By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Which award covers my cleaning and restoration staff?
Your crew is almost certainly covered by the Cleaning Award, formally the Cleaning Services Award 2020 (MA000022), which the Fair Work Ombudsman runs for the contract cleaning services industry. It covers the employers and the employees who fit the classifications written into the award, whether that is a cleaner on a recurring clean in an office or a technician doing a fire damage job.
According to the award's own coverage clause, published by the Fair Work Ombudsman at MA000022.html, it covers these employers and employees to the exclusion of any other modern award once they fit. That matters because a cleaning and restoration business often runs several kinds of work under one roof: bond clean and end of lease jobs, commercial contracts on a schedule, and insurance work after water damage or a fire. One award can sit across all of it.
Does it matter if we also do carpet, mould or fire damage restoration work?
It doesn't push you out of the award, it's named inside it. The Fair Work Ombudsman's own coverage examples for the Cleaning Award list specialist cleaning businesses, including gutter cleaning, cleaning and restoration, and damaged property cleaning, alongside office cleaners and shopping centre cleaners.
So a business running carpet and upholstery cleaning, mould remediation in a strata building, or forensic and damaged property cleaning after a fire sits inside the same award as a team doing a bond clean. If you use labour hire staff placed onto a cleaning contract, the award covers them too, under the same coverage rules.
What if a staff member's duties don't match a cleaning classification?
Then the Cleaning Award may not be the one that applies to that person, and you need to check further rather than assume. The Fair Work Ombudsman says award coverage depends on the industry the employer operates in and whether the employee's actual duties and qualifications match a classification in that award.
Cleaners not covered by an industry award fall under the Miscellaneous Award instead, and are classified by their duties and qualifications. This can come up with an office administrator booking quality checks on site, a quoting estimator, or a restoration technician whose role sits closer to trade work than cleaning. It's worth checking each role on its own, not just assuming the whole roster sits under one award.
Why does this quietly eat the margin on every clean?
Most owners treat the award as a compliance question to tick off once and forget. The real cost sits in what happens after: weekend and after-hours rates on an emergency water damage call-out, travel between sites, allowances for chemicals and PPE on a mould or fire job. When these on-costs get booked to general overhead instead of the job that caused them, every quote looks like it carried a healthier margin than it did.
A business running two qualified staff can carry that cost quietly for a while. Picture a restoration cleaner who had been staffing water damage jobs with two qualified restoration technicians on every call-out, a costly way to crew work that often falls on weekends and after hours under the award. He restructured the roster so one qualified technician now works alongside a second-year apprentice instead of a second qualified technician, and the quality check and sign-off stayed with the qualified person while the after-hours and allowance rates on that job started being costed against the job itself, not folded into overhead. Left unplanned, this is also where staff pressure builds: award-driven overtime that nobody budgeted for tends to show up as sick days and burnout in a crew, eating into margin that looked fine on the quote.
How can AI agents keep award costs in the right place instead of buried in overhead?
You can set up AI agents, software that does a job the way you would do it yourself, using your own prices, wording and rules, to read the roster and timesheet data as it happens and push the right on-cost against the right job and contract, instead of it landing in a general wages line at the end of the month. This is a data first way of working: the numbers come from your own jobs and your own roster, not from memory at quarter end.
One agent can flag when a water damage call-out or a fire restoration job is about to trigger a weekend or after-hours rate, before the job is booked, so it's quoted with the real cost in it. Another can carry the paperwork of matching staff duties to classifications across end of lease, commercial cleaning and restoration work, the way you would do it, so the gap between what a job earns and what it actually costs stops hiding in overhead.
This is general information, not legal, tax or employment advice. Check your own situation with the body named here or a qualified adviser.
Where can you check the current rules?
- Cleaning Award (MA000022) summary, the Fair Work Ombudsman's plain English guide to who the Cleaning Award covers.
- Award coverage for cleaners, the Fair Work Ombudsman's explanation of how coverage is worked out role by role, and what applies if no industry award fits.
- Cleaning Services Award 2020 (MA000022), the full award text with the coverage clause, published by the Fair Work Ombudsman.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching, built by Greg Allan, starts from the owner's own job and roster data, run through the Trade Business Intelligence, rather than from a general rule about awards. For a cleaning and restoration business that means looking at where award on-costs actually land, job by job and contract by contract, to see whether the margin shown on a quote survives once weekend rates, allowances and travel are in the right place. Often the award itself is not the problem, where it gets booked is. The how, the agents, the setup, is worked through inside the Academy, with members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member and the Academy is for owners open minded and willing to share what they learn.
