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Record it contemporaneously, claim it through your award's process, and keep your own copy. Published research found 73.5% of doctors worked five or more unrostered hours a fortnight but only 15.6% claimed all of it 4. Three jurisdictions have since settled unpaid-overtime class actions worth over $400 million 56.
Your entitlement comes from the award, not your term supervisor. NSW's rates and allowances sit in Information Bulletin IB2026_007, including callback at overtime rates with a four-hour minimum 1. The ACT's determination triggers overtime after more than ten hours in a shift or more than 76 paid hours a fortnight — unusually generous, and worth knowing if you move 2. Read your own instrument before you argue with payroll.
How to actually claim it. Log the time the day it happens, not at the end of the term. Attach a patient identifier and a one-line reason to each entry, so a later audit has something to audit 7. Submit through whatever your hospital uses — the app, the form, the roster system — and email yourself the payslip each fortnight so you have a timestamped record independent of the employer 7. Join the union before you need it, not after 7.
The claim rate is the problem, not the entitlement. AMA NSW's 2024 Hospital Health Check found only 38% of doctors in training claimed all their unrostered overtime, while 78.9% of what was claimed was paid in full 3. Peer-reviewed work put it more starkly: 73.5% worked five or more unrostered hours a fortnight and 15.6% claimed all of it 4. People do not claim because they fear the term assessment and the reference, not because they think they are not owed.
If you are told not to claim. That instruction is the thing the class actions were about — Victoria settled 30 actions against 36 health services for $175m, and NSW settled the largest underpayment class action in Australian legal history 567. The strategy the sub actually uses is to keep a full contemporaneous record and lodge retrospectively once the reference no longer has you over a barrel — slow, imperfect, and better than nothing 7.
The counter-argument worth hearing. Some departments push the opposite way: claim every minute, because unpaid hours make the roster look adequately staffed and kill the business case for another registrar 7.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
It is fully illegal to do what the HoD is doing, that's what all the recent class actions were about.
encouraged very heavily to claim all overtime, he said "it tells the hospital we need more stuff, please claim every minute of it"
Add patient hospital numbers to all of your call back/ over time and be diligent with notes in the event they audit your future claim. Join the union tomorrow if you haven't.
email payslips to yourself each fortnight for time stamped
Asked 105 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(unrostered|overtime|\bUROT\b|\bUROC\b|penalty rate|fatigue|time in lieu|\bTOIL\b)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring practical replies in the canonical 'told not to claim' thread, kept balanced so the department that demands every minute be claimed sits beside the one that forbids it.