2026 LegislationMost employment headaches are avoidable. They start small: a verbal offer, a quick email, a "we'll sort the details later" promise. Then six months on, someone resigns, performance slips, or a pay issue pops up, and you are trying to reconstruct what was agreed from memory and message threads.
In Australia, you cannot contract out of the National Employment Standards, modern awards, or enterprise agreements. A good set of employment documents does not just "feel professional", it helps you pay correctly, manage performance fairly, and end employment cleanly when it has to happen.
This category gives you practical templates that fit the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) approach: clear terms, sensible processes, and paper trails that stand up when someone challenges a decision.
Choose your legal document:
When to use these templates
Use these templates when you are hiring in a hurry and you can feel the risk of shortcuts creeping in. The classic scenario is a great candidate who needs an answer by Friday. You can move fast, but you still need a written contract that deals with pay, hours, duties, probation, and award coverage (or why an award does not apply). Getting that right upfront is cheaper than fixing it later.
They are also for the messy middle, not just day one. If you are changing someone from casual to permanent, adjusting hours, moving them into a new role, or introducing a commission structure, you want the variation documented. Otherwise, you end up arguing about what the "new arrangement" was meant to be, and payroll is stuck in the middle.
Performance management is another pressure point. Most small businesses do not fail because they lack policies, they fail because the steps were never written down. A properly drafted warning letter and performance plan can keep things fair and focused. It also shows you gave the employee a reasonable chance to improve, which matters in unfair dismissal claims.
Finally, these templates help when the relationship is ending. Resignations, abandonment of employment, redundancy consultations, or termination for capacity or conduct all have different traps. One wrong letter can turn a straightforward exit into months of back-and-forth, especially if notice, final pay, or reason for termination is unclear.
What you will find in this category
- Employment contract (full-time and part-time) templates, with clauses for duties, remuneration, hours, probation, and termination consistent with the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth).
- Casual employment contract templates, including casual loading, conversion pathways where relevant, and practical rostering expectations.
- Offer letters and onboarding packs, to confirm key terms early while you finalise checks like references, right to work, and role requirements.
- Confidentiality and intellectual property clauses, covering customer lists, pricing, systems, and work product created during employment.
- Work-from-home and flexible work arrangements, setting expectations around hours, availability, safety, and equipment use.
- Performance management documents, including written warnings and performance improvement plans that record expectations, support offered, and review dates.
- Termination and exit letters, including resignation acknowledgements, termination with notice, summary dismissal letters (where justified), and redundancy communications.
- Payroll and compliance notices, such as Fair Work Information Statement acknowledgement and record-keeping checklists to support minimum compliance.
Legal framework and key points to watch
The backbone is the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), including the National Employment Standards (NES) and the unfair dismissal regime. The NES sets minimums like annual leave, personal/carer's leave, maximum weekly hours, and notice of termination. Your contract can add benefits, but it cannot undercut those minimums. If a modern award or enterprise agreement applies, that instrument will often override or supplement parts of the contract, especially around pay rates, overtime, allowances, penalty rates, consultation and dispute resolution.
The next issue is classification and pay. Misclassifying someone as a contractor, calling them "casual" when they work regular hours with a firm advance commitment, or paying a flat rate without checking award entitlements is where underpayment claims begin. Honestly, most underpayment problems start with a contract that says "salary" and nothing else. A safer approach is to deal with award coverage explicitly, set out ordinary hours, and be clear about how additional hours are handled.
Termination is where process matters. Unfair dismissal risk turns on things like valid reason, procedural fairness, and whether the employee was warned and given a chance to respond (with some exceptions). Redundancy brings extra steps: consultation obligations under awards and agreements, checks for redeployment, and calculations for redundancy pay under the NES (subject to exemptions). If you are considering summary dismissal, you need to be able to explain why the conduct was serious misconduct, and why dismissal without notice was justified. That is not a vibe, it is evidence and wording.
Why our templates
- Built for Australian workplaces, with drafting that aligns to the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), the NES, and common award-driven obligations.
- Clear, plain-English structure that employees can actually understand, which reduces disputes about what a clause was "meant" to say.
- Regularly reviewed for common compliance shifts, including casual employment rules, record-keeping expectations, and termination process pitfalls.
- Lawyer-reviewed wording for the parts that cause fights: probation, confidentiality, IP, restraints (where appropriate), and termination mechanics.
- Editable Word format plus print-ready PDF, so you can customise quickly and still produce a clean signed copy for your records.