AI for Trades: Fix Award Underpayment Before Fair Work Does

Fair Work recovered a record $453 million — and construction is a named target

Fair Work recovered a record $453 million in unpaid wages last financial year, and building and construction was one of just two sectors it singled out for special attention. If you run a trades business and pay staff off a spreadsheet, that's the number to sit with. Because most of that money wasn't taken by wage thieves. It was lost to award errors — the wrong allowance, a stale penalty rate, a Saturday paid as a weekday — quietly compounding across every pay run.

The regulator has stopped waiting for complaints. It now goes looking. And the trades award is complicated enough that an honest business can be underpaying for years without knowing it.

What the regulator reported

On 14 September, the Fair Work Ombudsman published its 2025–26 results: $453 million recovered for more than 181,000 workers — up 27 per cent on the previous year's $358 million, and part of nearly $2.5 billion clawed back over six years. The lift came from proactive investigations, which nearly doubled to around 2,860 and recovered $45 million on their own. The regulator no longer needs a disgruntled worker to knock on the door.

Building and construction was named a priority sector. Fair Work recovered $6.8 million for 932 construction workers, completed close to 3,000 matters and launched 14 court cases in the sector alone. Disability support was the other priority. If you're in the trades, you're now on a list the regulator actively works through — not one it only responds to.

Why honest trades businesses underpay by accident

Here's the part that matters: underpayment in the trades is rarely theft. It's arithmetic. The Building and Construction General On-site Award runs seven classification levels and stacks allowances on top of the base rate — tool, height, multi-storey, leading hand, follow-the-job, travel. Electricians and plumbers sit under their own separate awards again. And the allowances don't all move with the base rate; they're reviewed on their own schedule, so a pay table you updated in July can still be carrying a travel allowance that changed months earlier.

Miss one of those, or apply an evening loading as a percentage when it's a flat dollar figure, and the shortfall is small per shift and invisible per payslip. Then it runs. Fair Work can pursue underpayments going back six years, and each worker and each pay period counts separately — so a single miscalculated allowance becomes six years of cumulative liability across your whole crew. That's how a $40-a-week error turns into a six-figure bill.

Intentional underpayment has been a criminal offence since 1 January 2025, carrying up to 10 years' imprisonment for individuals. Most trades businesses will never be near that line — the criminal law is aimed at deliberate wage theft, not honest mistakes. But the civil liability for an honest mistake is real, recoverable, and now actively hunted.

AI for trades payroll: where it helps, and where it stops

This is an admin problem, and admin is exactly what AI is good at. Modern payroll and rostering platforms now use automated award interpretation: they map each worker to the right classification, apply the correct penalty rates and allowances for the day and the site, reconcile the hours actually worked against the roster, and flag a pay run that doesn't match the award before it goes out. Some will audit your historical pay and surface the liability you've been carrying. It's the same admin layer wrapped around the trade that AI handles best — the paperwork, not the work on the tools.

But the software is only as right as the award you configure into it. It doesn't know that your leading hand is also on a site allowance, or which of your casuals crossed into a higher classification last month, unless someone sets that up correctly — and audits the six years already on the books. That setup and audit is the half that decides whether the tool actually protects you. If you're not sure where your exposure sits, see where AI touches your business before you buy anything.

What to do about it

Start with an audit, not a purchase. Pick one recent pay period and check it by hand against the current award for one worker in each role — base rate, penalties, every allowance. If it reconciles, you've learned something cheap. If it doesn't, you've found the error before Fair Work did, and you know the shape of the fix. If that reconciliation turns up a gap, book a call and we'll scope the audit and the tool together. Then choose a platform that interprets your award automatically and hold it to a single number: zero. The businesses that treat award compliance as a system to automate, rather than a spreadsheet to babysit, are the ones that sleep through the next round of proactive audits.