National Australia Bank will pay about $169 million to 66,000 current and former staff after payroll failures left workers underpaid for more than a decade, Australia's workplace regulator announced on Thursday.

The bank has entered an enforceable undertaking with the Fair Work Ombudsman, committing to pay $127 million in wages, $34 million in interest and $8 million in superannuation. A further $2 million contrition payment to the Commonwealth is the largest ever included in one of the ombudsman's enforceable undertakings.

Back payments to the 65,999 affected workers range from less than $5 to more than $87,000, including superannuation and interest, with an average payment of about $1,900. The bank has already repaid most of what it owes, with about $155 million handed back before the announcement.

What the ombudsman found

The underpayments stretched back to 2012 and covered staff under four successive enterprise agreements, from 2011, 2014, 2016 and 2024, as well as the Banking, Finance and Insurance Award. Workers affected included casual, part-time and full-time employees in personal and business banking roles across every Australian state and territory.

The breaches covered minimum wages for ordinary hours, overtime, shift loadings and call-outs, meal breaks, allowances, annual leave, personal leave, long service leave, parental leave, public holidays and redundancy and termination payments. The ombudsman said the case showed what could go wrong when an employer failed to coordinate payroll, industrial relations, technology, risk management, audit and legal functions.

Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said the bank had committed to fixing its administrative systems. She said the underpayments highlighted the serious, long-running problems that could arise when an employer failed to coordinate the key business functions needed to meet its workplace obligations.

Fourteen years of payroll errors

NAB first reported the problem to the ombudsman in late 2019, after discovering significant errors in how it applied its most recent enterprise agreement. An internal review then found the mistakes stretched back to 2012, caused by record-keeping errors and outdated payroll technology carried across systems.

Among the administrative blunders discovered were correct timesheet data being recorded incorrectly, staff not accruing leave properly, and other entitlements under successive enterprise agreements being miscalculated. The undertaking also requires the bank to strengthen its payroll systems, commission independent audits, improve board reporting and plan properly for compliance with any future enterprise agreement.

The ombudsman recovered more than $450 million in unpaid wages and entitlements for more than 181,000 workers in 2025-26, a figure that underlines how widespread payroll failures have become among large Australian employers.

What NAB and the union said

NAB group executive for people and culture Sarah White said the bank took its payroll obligations extremely seriously. She said: "We sincerely apologise for these unintended errors. We have and will continue to remediate anyone who has been impacted."

The Finance Sector Union was far less forgiving, calling it one of the worst cases of employee underpayment in Australian corporate history. Its national president, Wendy Streets, said: "Underpayment of wages is theft, pure and simple, and is unacceptable at any employer." She added that it was hard to believe a big four bank with all its resources would make such a colossal mistake over such a long period of time.

The union said it had first raised concerns about staff underpayments with NAB a decade ago, but the bank rejected the allegations at the time. It also pointed out that the announcement came weeks after NAB told staff that 2,500 jobs, about 6 per cent of its workforce, would be made redundant over the coming year.

A wider warning for big employers

Payroll expert Brett Cowan warned that some of the country's biggest employers could be sitting on millions of dollars in payroll mistakes because their systems repeated the same error every year. He said payroll accuracy was a business risk that belonged on the board's agenda, and that if a company could not explain how its payroll calculations worked, its board should be asking why.

NAB, which ranks third in size behind Commonwealth Bank and Westpac, reported a net profit of $6.14 billion in 2026. The $2 million contrition payment amounts to about 0.03 per cent of that profit, a contrast the union is unlikely to let pass. The bank must now email a written apology to all of its current Australia-based employees and complete its remediation programme, while the ombudsman retains the power to add further contraventions to the undertaking until mid-2028.

Source: Australian Associated Press