Short answer
Strata committee members serve as volunteers and are not paid a fee or wage for holding office. They can generally be reimbursed for reasonable out-of-pocket expenses they properly incur doing committee work, with the owners corporation’s approval. The paid roles in strata are the professionals a scheme hires, such as the strata manager — not the committee.
Volunteers, not employees
Sitting on the committee is an unpaid role. Members take it on to help run their own building, and the law treats them as volunteers who must act honestly, fairly and with due care — not as staff earning a wage. This is why many schemes hire a strata manager for the heavy administrative work: the committee gives direction and makes decisions, but the paid work sits with the professionals it engages.
Expenses and reimbursement
Being unpaid doesn’t mean being out of pocket. Where a member reasonably spends their own money doing genuine committee business, the owners corporation can reimburse that expense — typically with the owners’ approval and against a proper record of what was spent. Reimbursing a real cost is different from paying someone for their time, and the rules on what can be reimbursed and how it’s approved should be checked for your scheme before money changes hands.
Keeping the line between volunteer and expense clean
The care point is documentation: a reimbursement should be a genuine, approved, recorded cost — never a disguised payment for holding office. Straita keeps that trail for a self-managing scheme — the approval, the receipt and the ledger entry — so reimbursements are clearly expenses, sit within the budget, and can stand up to scrutiny at audit or at the AGM.
Primary sources
- Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 (NSW) — duties of committee members and owners corporation finances.
- Serving on a strata committee (NSW Government) — committee members are volunteers.