The 224 cases at a glance
- Penalised within a year: 118 (52.7%)
- The middle half: 212 to 491 days; the median, 352.5 days
- More than two years: 19 (8.5%); the longest, 1,925 days
- Only about an ignored compliance notice: 159 cases, median 321 days
- Announced: 8 October 2018 to 18 November 2025; penalised: up to 25 June 2026
The headline finding
From the day the Fair Work Ombudsman announced it had taken a business to court to the day the court penalised it, half of 224 cases took longer than 350 days. The median was 352.5 days.
In all, 118 cases (52.7%) ended in a penalty within a year of the announcement, and 19 took more than two years. A case here is one the regulator announced in its newsroom and the court later penalised, as the regulator’s own litigation register records it.
Two records, one case
The regulator publishes both ends of its court cases. When it takes a business to court, its newsroom says so, usually under a headline saying the business faces court or is in court. When the court penalises, the outcome goes on its litigation register with the respondent, the date and the penalty. OnNotice matched the two by the business’s name, with no model and no guesswork, and counted the calendar days between them.
A case is in this study only if it ended in a penalty and the regulator announced it in a release this site’s newsroom archive holds. The earliest was announced on 8 October 2018.
How long the cases took
The 224 cases, by the time from announcement to penalty
- Six months or less: 41 (18.3%)
- Six months to a year: 77 (34.4%)
- One to two years: 87 (38.8%)
- Two to three years: 11 (4.9%)
- More than three years: 8 (3.6%)
The quickest took 22 days and the longest 1,925 days. The middle half of the cases took between 212 and 491 days. Where one judgment penalised several companies the regulator had announced together, it is counted once.
Compliance notice cases
Of the 224 cases, 159 were about nothing but a compliance notice the business did not follow. A Fair Work Inspector can issue a compliance notice under s.716 of the Fair Work Act 2009 when they reasonably believe an employer has breached certain workplace laws, such as an award or the National Employment Standards, and the notice tells the employer what to do to fix it. Not complying is its own contravention, so the regulator can go to court on the notice instead of proving an underpayment from scratch.
Those 159 cases had a median of 321 days, against 392 days for the other 65. Of the 159, 90 were penalised within a year and 6 took more than two years, against 13 of the other 65. The data does not say why any case took as long as it did.
The court and the size of the penalty
The register names the Federal Court for eight of the cases. Their median was 906 days, and none was penalised within a year. It names the Federal Circuit Court, or its successor the Federal Circuit and Family Court, for 176 cases, with a median of 360 days, and names no court for 40, with a median of 244 days. Eight Federal Court cases are too few to say much about that court on their own.
Cases that ended in a penalty of $100,000 or more had a longer median: 469 days across 37 of them, and 11 took more than two years. The 187 cases with smaller penalties had a median of 321 days. The register does not say why.
What the data cannot show
Only cases that ended in a penalty the register records are here. A case that settled, was discontinued, was lost or is still running is not, and neither is a case the newsroom never announced, or one where the register names only a person, with no company or trading name to match on. Another 13 register outcomes were left out because one employer had more than one case running at once, and the two records do not say which outcome ended which case.
The start date is the day of the announcement, not the day the case was filed. And no year can be compared with another: a recent case is here only if it has already finished, so the latest years hold only the quick ones. The check that the headline survives this is the 194 cases announced on or before 25 June 2024, at least two years before the register’s last outcome. Their median was 360 days.
Two readings
A compliance notice is the regulator’s shortcut: a Fair Work Inspector puts the contravention in writing and tells the business what to fix, and if it does not, the court case is about the notice rather than an underpayment proved from scratch. The 159 cases about nothing but an ignored notice still took a median of 321 days from the announcement to the penalty.
There are two ways to read that. One is that this is a court doing its job at the pace a fair hearing takes: a business is entitled to be heard before it is penalised, and a year is not a long time in civil litigation. The other is that a penalty is there to deter, and one that lands most of a year after the regulator announced the case arrives a long way from the conduct it answers.
The data cannot say which. It can say how long it took.
Method
The sources are the Fair Work Ombudsman’s litigation outcomes register, as this site typed it (545 rows when the study ran), and the regulator’s newsroom, as this site archived it (1,198 releases, 469 of them announcing a court case). A release is paired with a register outcome when it names the same business, by its legal name or the trading name the register gives, in its title or its first four sentences, is dated before the outcome and is no more than eight years older. An appeal, or an outcome with no penalty, is never the end of a case. Where one employer had more than one case, releases and outcomes are paired in date order only when each release comes before its own outcome; otherwise those cases are left out. One judgment that penalised several companies announced together counts once.
Days are calendar days, and the quartiles are rounded to the day. We read two random samples of 30 pairs by hand, each against the release and the register row: 28 of 30 were right on the first build, and 30 of 30 after the fixes that first read led to.
Source: Fair Work Ombudsman, litigation outcomes and media releases.
General information only. OnNotice reports developments in Australian industrial relations, human resources and workplace law. This article is for education purposes only and is not intended to form professional advice. Always confirm against the primary source and seek specific advice relating to your circumstances.