What an EBA Costs to Run in Payroll Admin Hours

A construction EBA commonly takes 6 to 20 payroll admin hours per weekly pay run, plus 40 to 120 hours for setup. Messy timesheets, multiple sites and clause exceptions can push the cost much higher.

The short answer

There is no official number of hours for running an enterprise bargaining agreement, usually called an EBA on site. The useful way to budget is to split the work into setup, routine processing, checking and corrections.

For a weekly payroll, a practical starting range is:

• 40 to 120 hours for initial payroll setup and testing
• 6 to 20 hours for each weekly pay run
• 4 to 12 hours each month for audits, reconciliations and corrections
• 20 to 80 hours a year for rate changes, clause reviews and payroll rule maintenance

These are working estimates, not government statistics. A clean EBA with consistent digital timesheets may sit below the range. An agreement with many allowances, roster patterns and site-specific rules may sit well above it.

You can read more about the wider agreement payroll process in our EBA payroll hub.

A comparison by payroll complexity

The table assumes weekly pay runs and reasonably experienced payroll staff. It does not include the time supervisors spend chasing or approving timesheets.

Payroll profile	Typical setup hours	Admin hours per weekly pay run	Monthly checking hours
Simple, 20 to 50 workers, one site, clean digital time	30 to 50	4 to 8	2 to 4
Typical, 50 to 150 workers, several allowances and sites	60 to 100	8 to 16	4 to 8
Complex, 150 or more workers, multiple rosters and frequent exceptions	100 to 180+	16 to 30+	8 to 16

Headcount matters, but exceptions matter more. Processing 150 identical records can be easier than processing 40 workers with different starts, travel arrangements, meal breaks and higher duties.

Where the hours actually go

Reading the agreement and building the rules

Someone must turn each payroll clause into a calculation. That includes ordinary hours, rostered days off, overtime bands, shiftwork, allowances, travel, fares, meal payments, leave and super.

The hard part is usually the interaction between clauses. For example, an employee might work overtime on a night shift while receiving a site allowance and a higher-duty payment. Payroll needs to know which amounts are cumulative, which replace another payment and which form part of an overtime calculation.

Setup should also include parallel testing. Take real-looking scenarios and calculate them manually before relying on the payroll result. Test ordinary weeks, short weeks, public holidays, leave, overtime, commencements and terminations.

Fixing timesheets

Construction timesheets are rarely just start and finish times. Payroll may need the site, task, classification, shift, travel status and allowance eligibility.

A missing meal break or incorrect site code can change several payments. If payroll spends three minutes clarifying each of 80 records, that is four hours before calculation and checking begin.

Checking exceptions

A good pay run still needs exception checks. Look for unusually high or low hours, missing employees, duplicate allowances, overtime without ordinary hours, negative leave and changes from the previous week.

Minimum weekly super clauses deserve their own check. An EBA may require a weekly contribution above what a simple percentage calculation produces. The minimum weekly super calculator helps test that requirement.

Corrections and back pay

Late timesheets and wrong classifications create off-cycle payments or back pay. These jobs take longer than ordinary processing because payroll must identify the affected periods, rebuild the calculation and document the change.

One clause mistake can affect many workers across dozens of weeks. That is why a monthly sample check is cheaper than waiting for an employee complaint or union query.

Turning hours into an annual cost

Use this basic calculation:

Annual admin hours = pay-run hours × pay runs + monthly review hours × 12 + annual maintenance hours

Say a contractor uses 12 payroll hours for each of 52 weekly pay runs, five hours a month for checking and 60 hours a year for agreement maintenance.

The total is:

• Weekly payroll: 12 × 52 = 624 hours
• Monthly checking: 5 × 12 = 60 hours
• Annual maintenance: 60 hours
• Total ongoing admin time: 744 hours a year

At an assumed internal employment cost of $55 an hour, that is $40,920 a year. The $55 figure is only an example. Use the payroll employee's full hourly cost, including salary, super, leave, payroll tax where applicable, software and management overhead.

If first-year setup takes another 80 hours, the first-year total becomes 824 hours, or $45,320 at the same assumed hourly cost.

Legal numbers that affect the workload

As at October 2026, the compulsory super guarantee rate is 12 per cent of ordinary time earnings. An EBA can create a higher contribution or a minimum weekly amount, so checking only the statutory percentage may not be enough.

As at October 2026, the National Employment Standards set 38 hours as the maximum weekly hours for a full-time employee, plus reasonable additional hours. An agreement may contain averaging arrangements, but payroll still needs to identify ordinary and additional hours correctly.

As at October 2026, employee records generally need to be kept for seven years. Payslips must generally be given within one working day of payment. Those rules add record keeping and review time even when the calculations are right.

As at October 2026, most enterprise agreements can have a nominal expiry date no more than four years after approval. A qualifying greenfields agreement for a major project can have a nominal life of up to eight years. An agreement can continue operating after nominal expiry until it is replaced or terminated, so payroll cannot simply switch its rules off on the expiry date.

How to reduce the admin load safely

Start with a clause register. For every payment rule, record the trigger, rate, calculation base, interaction with other clauses and evidence payroll needs.

Keep payroll codes controlled. Ten site supervisors should not be able to describe the same allowance in ten different ways.

Set a timesheet cut-off and make one person on each site responsible for missing information. Payroll should not spend Monday morning ringing every foreman separately.

Finally, track corrections. If travel allowance errors appear every week, the problem is probably the form, approval process or rule setup. Fixing the cause saves more time than processing the same adjustment again.

The number to put in the budget

For a typical construction employer with weekly pay, allow 8 to 16 payroll admin hours per run, then add setup, monthly checks and annual clause maintenance. Budget separately for back pay, new sites and agreement changes.

Do not price the work from headcount alone. Count the clauses, roster types, allowances, sites and weekly exceptions. That gives you a much more honest view of what the EBA costs to run.