An Award Gained A Working From Home Clause On Monday. What It Makes An Employer Provide Is Paperwork.

A written page, and nothing else. Ask what must an employer provide for a work from home employee in Australia and the Clerks Award now answers it directly: an agreement listing six things, kept as a time and wages record. No desk, no monitor, no internet plan, no share of the power bill.

Which is not what most employers think arrived on Monday.

Outstaffer employs people in other countries and carries this paperwork for a living, so read the Employer of Record side of the business as disclosure rather than pitch.

What clause 5A makes an employer provide, and what it quietly does not

Clause 5A of the Clerks Private Sector Award 2020 was inserted by determination PR815538 and commenced on 26 October 2026, following the Full Bench decision the Commission issued on 27 August.

Read 5A.1 slowly. An employee “may request”, and an employer “may agree”. No obligation to agree, no deadline to answer, no grounds a refusal has to rest on. Section 65A gives an eligible employee the last two: 21 days, and reasonable business grounds.

What 5A.6 requires is that any agreement be in writing and identify the days, the location, any award terms modified, any facilitative agreement, the start date, and how it can be varied or ended. Clause 5A.8 then makes the employer keep it as a time and wages record and give the employee a copy.

That is the whole provisioning obligation. Six items and a filing duty.

The hour outside the spread is where the money sits

Most of clause 5A hands employers flexibility, not duty.

Which home hours turn into overtime?

The spread of ordinary hours is 7.00 am to 7.00 pm Monday to Friday. Clause 13.6(a) requires them to be worked continuously, apart from breaks. Clause 21.1(c) pays the overtime rate for hours worked at the employer’s direction outside that spread, and clause 21.4 sets that at 150 per cent for the first two hours.

So the arrangement everybody already runs, on at eight, off at three for the school gate, back on after dinner, breaks the continuity rule and puts the hour after seven outside the spread.

What the written agreement is actually worth

A Level 3 clerical employee sits on a minimum hourly rate of $31.11 from 1 July 2026. That evening hour at 150 per cent is $46.67, a premium of $15.56 over ordinary time. Three evenings a week across 46 working weeks is 138 hours, or $2,147 a year per head. Four people on that pattern is $8,586.

Clause 5A.5(a) lets employee and employer move the spread by agreement, and 5A.4(a) lets them set aside the continuity rule. Both cost a page. One caveat nobody else is stating: clause 13.4 caps the move at one hour, so eight o’clock is the ceiling. The clause buys an hour, not an open evening.

The strongest argument against reading it this way

Clause 21.1 pays overtime for hours worked “at the direction of the employer”. An employee who chooses to log back on after dinner, unasked, is arguably not working at anybody’s direction, and that question has never been tested for self-selected hours at home. Plenty of employers will read it that way and never hear about it.

They may be right. The difficulty is where that argument happens: afterwards, against a records request, with nothing written down.

Related reading

• The Work From Home Law Victoria Promised Is Still Not Law
• You Shipped The Laptop. The Connection Was Never In The Box.

Write the six things down before somebody asks

Note 1 to clause 5A says it covers “the formalisation of an existing working from home arrangement”. Every informal Tuesday-and-Thursday deal already running is inside its reach, and almost none is on a page that satisfies 5A.6.

Clause 5A follows the same pattern as the right to disconnect: it regulates the hours, not the equipment. The provisioning question it leaves open is the one no award or statute has ever assigned, and silence there still lands on the worker.

So the honest answer to what must an employer provide for a work from home employee is a page, and that page is worth about two thousand dollars a head. If you would rather someone else carried the employment paperwork, sign up and price a role through it. Or write the six lines yourself this week, which is also a decision.