RDO

The standard ordinary working week in construction is 38 hours. Instead of working 7.6 hours a day, most workers work 8 hours a day and bank the difference. Over a four-week cycle that extra time adds up to a full day, which is then taken as a paid rostered day off.

The Building and Construction General On-site Award 2020 provides for ordinary hours to be arranged this way, so that workers accrue a day off in each cycle. Most enterprise agreements on commercial and civil sites build on the award and lock in an RDO roughly every second or fourth Monday or Friday, depending on the agreement.

The result is that an RDO is not a holiday the worker chooses. It is a fixed day, set in advance, that applies to everyone covered by the same agreement.

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Each year, employer associations and unions publish an industry RDO calendar for each state, and many enterprise agreements adopt it. The calendar lists every RDO for the year, and often moves some of them so they sit next to public holidays or across the Christmas shutdown.

Because most trades on a commercial site are covered by agreements that follow the same calendar, the practical effect is a site-wide shutdown. Formwork, concrete, steel fixing and services crews all stop on the same day, so there is little point the head contractor keeping the site open.

Calendars differ between states, and not every agreement follows the industry calendar. Check the RDO dates in each subcontractor's agreement when you set up the programme, and confirm the current year's calendar with your state employer association rather than relying on last year's dates.

RDOs reduce the number of working days available, so the programme calendar must show them as non-working days. A project with roughly one RDO a month loses more than a week of working time a year, before rain and public holidays are counted.

They also matter for delay claims. Most contracts measure extensions of time in working days or calendar days, and the definitions decide whether RDOs count. If the programme calendar and the contract definitions do not match, the time you claim and the time the superintendent assesses will not match either.

Working an RDO is possible, but it usually means penalty rates under the relevant agreement and agreement from the workers. Planners sometimes treat RDOs as hidden float, then find the overtime cost was never in the budget.

• Using a generic calendar. A programme built on a five-day week with only public holidays removed overstates the time available.

• Ignoring trade differences. Some subcontractors are covered by agreements with different RDO arrangements. Know who will be on site and who will not.

• Assuming RDOs can be worked at normal rates. Working an RDO usually attracts penalty rates. Price it before you rely on it to recover time.

• Forgetting RDOs in delay claims. Check whether the contract's definition of working days excludes RDOs before you calculate an extension of time.