How to roster off-site catering jobs: travel, setup and packdown

Written by Roster Flow. Published 18 August 2026.

The service is the part of a catering job everyone plans for. The hours around it are where the money goes: loading the van takes longer than anyone allowed, the setup crew waits at a locked loading dock, the packdown runs an hour past the quote, and the washing up waits back at the kitchen for whoever is still there. None of it shows on a roster built only around the time the guests eat.

This article covers catering at someone else’s venue: an office, a home, a hall, a park or a function space you do not run. For events in your own venue, rostering functions and events covers run sheets and service ratios in detail.

Get the job sheet before you roster anyone

Every off-site job needs a written job sheet, because the venue decides half of your roster. Get these details from the client or the venue before you put names against shifts.

• The address and access: a loading dock or street parking, stairs or a lift, and the earliest time you can get in.
• The times: access from, service start and finish, and the time you must be out by.
• Numbers and service style: guest numbers, and whether it is a drop off, a buffet, platters or waited service.
• What is on site: a full kitchen, a warming area only or nothing, and whether power and water are close to where you set up.
• What you bring: equipment, crockery, linen, urns and tables, all of which have to be loaded, carried and brought back.
• The site contact: who meets the team, who signs off at the end and what happens to leftovers.

A drop off lunch needs a driver and not much else. Waited service for the same numbers needs a team on site for hours. The job sheet tells you which roster you are building.

Roster the job in stages

Break the job into stages and roster each one, so people start when their stage starts and finish when it ends.

The easiest stages to leave off are the first and last minutes on site: waiting for access, and the final walk through with the venue. Put both on the job sheet with a time against them.

Which award covers catering staff

Who you are changes the award. The Restaurant Industry Award 2020 covers the restaurant industry, which includes catering by a restaurant business (clause 4.2), meaning catering for a social or business function that is incidental to the restaurant’s main business (clause 2). It does not cover contract caterers whose principal business activity is providing catering services on a contract or fee-for-service basis (clause 4.4). The Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020 lists caterers in its industry (clause 4.2) and defines a catering employer as one whose primary business is to provide catering services (clause 2). Confirm yours with the Fair Work Ombudsman’s Find my award tool. The rules below are from those two awards, and an enterprise agreement may set different terms.

Travel and getting people there

Decide for each job whether the team meets at the kitchen and travels together or goes straight to the venue. Either can work, but the roster should show where each person starts and when.

The two awards deal with travel differently. Under the Restaurant Industry Award, an employer must pay an employee who works away from the employer’s workplace at their minimum hourly rate for time spent travelling both ways between their home and the place of work, and for engagements that need travel of 80 kilometres or more, in the circumstances the clause sets out, must also pay for transport both ways (clause 21.6). Under the Hospitality Industry (General) Award, an employee required to start before their normal starting time, when their regular transport is not available and the employer does not provide transport, is paid the cost of transport to work (clause 26.9). A full-time or part-time employee required to work more than 80 kilometres from their usual place of work is paid the fares they reasonably spend travelling from their usual place of work to the new one (clause 26.10).

• Put the van’s trips on the roster. Driving the van, loading and unloading are part of the job, so roster them and record them on the timesheet like any other task.
• Mind early starts. A 5:00 load for a breakfast job may be before public transport runs, which is where clause 26.9 of the Hospitality award comes in.
• Keep people together where you can. Travelling in the van means everyone arrives at once and the setup starts on time.
• Check the entrance the day before. A team at the wrong door of a large site is paid time lost before the setup even starts.

Breaks, minimum shifts and long days

Setup-only and packdown-only shifts are where the minimum engagement bites. A casual asked to come for 90 minutes to set up is paid for 2 hours under both awards, so either give the shift 2 hours of work or roster the same people for the setup and the service. Late jobs cost more too: the Restaurant award adds an amount per hour for hours worked from 10:00 pm to 6:00 am on weekdays (clause 24.2), and the Hospitality award from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am on weekdays (clause 29.2). Current amounts are on the Restaurant Award pay rates and Hospitality Award pay rates pages.

Driving, lifting and food safety

• Fatigue. Safe Work Australia’s page on fatigue says businesses must eliminate or minimise the risk of fatigue so far as is reasonably practicable. Do not roster one person to load at dawn, work the service, pack down and drive the van home after dark without looking at the whole day. Split the driving between two people on long jobs.
• Lifting. Urns, trestle tables, crates of crockery and full food boxes are heavy and awkward. Safe Work Australia’s model Code of Practice on hazardous manual tasks explains that the risks of hazardous manual tasks must be assessed and managed, so roster enough hands for loading, long carries and packdown.
• Food safety supervision. Food Standards Australia New Zealand says caterers are among the businesses that need to meet food safety supervisor requirements, and that the supervisor must be reasonably available, which means on site or easily contacted, for example by phone. Know who that is for every job.

A worked example: a corporate lunch for 80

A contract caterer covered by the Hospitality Industry (General) Award has a Thursday buffet lunch for 80 guests at an office 30 minutes’ drive from its kitchen. The food is cooked and chilled the afternoon before, on the kitchen roster. The job sheet says access from 10:30, lunch from 12:00 to 13:30, and out of the building by 14:30. From its own past jobs, the caterer allows 30 minutes to load, 75 minutes to set up a buffet this size, an hour to pack down and reload, and 30 minutes to unload and wash the kit.

That is 6 + 6 + 8 = 20 paid hours for the job. The two service staff meet the van at the venue, so their shifts start there at 10:30, and their 4 hours are well above the 2 hour minimum engagement in clause 11.3. The job lead and driver work 6 hour shifts. Under clauses 16.2 and 16.4, a shift of more than 5 and up to 6 hours includes an unpaid meal break only if the employee has asked for one in writing by the start of the shift, and the employer must not unreasonably refuse. If either of them has, the break goes in the quiet stretch after the buffet opens, and their finish moves out by the length of the break.

Now suppose the client asks on the day to run lunch 30 minutes longer. Everyone finishes 30 minutes later, which adds 2 paid hours across the four people. It also takes the job lead and driver past 6 hours, so each now needs an unpaid meal break of at least 30 minutes after the first 2 hours and within the first 6 (clause 16.2). If the break is not allowed, clause 16.6 adds 50% of the ordinary hourly rate from 6 hours after starting until it is. Price the extension, and replan the breaks, before agreeing to it.

The gap before the next shift matters most after evening jobs. A full-time job lead who finishes an evening function at 23:00 cannot start ordinary hours the next day before 9:00, because of the 10 hour break in clause 15.5(e). Price every job with the roster cost calculator before it is confirmed, and compare the cost with the job’s revenue rather than with a normal day in the kitchen.

After the job

Off-site jobs rarely finish at the rostered time, and a clock out at a client’s building is easy to forget. Check the job’s timesheets the next day, fix any gaps while the job lead still remembers the finish times, and approve them before payroll. Fixing missing clock-ins and recording unpaid breaks cover both. Then update the job sheet with the real load, setup and packdown times, so the next quote is built on your own figures.

Roster Flow helps with the parts of catering that repeat: availability and leave from staff phones, the roster published to everybody at once, clock ins that become timesheets, and approved hours sent to Xero, MYOB or a CSV file. See how it works for catering.

An off-site catering roster checklist

• The job sheet has the address, access time, service times and out time
• Every stage is rostered, from loading the van to washing the kit
• Each person’s starting place and time is on the roster
• Travel and transport rules in your award are checked for the job
• Casual shifts are at least 2 hours, setup and packdown crews included
• Meal breaks are planned for shifts that need them, and written break requests are noted
• Extensions on the day are priced, with breaks replanned, before they are agreed
• Driving is shared so nobody drives home alone after a long day
• Heavy loads have enough people rostered
• Actual times are checked the next day and fed back into the job sheet

Sources

• Fair Work Commission: Restaurant Industry Award 2020 [MA000119]
• Fair Work Commission: Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020 [MA000009]
• Fair Work Ombudsman: find my award
• Safe Work Australia: fatigue
• Safe Work Australia: model Code of Practice, hazardous manual tasks
• Food Standards Australia New Zealand: food safety supervisor

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