How to Cut Agency Staffing Costs Without Losing Cover

Where the agency cost actually goes

It is worth being clear on what you are paying for when you use a traditional staffing agency. You are paying for their recruiter time to find and vet workers, their account manager time to handle bookings and queries, their compliance and payroll infrastructure, and their margin on top of all of that.

For businesses that use agency workers occasionally for genuinely hard-to-fill roles, that overhead is arguably worth it. For businesses that are booking the same five workers every weekend through an agency because they have not built the relationships themselves, it is not.

Step one: convert regular agency workers to direct casuals

The highest-value action for most businesses is this: identify the agency workers who come back repeatedly and offer them a directly-employed casual arrangement instead. You remove the agency from the equation entirely, pay the worker the same rate (or a small uplift to make the switch worth their while), and the agency margin disappears.

This requires checking your agency contract — some include rebooking or introduction fee clauses that apply if you hire a worker directly within a defined period. Read the contract, understand the terms, and where necessary wait out the restriction period. The saving is worth the patience.

ERA 2025 is also relevant here. From 2027, agency workers who have been coming to your site regularly may have a right to be offered guaranteed hours. Getting ahead of that by converting your most reliable people to directly-employed casuals now gives you more control over the relationship and reduces your exposure.

Step two: build a casual pool that actually works

Many businesses say they have tried to reduce agency use but found they could not fill the gaps reliably with their own casual workers. In most cases, the problem is not the workers — it is the system. A casual worker who gets shifts via WhatsApp, receives informal notice, and has no easy way to confirm or update their availability is not going to be as reliable as one on a proper system.

What a functional casual pool needs:

• Workers who see shifts in a system, not a message thread, and can confirm with one tap
• Published rotas with enough notice that casual workers can plan around your shifts rather than working around their other commitments
• An easy way for workers to update their availability so you are not calling people who are already booked elsewhere
• A reliable payment process — casual workers who are paid correctly and on time are casual workers who come back

None of this is complicated. Most of it comes down to treating your casual workers like the resource they are, rather than an afterthought managed through informal channels.

Step three: use agency only for genuine last-minute gaps

Once you have a direct casual pool that works, agency becomes a genuine last resort rather than a first call. You use it for genuine last-minute gaps you cannot fill any other way — not for regular shifts that you could and should be filling directly.

When you do need agency cover, using a platform-based model like FlexiWork Agency at 15% rather than a traditional agency at 25–35% reduces the cost of those unavoidable gaps. The workers are verified, rated, and can be rebooked directly once you have used them through the platform.

ERA 2025 changes the calculation further

Since February 2026, you and your agency jointly must provide agency workers with reasonable notice of shifts. Last-minute same-day bookings are now legally questionable. If your agency model depended on that kind of short-notice flexibility, it needs to change regardless of cost considerations.

And from 2027, regular agency workers at your site are expected to gain guaranteed hours rights. The more you can shift your flexible staffing to directly-employed casuals, the simpler your ERA 2025 obligations become.

Frequently asked questions