Easter 2026 Construction Guide: Penalty Rates, Scheduling and Crew Planning

Easter 2026 runs from Good Friday 3 April through Easter Monday 6 April. For Australian builders and subcontractors, that is four days of elevated wage obligations, disrupted supply chains, and a rostering headache that can ripple well into the following week. Under the Building and Construction General On-site Award (MA000020), full-time and part-time workers earn 250% of their ordinary rate on public holidays. Casuals earn 275%. Miss the detail and you are exposed to Fair Work underpayment claims. Get it right, and Easter work is at least priced correctly.

TL;DR

• Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays in every state and territory.
• Easter Saturday is a public holiday everywhere except TAS and WA. Easter Sunday is only a public holiday in NSW, QLD, and ACT.
• Tasmania adds Easter Tuesday (7 April), so Tasmanian crews face five consecutive days of elevated rates.
• MA000020 penalty rates: 250% FT/PT, 275% casual. Minimum 4-hour engagement applies.
• You can request workers to attend. You cannot direct them. Workers may reasonably refuse.
• Supply chains and council offices shut down. Order critical materials the week before.

Easter 2026 Dates — Which Days Are Actually Public Holidays in Your State?

Not all four Easter days carry the same legal weight. The differences matter when you are costing a project.

Source: FairWork Mate, Public Holidays Australia 2026: Complete List by State (2026).

If you run crews across multiple states, say a Queensland head contractor with Victorian subcontractors, you are managing different public holiday profiles for the same calendar weekend. A Victorian subbie does not get Easter Sunday at public holiday rates because Victoria does not gazette it. A QLD worker does. This catches people out every year.

Tasmania is worth calling out separately. With Easter Tuesday gazetted, Tasmanian workers face five consecutive days of MA000020 penalty rates (3–7 April). If you have site staff based in Hobart, budget accordingly.

Building and Construction Award (MA000020) — Exact Penalty Rate Percentages

The MA000020 base rates were updated effective 24 February 2026 (Fair Work Ombudsman, Building and Construction General On-site Award MA000020 Pay Guide, February 2026). The public holiday penalty rates are:

• Full-time and part-time employees: 250% of ordinary hourly rate
• Casual employees: 275% of ordinary hourly rate (casual loading is already included — do not add it again on top)

The same rates apply to every gazetted public holiday under the award. There is no reduced rate for Easter Saturday or Sunday just because they are less universally recognised. If the day is gazetted as a public holiday in your state, the full penalty applies (HIA, Penalty Rates under the Building and Construction General Onsite Award, 2026).

How Much Will Easter Actually Cost You? Worked Dollar Examples

Award base rates vary by classification, but working through a realistic example shows why Easter rostering decisions have real dollar consequences.

Example: Leading hand carpenter, ordinary rate $42.00/hr

That is an extra $504 per shift per full-time worker compared with a normal weekday. Put five workers on site across one Easter public holiday and you are looking at roughly $2,500 more in labour before on-costs, super, or any overtime beyond eight hours.

In our experience, this is the number that surprises project managers most when they first price Easter work into a variation. Use it in your cost modelling now, not after the holiday.

The 4-Hour Minimum Rule and Why It Matters

Under MA000020, when you call a worker in on a public holiday, you must pay a minimum of four hours regardless of how long the actual work takes (Building and Construction General On-site Award MA000020, Fair Work Ombudsman).

What that means in practice:

• A worker called in for a two-hour concrete pour on Easter Monday gets paid for four hours at 250%.
• If the pour is abandoned after one hour due to rain, you still owe four hours at penalty rates.
• There is no short-call exception on public holidays under this award.

This changes the cost calculation for any short-duration Easter task. If what you are scheduling takes less than four hours, you are paying for more time than you use. Build that into your Easter project budget.

Can You Ask Crew to Work on Easter? Your Legal Obligations

This is where builders most commonly get it wrong. Under the National Employment Standards (NES), employees have the right to be absent on a public holiday. An employer may request that an employee work on a public holiday, but that request must be reasonable, and the employee may reasonably refuse (Fair Work Act 2009, s.114).

What makes a refusal reasonable? The Fair Work Act looks at:

• The nature of the employer's business and the work required
• The employee's personal circumstances, including family responsibilities
• The amount of notice given
• Whether the employee will receive additional compensation (they will under MA000020, but that alone does not make any refusal unreasonable)

One thing worth emphasising: you cannot temporarily alter rosters to avoid public holiday payment obligations. Changing a worker's regular rostered day off to a public holiday, to avoid paying the penalty rate on their next ordinary shift, is a breach of Fair Work obligations and exposes you to back-pay liability (Citation Group, Employer's Guide to Public Holidays, March 2026).

The practical approach is straightforward. Send a written request to workers well in advance, explain the operational need, and document responses. Do not assume attendance.

Public Holiday Substitution — When and How It Works

Under s.115 of the Fair Work Act 2009, an employer and employee may agree in writing to substitute a different day as the public holiday. The substitute day then becomes the public holiday for all penalty rate purposes. The original gazetted day reverts to ordinary rates, and the substitute day attracts 250%/275% instead.

This is genuinely useful for construction sites that run Monday to Friday. If Easter Monday work is unavoidable, you might agree to substitute Easter Monday with the following Monday (13 April) as the public holiday. Workers who attend on 6 April are then paid at ordinary rates, and those who take 13 April off receive their ordinary public holiday entitlement.

Two requirements: the agreement must be in writing and the substitute day must be reasonably equivalent to the original. Verbal agreements are not enough. Keep signed records.

Easter Construction Scheduling: Supply Chain, Permits and Site Restrictions

Wage costs are only part of the planning picture. Three operational factors hit builders just as hard.

Supply Chain Shutdowns

Most hardware suppliers, building material distributors, and manufacturers close across the four-day Easter weekend. Orders placed on Thursday 2 April for delivery the following week may not arrive until Wednesday 9 April or later, depending on warehouse reopening schedules. If your project has a concrete pour, frame delivery, or critical materials order timed around Easter, order the week before and get delivery dates confirmed in writing from your supplier (Accurate Services, How Public Holidays Can Affect Building and Construction Production, 2026).

Approval and Permit Pauses

Council planning offices, private certifiers, and consulting engineers operate at reduced capacity over Easter — many at zero. Any urgent variation approval, building permit, or engineering certificate needed the week commencing 7 April should be lodged by Wednesday 1 April at the latest. Normal processing times do not apply through the Easter period.

EPA and Council Construction Noise Restrictions

State EPA legislation and local council conditions of consent frequently restrict construction activity on public holidays and Sundays. In NSW, the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997 and local development consents typically prohibit noisy construction work on public holidays. Victoria has equivalent restrictions. Before you schedule any Easter site work, check your development consent conditions and local EPA requirements. A stop-work order over Easter will cost you far more than any scheduling gain.

April 2026 Planning: The Easter and ANZAC Day Crunch

Easter is only half the April story. ANZAC Day falls on Saturday 25 April 2026, which means workers in most states receive a substitute public holiday on Monday 27 April (check your state gazette for the substitution rule as it varies).

That gives April 2026 five or more public holidays depending on state, all packed into a three-week window. For project managers running April programmes, a few things are worth doing now:

• Budget for significantly higher labour costs across the month
• Re-sequence critical path activities away from public holiday dates where possible
• Confirm your subcontractor agreements clearly address public holiday rates — do not assume subbies absorb the penalty difference in their quoted rates
• Update your preliminary schedule and talk to clients before Easter, not after

April is routinely one of the costliest months for construction labour in the Australian calendar. Easter 2026 lands at the very start of it, compressing available working days and front-loading your cost exposure from day one.

How SkillsDock Helps You Manage Easter Rosters and Avoid Underpayment

Managing Easter rosters manually, tracking which days are public holidays in which states, flagging full-time versus casual workers, applying correct penalty percentages, is exactly where payroll errors happen. We have seen it.

SkillsDock's workforce management tools let you pre-configure public holiday schedules by state, so your roster reflects the correct entitlements for each crew member's location. SkillsClock, the mobile time tracking app with geofencing, automatically flags shifts that fall on gazetted public holidays and applies the appropriate rate category, removing the manual override step that causes underpayment.

Before Easter, use the scheduling dashboard to:

1. Identify which workers are rostered across the holiday period
2. Confirm employment type (FT/PT versus casual) for each rostered worker
3. Send written requests to workers asked to attend on public holidays, documented in the system
4. Check planned shift durations against the four-hour minimum engagement rule

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Frequently Asked Questions

What penalty rate do construction workers get on Easter public holidays in 2026?

Under the Building and Construction General On-site Award (MA000020), full-time and part-time employees earn 250% of their ordinary hourly rate on any gazetted public holiday. Casual employees earn 275%, which already includes the casual loading. Do not add the casual loading on top of the 275%. These rates apply to every gazetted Easter public holiday in your state (HIA, 2026).

Is Easter Saturday a public holiday for construction workers in every state?

No. Easter Saturday (4 April 2026) is a gazetted public holiday in ACT, NSW, NT, QLD, SA, and VIC, but not in TAS or WA. Workers in Tasmania and Western Australia rostered on Easter Saturday are entitled to ordinary Saturday rates under MA000020, not public holiday rates. Always check the gazetted list for your state before finalising your Easter roster (FairWork Mate, 2026).

Can I direct my workers to come in on Easter Monday?

You can request workers to attend on a public holiday, but you cannot direct or compel them. Under the National Employment Standards, an employee may reasonably refuse if the refusal is reasonable given their personal circumstances, the notice provided, and the nature of the work. You also cannot restructure rosters to avoid the public holiday entitlement. Verbal pressure to attend is not a substitute for a proper written request (Fair Work Act 2009, s.114; Citation Group, March 2026).

What is the 4-hour minimum engagement on Easter public holidays?

Under MA000020, any employee called in on a public holiday must be paid for a minimum of four hours, even if the actual work is shorter. A two-hour concrete inspection on Good Friday is still billed as four hours at 250% of the ordinary rate. This applies regardless of whether the worker is full-time, part-time, or casual.

How does Easter interact with ANZAC Day in April 2026?

Easter (3–6 April) and ANZAC Day (25 April, with a likely substitute Monday 27 April in most states) together create a compressed April with five or more public holidays. For builders running April programmes, this means higher labour costs, fewer working days, and real pressure on subcontractor schedules. Re-sequence critical path activities where you can and update your client cost reports before Easter to avoid end-of-month surprises.

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Conclusion

Easter 2026 is a live compliance event for every construction business employing workers under MA000020. The rates are clear: 250% for full-time and part-time, 275% for casuals, with a four-hour minimum engagement. What catches people out is the state-by-state variation in which days are actually gazetted, combined with supply chain shutdowns and permit pauses.

Start now, not on Good Friday morning. Check your development consent conditions before scheduling any Easter site work. Order critical materials before Thursday 2 April. Issue written requests to any workers you need over the break. And if April has both Easter and ANZAC Day on your programme, revisit your preliminary schedule and cost report before your clients do it for you.