a facilities manager to work out whether a price is realistic.

The award groups cleaning work into three classification levels. The level determines the minimum hourly rate, and an employee must be paid at the level that matches the work they are actually asked to perform, not the level that is cheapest.

The broad structure is consistent, but the exact wording of the classification definitions and the dollar rate attached to each one change with each annual review. The Fair Work Ombudsman publishes a pay guide for MA000022 that lists the current rate for every level and employment type.

The award recognises full-time, part-time and casual employment, and the cost of each is different. Full-time and part-time employees accrue paid annual leave and personal leave, and receive notice of termination and redundancy entitlements. Part-time employees have agreed regular hours that must be set out in writing before work starts.

Casual employees do not accrue paid leave, and instead receive a casual loading on top of the minimum hourly rate. That loading compensates for the absence of leave and notice entitlements. The casual loading percentage is set by the award and the National Employment Standards, and it is applied to the base rate before penalties are calculated in the way the award specifies.

The contract cleaning industry runs on part-time and casual labour because sites are cleaned in short blocks outside business hours. That structure is legitimate, but it creates two practical risks: minimum engagement periods and broken shifts. The award sets a minimum number of hours an employee must be paid for each time they are engaged, and imposes conditions on shifts split across a day. A roster built without accounting for those rules will be underpriced.

Commercial cleaning is rarely a nine-to-five job, which is why penalty rates and shift loadings drive so much of the real cost. The award applies higher rates to work performed at times outside ordinary hours. The categories below are the ones that matter most when a site is priced.

Each category carries its own percentage, and those percentages differ between permanent and casual employees. The interaction between the casual loading and penalty rates is a common source of underpayment, so the Fair Work Ombudsman pay guide and the online pay calculator are the right places to confirm a specific rate for a specific shift.

Allowances are the part of the award most often left out of a quote. They are usually small on a per-shift basis and significant across a year and a workforce. Several are specific to the cleaning industry.

Some allowances are expressed as a flat amount per shift or per week, and some as a percentage of the standard rate, which means they move automatically when minimum rates are reviewed. Confirm the current amount in the pay guide before building any of these into a labour model.

A commercial cleaning price is not the award rate. The award rate is only the first line in the build-up. On top of the base hourly wage, a compliant contractor carries superannuation, payroll tax where the business exceeds the state threshold, workers compensation premiums, annual leave and leave loading, personal leave, public holidays, and the cost of training, supervision and replacement staff when someone is away.

Then come the non-labour costs: chemicals and consumables, equipment purchase and maintenance, public liability and other insurances, uniforms, police checks and inductions, quality auditing, scheduling and account management, and administration. Only after all of that is there any margin.

This is why a rate that looks close to the award hourly rate is a warning sign rather than a bargain. Pro Clean Corp publishes its own bands on the commercial cleaning prices page: general commercial and office work is typically quoted at $35 to $50 per hour, warehouse and industrial work at $45 to $65 per hour, and specialist or medical work at $55 to $75 per hour. Those figures include labour on-costs, materials, insurance, supervision and margin. A quote well under the lower end usually means the hours on site have been cut, not that the work is cheaper to do.

Minimum rates under MA000022 change. The Fair Work Commission conducts an Annual Wage Review each year, and the resulting increase takes effect from the first full pay period on or after 1 July. Allowances expressed as a percentage of the standard rate move at the same time. Any dollar figure published in an article can be out of date within months.

The authoritative sources are the Fair Work Ombudsman pay guide for the Cleaning Services Award, the Fair Work Ombudsman pay calculator, and the award text itself on the Fair Work Commission website. Employers should also check whether an enterprise agreement applies, because a registered agreement can displace award rates provided employees are better off overall.

For a buyer, the practical test is simpler. Ask a prospective contractor which award or agreement covers their cleaners, what classification level the site will be staffed at, and how many labour hours per week the price is built on. A contractor who can answer those three questions clearly is one who has priced the work properly.