Wellrun guide
Employee records: what to keep, for how long, and who should see them
Keep employee time and wages records for seven years. That is the Fair Work rule, and it runs longer than the ATO's five-year rule for other business records. Employee records also have rules about their form, and they are somebody else's personal information. Here is what that means in practice.
Records about the people who work for you are different from every other record in the business, in three ways at once. There is a minimum period you must keep them. There are rules about their form. And they are somebody else's personal information, which is not the same as being yours to file wherever suits.
How long: seven years, and it is not the ATO's five
The Fair Work Ombudsman states that employers must keep time and wages records for seven years. That obligation sits in section 535 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) and the Fair Work Regulations.
This trips people up because the general ATO business record rule is five years. Both apply. Where they overlap, the longer one governs, so the practical answer for anything touching employment is seven.
What has to be in an employee record?
Seven categories, set out by the Fair Work Ombudsman: general details, pay, hours, leave, superannuation, any individual agreements, and how the employment ended.
| Category | Includes |
|---|---|
| General | Employer and employee names, the employer's ABN, the employee's start date, and whether the employment is full time, part time, permanent, temporary or casual. |
| Pay | Rate paid, gross and net amounts, and any deductions. Also incentive payments, bonuses, loadings, penalty rates and other separately identifiable entitlements. |
| Hours | Overtime hours, or start and finish times where a penalty or loading applies. For casual and irregular part-time employees paid by time worked, a record of the hours worked. |
| Leave | Leave taken and the balance accrued. Any agreement to cash out leave, and what was paid. |
| Superannuation | Amounts paid, the pay periods, the dates paid, the fund, and why that fund. Where an employee chose a fund, the record of that choice. |
| Agreements | Individual flexibility arrangements, guarantees of annual earnings, and any agreement to average hours. |
| Termination | How the employment ended, and who ended it. |
Form matters as much as content
There is no prescribed template, and electronic records are fine. But the Fair Work Ombudsman is specific that records must be legible, in English, readily accessible to a Fair Work Inspector, and not false or misleading. They must not be altered except to correct an error.
That last point is worth dwelling on, because it rules out a common habit: quietly editing a record to make it match what should have happened. If a record is wrong, the correction is a new entry that says what was corrected and when, not a rewrite of the old one.
Superannuation changed on 1 July 2026
If your notes, your templates or your bookkeeper's checklist still refer to paying super quarterly, they are out of date.
From 1 July 2026, under Payday Super, the superannuation guarantee is calculated on each eligible employee's qualifying earnings and paid on payday, rather than on ordinary time earnings on a quarterly cycle. The ATO has moved its quarterly guidance into an archive covering the period to 30 June 2026.
The SG rate for 2026-27 is 12 per cent.
The ATO's record-keeping requirement for super is five years, and it expects records of the choice-of-fund offer within 28 days, contribution details per employee and per fund, qualifying earnings calculations, and stapled fund requests. Since Fair Work wants super information as part of the seven-year employee record, seven is again the safe answer.
Who should be able to see employee records?
Only the people who genuinely need them, which in most small businesses is the owner and whoever runs the payroll. Access is where small businesses most often go wrong, and it rarely involves bad intent. A folder gets shared so someone can find one thing, and it stays shared.
Records about individual people should sit apart from operating procedures and general business documents, with access limited to those who genuinely need it. Deciding that once, by category, is part of organising business records so someone else can find them. Two reasons, and the second is the stronger.
- It lets you delegate operational work without handing over sensitive material. You cannot open up the procedures if the pay records are in the same folder.
- The information is about other people. They gave it to you to be employed, not to be circulated, and you cannot consent on their behalf to it going further.
Write the record, not an opinion
A file about a person should hold documents and dated facts: the agreement, the hours, the leave, the pay, what was decided and when. It should not accumulate commentary.
Notes written in frustration on a Tuesday read very differently two years later in a dispute, and they will be read, because employment records are among the first things produced. Keep the record factual, keep it contemporaneous, and if something needs to be said about conduct or performance, say it through the proper process rather than in a filing note.
What to check this week
- Can you produce, for every current employee, a signed agreement, their current pay rate, and their leave balance, without asking anyone?
- Are pay slips going out within one working day of payday?
- Has your super process actually changed to payday, or only your intention to change it?
- Is there a folder of people records that more people can reach than need to?
- Do you still hold records for people who left more than seven years ago, and are you keeping them for a reason you could state?
Holding records for people who left more than seven years ago runs the other way from the rest of that list. Keeping personal information longer than you need it is its own problem, not a safe default.
None of this is employment or privacy advice. If something turns on a policy, a performance issue, a termination or a dispute, get advice appropriate to your circumstances before acting on it.
Keeping people records separate
In Wellrun, People is a restricted section. It is never available to an outside adviser, whatever the owner turns on, and that is refused by the database rather than by a setting somebody could talk their way past.
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Where these facts come from
Checked 2 September 2026. Rules change, and the ones below are indexed or amended from time to time. Check the source before you rely on a figure.
- Fair Work Ombudsman, Record keeping: seven years for time and wages records
- Fair Work Ombudsman, Record keeping and pay slips fact sheet: categories, form, and the one working day pay slip rule
- ATO, Key superannuation rates and thresholds: 12 per cent for 2026-27, last updated 17 April 2026
- ATO, Record keeping for Payday Super: qualifying earnings and payday payment, last updated 27 June 2026
- ATO, Overview of record keeping rules for business: the general five-year rule