Locum nursing in Australia is one of the most flexible and financially rewarding career paths available to AHPRA-registered nurses, but navigating NMBA requirements, choosing between agency and direct work, and structuring pay correctly takes planning. Whether you are picking up casual shifts between permanent roles or building a full locum career, understanding the mechanics of registration, pay structures, and tax obligations will help you earn more and avoid nasty surprises at tax time.
This article is general information only and is not personal financial or tax advice.
NMBA Registration: Your Licence to Work
Every nurse working in Australia must hold current registration with the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA), managed through AHPRA. Registration covers registered nurses (RNs), enrolled nurses (ENs), and nurse practitioners (NPs). Before you can accept a single locum shift, your registration must be current, unconditional, and show the correct principal place of practice.
For the 2026-27 registration period, the NMBA increased renewal fees by 4.25%, bringing the general registration fee to $193. You must complete at least 20 hours of continuing professional development (CPD) per registration year, relevant to your context of practice. The NMBA also requires a minimum of 450 hours of practice in the preceding five years to meet the recency of practice standard. If you have taken time away from nursing, check your hours before committing to locum agency agreements.
Locum agencies and direct employers are required to sight your AHPRA registration confirmation before engagement. Keep your registration certificate and any endorsement details readily available.
Agency vs Direct: What Is the Difference?
Most locum nurses in Australia start through a nursing agency. Agencies such as NurseLink, Medecal, and Medstaff source shifts across hospitals, aged care facilities, community health, and specialist clinics. The agency handles compliance checks, indemnity insurance requirements, timesheet processing, and invoicing the workplace. In exchange, the agency takes a margin on your rate.
Direct engagement, where the hospital or health service books you without an intermediary, typically pays more because there is no agency margin. Many experienced locums build a direct client list alongside agency shifts. Some health networks run their own internal casual pools, which effectively sit between the two models.
The trade-off is administrative: direct engagements mean you handle your own invoicing, super tracking, and sometimes credentialing verification yourself. A platform like Sessional is designed specifically for this workload, letting you manage invoices, track super, and monitor credential expiry across all sources in one place.
PAYG vs ABN: How Locum Nurses Are Paid
Locum nursing pay structures fall into two main categories.
PAYG (casual employee). Under this arrangement you are treated as a casual employee of the agency or health service. The payer withholds income tax via the PAYG withholding system, contributes superannuation at the statutory rate, and you receive a payslip. This is the most common structure for agency nurses. Casual employees under the Nurses Award 2020 receive a 25% casual loading on the base award rate as compensation for the lack of paid leave. In practice, many agencies pay above-award rates with a blended loading that can reach 45% above base, putting first-year RN casual rates around $49 per hour and eighth-year RN rates around $66 per hour.
ABN (contractor/sole trader). Some experienced locums work as independent contractors, invoicing clients directly through an ABN. This unlocks broader tax deductions (professional indemnity insurance, CPD costs, uniforms, equipment, home office, and travel) but removes the automatic PAYG withholding safety net. You are responsible for setting aside income tax and lodging a BAS if your annual turnover reaches the GST registration threshold of $75,000. Above that threshold, you must register for GST, charge 10% GST on your invoices, and lodge a BAS, usually quarterly.
One critical point: holding an ABN does not exempt you from superannuation obligations on your payer's side. Under ATO rules, if you are engaged primarily for your own labour and skills (not supplying a business outcome with your own tools and risk), the payer must still pay the Super Guarantee on your behalf, even when you invoice via an ABN. The SG rate for 2025-26 is 12% of ordinary time earnings.
Casual Loading and What It Actually Means
Casual loading compensates for the absence of paid annual leave, sick leave, and other permanent entitlements. For PAYG locum nurses, this loading is built into the hourly rate. When comparing locum rates against permanent salary benchmarks, strip out the loading before comparing: a permanent RN earning $42 per hour base with entitlements is broadly comparable to a casual PAYG locum on $52 per hour (25% loading applied).
Contractor nurses on ABN arrangements do not receive a statutory loading from their payer, because they are not employees. The higher contractor rate (typically $55 to $75 per hour for specialist RNs) is intended to compensate, but you must fund your own leave, insurance, and super contributions from that gross rate.
Tracking Earnings Across Multiple Payers
Most locum nurses work across several agencies and direct clients simultaneously. This creates a common and dangerous tax problem: each payer applies the standard tax-free threshold only if you have nominated them as your primary employer on your TFN declaration. If you have not done this correctly, or if your combined income pushes you into a higher tax bracket mid-year, you can arrive at tax time with a large underpayment.
Equally, super contributions come from multiple sources at different times. Without a single view across payers, it is easy to miss a missed contribution or a super fund consolidation opportunity.
This is exactly the problem Sessional solves: an earnings and tax-reserve dashboard that aggregates income from all sources, flags when super has not been received, and lets you run a real-time estimate of your year-to-date tax liability. For ABN nurses, the BAS readiness tracker and invoice tools with automatic payment chasers reduce the administrative overhead of running your own locum business.
For ABN nurses making personal super contributions to stay within the $32,500 concessional contributions cap for 2026-27, Sessional's super tracker shows how much employer SG you have already received across all payers before you make additional contributions.
What to Check Before You Accept a Locum Shift
Before signing an agency agreement or accepting a direct booking, confirm:
- Your NMBA registration is current and unconditional at AHPRA's portal
- The engagement is structured correctly (PAYG or ABN) and you understand who is responsible for super and tax
- Your professional indemnity insurance covers the shift type and workplace setting
- Any mandatory credentialing documents (Working with Children Check, police check, vaccination evidence, BLS currency) are current for the relevant state
- If you are an ABN contractor, your invoice terms and payment schedule are agreed in writing before the first shift
See the full nurse profile on Sessional, explore pricing, or use the invoice template tool to generate a compliant GST invoice for your first direct engagement.
Sources
- NMBA - Registration renewal fees 2026-27
- NMBA - CPD requirements for nurses and midwives
- NMBA - Recency of practice standard via AHPRA registration requirements
- ATO - Super Guarantee rate 12% from 1 July 2025
- SuperGuide - Concessional contributions cap $30,000 for 2025-26
- NurseLink - Agency nurse pay rates in Australia 2026
- AHPRA - Applying for registration