Whether the person also works for somebody else is not one of the tests. The ATO's published factors run to control, integration, how payment is calculated, the right to delegate, who supplies the tools, and who carries the commercial risk. Working elsewhere is not on that list. It can be evidence of a person running their own business, which is a different thing, and on its own it settles nothing. That is the contractor trap in offshore hiring.
Get advice on your own arrangement before you act on any of this. Outstaffer sells the remedy, so treat that as a disclosure rather than a pitch: our compliance work exists because this misreading is common enough to build a service on.
A record share of Australians now hold a second job
The ABS released the June quarter Labour Account on 4 September 2026. The multiple job-holding rate hit a record 6.9 per cent, with about 1.0 million people holding more than one job. Secondary jobs rose 11.7 per cent over the year. Main jobs rose 1.9 per cent.
Do the division the release does not do for you. Of the 410,400 jobs added over the year, 122,000 were secondary jobs. Nearly three in ten jobs added in Australia in a year were somebody's second one.
So the reasoning has quietly changed. Founders see a worker with two or three income sources and read it as proof of contractor status, because the pattern is now ordinary. It is ordinary onshore, among people who are unambiguously employees in their main job.
The ATO's contractor factors do not mention other clients
The ATO's guidance on the difference between employees and independent contractors is blunt about labels. Any label you and the worker use to describe the relationship, it says, will not determine or be relevant to how that relationship is characterised.
Does a second client make someone a contractor?
No. It is not a listed factor. The list asks who controls how, where and when the work happens, whether the worker serves in your business or provides services to their own, whether they can subcontract, who pays for the laptop, and who wears the loss.
What does integration actually mean?
It asks whose enterprise the work builds. A contractor provides services to your business while furthering their own. Someone with a second job at a cafe on Saturdays is furthering nobody's enterprise. They are working two jobs, and both employers owe them the same things.
What the offshore arrangement costs if you have it wrong
Employer of Record on our published pricing is $195 per employee per month. On a person you currently pay about $2,000 a month, that is $2,340 a year, or 9.75 per cent on top of what you already spend. That is the price of the certainty.
Now price the other side. A reclassification arrives as back-paid leave, a payroll tax question you have never modelled, and an adviser's hourly rate while somebody reconstructs two years of payments. Payroll tax treatment varies by state, and the arrangements most at risk are the ones nobody has looked at since they started.
The honest case for leaving your contractor arrangement alone
Plenty of these engagements are exactly what they say they are. A developer with five clients, their own machine, their own liability cover and the right to hand work to someone else is a contractor by every factor on the ATO's list, and reclassifying them would be wrong.
The base rate of review on a small cross-border arrangement is also genuinely low. Most of these are never examined.
Both true. Neither is an argument for not knowing which one you have, and the five questions that settle it take about a minute.
Related reading
- The hidden cost of getting your first offshore hire wrong
- How much offshore staffing actually costs in Australia
What I would check this week
One thing. For every contractor you pay, write down which of the six ATO factors you would rely on, and see whether "they work for other people too" is doing most of the work.
If it is, you have a classification problem rather than a paperwork problem, and running one role through proper employment is where the contractor question stops being yours to carry.
The part I want an argument about: has an adviser ever actually told you a second client settles this, or did we all decide it together?
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