The Holiday Season Starts Now: How to Staff Your Venue for Maximum Profitability
September is not too early. In fact, for most operators, it is already the right time.
The end-of-year trading window is the most profitable period in the Australian hospitality calendar. Work functions, Christmas celebrations, New Year’s Eve events, and the general uplift in social spending that comes with the warmer months represent a genuine revenue opportunity for venues that are ready to capture it.
The operators that capture it fully are the ones who have their teams in place before the rush arrives, not scrambling to fill gaps when the bookings are already confirmed and the rosters are already stretched.
Why September Is the Moment to Act
According to Sprintlaw Australia’s May 2026 guide to Christmas hiring, hospitality venues should be bringing on additional staff from mid-October at the latest to cover onboarding and training and be set for the influx of end-of-year functions and holiday crowds. That mid-October start date means the recruitment process, advertising, interviewing, reference checking, and onboarding, needs to begin now.
According to the Toast Consumer Preferences Survey 2025, cited in Toast’s February 2026 Australian holiday staffing guide, 43.5% of hospitality workers identify salary and benefits as their top consideration when accepting a role, while 27.5% cite work-life balance. In a tight labour market, the venues that move first with a clear, honest offer will consistently secure better candidates than the ones who post in October when every other operator in the area is doing the same thing.
The best hospitality staff available right now are still weighing their options. By October, they will already have committed somewhere else.
The Compliance Picture Has Changed
Getting the staffing right this season also means getting the compliance right, and there are two changes operators need to have across before the first December shift.
From 1 July 2026, the Fair Work Commission’s Annual Wage Review delivered a 4.75% increase across all modern awards, including the Hospitality Industry Award. If your pay rates, casual loadings, and penalty rate calculations have not been updated to reflect the new figures, the time to fix that is now, not when the Fair Work Ombudsman is reviewing a complaint in February.
Public holiday rostering is also under closer scrutiny. According to the Australian Business Lawyers and Advisors January 2026 guide to public holiday rostering, a shift appearing on a roster is not a lawful request under the Fair Work Act. Employers must genuinely seek employees’ consent for public holiday work in advance and document both acceptance and any reasonable refusal. With Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Year’s Day all falling in your busiest trading window, the legal and operational risk of getting this wrong is significant. Build your consent process into your rostering now, before the dates are on top of you.
Building a Team That Performs Under Pressure
The holiday season is not just more of the same at higher volume. The period involves set menus or fixed-price functions, heightened guest expectations, surcharge management, and changes in customer behaviour that staff need to be briefed on specifically.
That means onboarding any new staff well before the first big function date. Pairing new hires with experienced team members for their first few shifts. Running pre-shift huddles on upselling, surcharge explanations, and venue-specific expectations. And having clear escalation paths for complaints and difficult situations so your floor team never has to improvise in front of a full house.
From our conversations with pub, club, hotel, and restaurant operators across Australia, the venues that trade most profitably through the holiday season are not always the busiest ones. They are the ones where the team is prepared, the roster has genuine depth, and the manager is not spending every service firefighting gaps.
A well-staffed venue going into October is a confident venue going into December. The revenue difference between a team that is ready and a team that is stretched is measurable, and it shows up in everything from table turn times to function rebookings for the following year.
Start the Conversation Now
At Frontline Hospitality, we work with pub, restaurant, hotel, and club operators across Australia to build the teams they need for their busiest periods. If your roster heading into the holiday season needs strengthening, now is exactly the right time to talk about it.
Sources: Sprintlaw Australia, When Do Christmas Casuals Start, May 2026 · Toast, How to Manage Restaurant Staffing During the Holidays in Australia, February 2026 · Australian Business Lawyers and Advisors, Public Holiday Rostering: What Employers Need to Know, January 2026 · POSApt, Public Holidays 2026: How Australian Businesses Can Plan Ahead, October 2025 · Fair Work Commission, Annual Wage Review Decision 2026-27, June 2026 · Australian Hotelier, August-September 2026 Edition