Pocket money for a 16 year old in Australia
At sixteen the law sets the rate in most of the countries here. The pocket wage is simply the real junior wage, paid at home.
A 16 year old in Australia earns
$12.51an hour
About $62.55 a week if they do 5 hours of paid jobs. That's the real legal minimum for their age. From here the law sets the rate, not us.
Worked out from Fair Work Ombudsman — Annual Wage Review 2026, rates from 1 July 2026.
The rate at every age in Australia.
Pocket Wage is a straight line, one step every birthday, until it meets the real minimum wage. Here's the whole ladder in Australia.
- Pocket wage, paid by you
- Real minimum wage, paid by a boss
At 15, the legal minimum in Australia is $9.73 an hour. Pocket Wage draws a straight line from there back to zero, and a kid's age picks the spot on it.
What a 16 year old can do, and what it pays.
Every paid job has a standard time: how long it should take, not how long it did. Dawdle and you earn less a minute. Get good at it and you earn more. There's no timer to game and no price to haggle.
Sixteen year olds can work legally almost everywhere, and the minimum wage that applies to them is the one Pocket Wage uses. That is the whole design: the family rate and the market rate have met, and a first job is a change of employer, not a change of world. Jobs at home are now priced exactly as an employer would price them.
If they have a job outside the house, the Jobs Board keeps going for the jobs they still do at home. If they do not, the pocket wage is a fair, legal-rate wage for real work, and the payslip they have been reading since twelve is the one they will recognise on day one of employment.
The payslip at 16
Identical to a real payslip. If you have been running Pocket Wage since they were small, this is the eleventh pay rise and the five hundredth payday or so. Graduation is next.
The Jobs Board at age 16, $12.51 an hour
| Job | Standard time | Pays |
|---|---|---|
| Run the whole house for a weekend | 6 hr | $75.06 |
| Full garden maintenance | 2 hr | $25.02 |
| Wash, vacuum and detail the car | 1 hr 30 min | $18.77 |
| Babysit younger siblings for an evening | 3 hr | $37.53 |
Example jobs and times. Family Duties, like clearing your own plate, are unpaid: belonging isn't billable.
How junior wages work in Australia.
Australia's national minimum wage is set every year by the Fair Work Commission and takes effect on 1 July. For workers under 21 the law publishes junior rates as a percentage of the adult wage: 36.8% under 16, rising each birthday to the full rate at 21. A fifteen year old with a casual job is legally owed the under-16 rate, and it goes up on their sixteenth birthday whether or not their boss remembers.
Pocket Wage anchors on that under-16 rate and draws a straight line back to zero, so every age from five to fifteen sits on the same ramp the law uses from fifteen to twenty-one. From sixteen the site shows the real junior rate. When the Commission announces a new wage each June, every rate on this site changes on 1 July, and so does every kid's pocket wage: Pay-Rise Day for the whole country.
The age a child can legally work varies by state, usually 13 to 15, with lighter rules for things like delivery rounds. The junior minimum wage applies to anyone employed, whatever their age.
Source: Fair Work Ombudsman — Annual Wage Review 2026, rates from 1 July 2026.
Questions parents ask about 16 year olds.
Should a sixteen year old still get pocket money?
Not pocket money. A wage for work at home, at the same rate the law says an employer must pay them. Family Duties stay unpaid, as they always were.
What is the minimum wage for a sixteen year old?
The rate on this page, from the official source linked below. It is the legal junior rate for this country, not a Pocket Wage estimate.
What happens when they get a job?
Graduation. The rate at home and the rate at work are the same number, so the first payslip from a boss looks exactly like the one from home. That was the point of every birthday since five.
What is the average pocket money in Australia?
Surveys by Australian banks and kids' money apps typically find a few dollars a week at primary-school age, rising to ten or fifteen for teenagers, mostly given for nothing. A pocket wage is usually more, and all of it is earned.
Every birthday is a pay rise.
The app runs the whole thing: the Jobs Board, the standard times, a sacred weekly payday with a payslip, and Pay-Rise Day on every birthday. No cards, no stored money. The parent is the bank.