Ask most café owners how they build next week’s roster and the honest answer is: they open last week’s spreadsheet, make a few adjustments, and send it to the group chat. It takes 20 minutes on a good week, two hours on a bad one — and it works until it doesn’t.
The problem with template-based rostering isn’t the spreadsheet itself. It’s what gets baked in over time: the same coverage pattern week after week regardless of what’s actually happening, the casual minimum shifts that quietly go unmet, the break timing that nobody’s checked against the award since the business opened. A downloadable café roster template gives you a grid. It doesn’t tell you who to put where or whether the shift is legal.
This guide works through how to build a café roster from first principles — starting with demand, not availability.
Which award covers your café
Before building any roster, you need to know which modern award applies. For most standalone cafés and coffee shops — those not attached to a hotel or accommodation — the relevant award is the Restaurant Industry Award 2020 (MA000119). If your café operates as part of a larger hospitality venue with accommodation, the Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020 (MA000009) may apply instead.
The distinction matters because the two awards have different minimum engagement periods, different break structures, and different penalty rate schedules. If you are unsure which award covers your operation, the Fair Work Ombudsman’s Find My Award tool is the authoritative starting point.
Everything below assumes the Restaurant Industry Award. If your café falls under the Hospitality award, check the equivalent provisions in that instrument — some numbers differ.
Step 1: Map your demand, not your availability
The most common rostering mistake is starting with who’s available and working backwards to coverage. The correct sequence is the reverse: start with when you need people, then fill in who.
For a café, demand is driven by transaction volume — covers, orders, or revenue per hour. You don’t need a sophisticated forecasting system for a 10–20 person operation. You need three things:
- Your average revenue or transaction count by hour of day for a typical week (your POS system has this)
- Your known busy variations — weekends, nearby school holidays, public holidays, local events
- Your fixed costs: the opening-up crew, the close-down crew, and the minimum kitchen and floor cover you need regardless of volume
Once you’ve mapped a typical week by hour, you can see where the peaks are and how far the troughs drop. A café that runs three to four times its morning traffic volume through a Friday lunch rush needs a materially different roster for Friday than Tuesday, even if both days are nominally “open nine to five.”
Most cafés under-roster mornings and over-roster mid-afternoons — especially when the roster is built by feel. An hour spent looking at actual transaction data before building the roster usually reveals at least one shift that’s carrying unnecessary labour cost.
Step 2: Get your casual-to-part-time ratio right
A common trap for growing cafés is relying almost entirely on casuals for flexibility. Casuals cost more per hour — the 25% casual loading reflects the absence of leave entitlements — and they can decline shifts, which creates coverage risk during busy periods.
Part-time employees under the Restaurant Industry Award must be engaged for a minimum of three hours per shift. They have guaranteed hours and can only be rostered additional hours during their nominated availability window. In exchange, they’re cheaper per hour, easier to retain, and more predictable for planning.
A workable starting point for a 10–20 staff café:
| Role | Employment mix |
|---|---|
| Core kitchen and senior floor staff | Part-time or full-time preferred |
| Openers and mid-week lunch covers | Part-time, with defined availability |
| Weekend peak and event covers | Casual, to absorb volume spikes |
| Holiday cover and sick-day fill | Casual pool, retained and kept warm |
The practical rule of thumb: use part-time for the hours you know you always need, and casuals for the hours that vary with conditions. If a casual is working the same shift every week for months, you may have an obligation to consider them for casual conversion under the Fair Work Act — an issue that’s become more pointed since the Closing Loopholes Act amendments took effect.
Step 3: Apply the award minimums before you publish
The Restaurant Industry Award sets several minimums that need to be confirmed before a roster is finalised.
Minimum engagement periods. Casuals must be engaged and paid for a minimum of two hours per shift. Part-time employees must receive a minimum of three hours. A two-hour café opening shift for a casual works; a 90-minute cover does not — you’d pay two hours regardless.
Rest between shifts. Employees (excluding casuals in certain circumstances) must have at least ten hours off between consecutive shifts. A close finishing at 11pm followed by an open starting at 7am the following morning may breach this provision. This is one of the most common rostering errors in hospitality, and it’s easy to create it accidentally when building a week’s roster shift by shift.
Days off. Permanent employees must receive at least eight full days off in any four-week period. This is a provision many small café operators aren’t aware of; it effectively caps the number of consecutive days you can roster a full-time or part-time employee.
Meal and rest breaks. The award requires an unpaid meal break where a shift exceeds five hours. Paid rest breaks of 10 minutes apply for each four-hour period worked. Breaks must be scheduled at practical intervals — the award says they should be spread reasonably across the shift.
Checking these before publishing the roster — rather than after a complaint — is both the compliant approach and the operationally sensible one.
Step 4: Build in enough notice
Under the Restaurant Industry Award, rosters must be provided at least seven days in advance for permanent employees, and changes to a published roster require seven days’ notice unless both parties agree otherwise or there is an unforeseen operational need (such as an unplanned closure or a sudden surge in bookings).
For casuals, the rules are different — casuals can be offered and may accept shifts on shorter notice. But relying on casuals for your core coverage and then calling them the day before creates the coverage risk described above. Casuals can say no.
Building a seven-day-ahead publishing habit has a secondary benefit: it gives you a week to see conflicts before they become emergencies, and it gives your staff enough notice to organise their lives around their work hours — a factor that research increasingly links to retention.
Step 5: Check the roster as a whole, not shift by shift
Individual shifts that all look compliant can still produce a non-compliant roster at the week level. Specific things to check once the full week is built:
- Weekly overtime. Ordinary hours under the Restaurant Industry Award are 38 per week for full-time employees. If a full-time employee is rostered six days and each shift looks within daily limits, their weekly total may still cross the threshold and attract overtime rates.
- Consecutive days. Flag anyone showing up more than five days running.
- Back-to-back late-opens. Scan for the close-followed-by-open scenario described above.
- Casual minimums across the week. A casual rostered for multiple short covers may have each shift individually over the two-hour minimum, but it’s worth confirming, especially when last-minute changes are made to shift times.
A five-minute check of the full weekly roster catches most of these before the week begins.
A worked example: Tuesday vs Saturday in a 14-person café
Take a café with six part-time staff, six casuals, and two full-timers. Tuesday trade runs about 30% of Saturday volume, concentrated in the breakfast and morning coffee window.
For Tuesday, a compliant and cost-efficient roster might look like this:
| Time | Role | Employee type |
|---|---|---|
| 6:30am – 12:30pm | Opener (floor) | Part-time |
| 6:30am – 12:30pm | Opener (kitchen) | Part-time |
| 10:00am – 2:00pm | Mid (floor) | Casual — 4-hour shift, above 2-hr minimum |
| 12:00pm – 5:00pm | Lunch and close (kitchen) | Full-time |
| 12:00pm – 5:00pm | Lunch and close (floor) | Full-time |
Saturday requires a different shape entirely: additional floor staff through the 8am–12pm peak, a second kitchen hand through lunch, and a casual closer. The same template cannot produce both rosters without someone manually adjusting every shift. That’s the limitation of a static spreadsheet: it makes yesterday easy to copy but doesn’t make the adjustment visible or flag when a shift falls below minimums.
How this looks as you grow
The principles above apply at every scale. What changes is the tooling you need to apply them reliably.
Single-site café, fewer than 10 staff. Manual rostering against the award is manageable if you check each provision every week. The Fair Work Ombudsman’s Pay and Conditions Tool gives you accurate rates for individual scenarios. The risk at this size is the shortcuts that accumulate when things are busy — the same roster copied unchanged for three months, the casual whose shift regularly drops below the minimum.
10–20 staff, established operation. This is where the cost of manual errors becomes meaningful. A rostering tool that enforces minimum engagement, flags rest period breaches, and calculates running weekly hours before you publish removes the most common compliance gaps. The time saving on roster-building is secondary to the compliance benefit — but both matter at this scale.
Multiple sites or significant growth. Once you’re managing rosters across two or more locations, or exceeding 20 staff at a single site, the seven-years record-keeping obligation under the Fair Work Act becomes a practical consideration. Reconstructing records from a folder of spreadsheets is time-consuming and often incomplete. A system that logs every roster version, every change, and every employee acknowledgement produces the kind of audit trail that demonstrates good-faith compliance — which matters more now than it did before the wage theft provisions that took effect in January 2025.
The short version
A good café roster starts with demand data, not last week’s template. Match your staffing levels to when trade actually happens, use part-time staff for predictable hours and casuals for variable peaks, and check the Restaurant Industry Award minimums — two-hour casual minimums, three-hour part-time minimums, ten hours between shifts, seven days’ notice before changes — before the roster goes out. Check the week as a whole, not just shift by shift. The compliance and the cost efficiency point in the same direction: roster what you need, when you need it, and confirm it’s legal before it’s published.
Frequently asked questions
What is the minimum shift length for a casual at a café in Australia?
Under the Restaurant Industry Award 2020, casual employees must be engaged and paid for a minimum of two consecutive hours per shift. A shift of 90 minutes would still be paid as two hours. If your café falls under the Hospitality Industry (General) Award, the same two-hour minimum applies.
Do café employees get paid rest breaks?
Yes. Under the Restaurant Industry Award, employees are entitled to a paid 10-minute rest break for each four hours worked, and an unpaid meal break where a shift exceeds five hours. The breaks should be scheduled at reasonable intervals across the shift, not taken back-to-back at the start or end.
How much notice do I need to give staff before changing a café roster?
Under the Restaurant Industry Award, permanent employees must receive at least seven days’ notice of roster changes. Changes on shorter notice may be made where both parties agree or where there is an unforeseen operational need. Casuals can be offered and may accept shifts with less notice, but cannot be required to take them.
What is the difference between a casual and part-time employee for rostering purposes?
Part-time employees have guaranteed hours and a minimum shift of three hours under the Restaurant Industry Award. They must be consulted before their agreed hours or days change. Casual employees have no guaranteed hours, can decline shifts, and receive a 25% loading in lieu of leave entitlements. Their minimum shift is two hours. Casuals offer flexibility but cost more per hour and carry coverage risk because they can say no.
How many days in a row can I roster a café employee?
The Restaurant Industry Award requires that permanent employees have at least eight full days off in any four-week period. This limits consecutive rostering, though the award does not specify a maximum run of consecutive days in absolute terms. Ten hours must elapse between the end of one shift and the start of the next. Rostering someone to close and then open the following morning may breach that rest period if shifts are not timed carefully.
Which award applies to café staff in Australia?
Most standalone cafés and coffee shops are covered by the Restaurant Industry Award 2020 (MA000119). Cafés that form part of a hotel, resort, or accommodation venue are more likely to fall under the Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020 (MA000009). The Fair Work Ombudsman’s Find My Award tool confirms which award applies to a specific operation.
Can I use the same roster template every week for my café?
Using the same template each week can work for the fixed structure of your roster, but the staffing levels and shift times should reflect actual demand for each week rather than the previous week’s pattern. Award minimums — casual minimums, rest periods, weekly overtime thresholds — need to be checked each time the roster is built or modified, as changes to one shift can affect compliance across the week.
This article is general information only and does not constitute legal or industrial relations advice. Award conditions and rates change and vary by employment type and classification. Consult the Fair Work Ombudsman or a qualified adviser for guidance specific to your operation.
Sources
- Fair Work Ombudsman — Restaurant Industry Award 2020 (MA000119): fairwork.gov.au
- Fair Work Ombudsman — Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020 (MA000009): awards.fairwork.gov.au/MA000009.html
- Fair Work Ombudsman — Hours of work, breaks and rosters: fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/hours-of-work-breaks-and-rosters
- Fair Work Ombudsman — Find My Award tool: fairwork.gov.au/find-my-award
- Fair Work Ombudsman — Casual employees: fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/types-of-employees/casual-employees
- Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024 — Federal Register of Legislation
- Australian Bureau of Statistics — Counts of Australian Businesses, July 2021–June 2025: abs.gov.au