Annual Leave Calculator Australia

Annual leave is calculated on your ordinary hours of work, not on your job title or your headcount status. Under the National Employment Standards every employee except a casual gets 4 weeks of paid annual leave for each year of service, and it accrues progressively as you work rather than landing in one lump on your anniversary. The Fair Work Ombudsman's own Leave Calculator spreads that entitlement across the calendar: 4 weeks is 28 days of entitlement per 365 days of service, so every ordinary hour you work earns 0.076712 hours of leave. On a 38-hour week that is 2 hours 55 minutes a week, 5 hours 50 minutes a fortnight, and 152 hours 10 minutes over a full year — the figure this calculator returns for 2025-07-01 to 2026-06-30, and the same figure the Fair Work calculator returns for those inputs. Overtime and unpaid breaks are not ordinary hours, so they earn no leave.

Neither number is the entitlement — the entitlement is 4 weeks of your own ordinary hours, and how many "days" that is depends entirely on your roster. Someone working five 7.6-hour days a week has 4 weeks worth 152 hours, which spends as 20 rostered days. Someone working three 8-hour days a week has 4 weeks worth 96 hours, which spends as 12 rostered days. The 28 figure is calendar days, and it is only relevant to the accrual arithmetic: the Fair Work Ombudsman's method treats 4 weeks as 28 days of entitlement per 365 days of service. Because leave is taken in your ordinary hours, taking a week off costs you a week's ordinary hours whether you work two days or six — which is why this calculator reports a balance in hours first and converts to weeks second.

A 40-hour week accrues 3 hours 4 minutes of annual leave, because each ordinary hour earns 0.076712 hours of leave. Over the full year from 2025-07-01 to 2026-06-30 that comes to 160 hours 11 minutes, which is what 4 weeks of a 40-hour week is worth — the accrual rate is built so a full year of work delivers a full year's entitlement. Note that 38 hours, not 40, is the maximum weekly ordinary hours the National Employment Standards set for a full-time employee, so a 40-hour week often includes two hours that are overtime or reasonable additional hours. Only genuine ordinary hours accrue leave, so if two of those hours are overtime, enter 38 rather than 40 above.

It depends on whether the leave is paid. Fair Work states that annual leave accumulates while you are on paid annual leave, paid sick and carer's leave, paid family and domestic violence leave, community service leave including jury duty, and long service leave. It does not accumulate while you are on unpaid annual leave, unpaid sick or carer's leave, or unpaid parental leave — and the Australian Government's Paid Parental Leave Scheme does not count as paid leave for this purpose, so no annual leave accrues while you are being paid by that scheme and taking unpaid leave from your employer. This calculator handles that with the optional "unpaid leave taken" field: those hours come out of the accruing base before the entitlement fraction is applied, which is exactly what the Fair Work calculator does with the same input.

Annual leave loading is an extra amount paid on top of your base pay when you take annual leave, most commonly 17.5%. It is not a universal statutory right. Fair Work is explicit that loading "doesn't apply to all employees and depends on what their award or enterprise agreement says", so whether you get it, and at what rate, is a question about your award or agreement rather than about the National Employment Standards. Some awards also make it the higher of 17.5% or the shift loading you would otherwise have earned, which is the situation in Fair Work's own published example. That is why the loading toggle on this page is off by default and asks you to confirm your award provides it — turning it on when your award is silent would overstate what you are owed.

No. Fair Work Act s 87 excludes periods of employment as a casual employee from the annual leave entitlement, and Fair Work states plainly that all employees except casuals get paid annual leave. The trade-off is casual loading, the higher hourly rate a casual is paid instead of paid leave entitlements. This calculator is therefore not the right tool for casual work: if you are casual, the hours you enter accrue no annual leave at all, no matter how many you work or how long you stay. If your engagement has changed — for example you have converted from casual to permanent — start the work period on the date the permanent employment began, because the casual service before it does not accrue leave.

It is paid out. Fair Work Act s 90(2) requires an employer, when employment ends, to pay any untaken paid annual leave at the amount that would have been payable had the employee taken that leave. Fair Work adds that this includes annual leave loading and other payments if the employee would have received them when taking the leave, and that the payout applies even where an award, enterprise agreement or employment contract says it does not. Unused leave also rolls over year to year while you are employed — it does not expire at the end of a financial year. The balance and payout figures above give you the hours and the gross amount; they do not calculate the tax withheld on an unused-leave payment at termination, which uses separate ATO withholding schedules.

Because the Fair Work Ombudsman's calculator does not use 4/52. Dividing 4 weeks of entitlement by 52 weeks of the year gives 1/13, or 0.076923 hours of leave per ordinary hour, which is the shortcut most quick explanations use. The Fair Work calculator instead spreads 4 weeks across 365 calendar days, giving 0.076712 hours per ordinary hour. The gap is about 0.27 per cent — small, but on a full-time year it is the difference between 152 hours 35 minutes and 152 hours 10 minutes. This page follows the regulator's own calculator rather than the shortcut, and the engine is tested against eight balances taken directly from it, so the figures here match what you would get by working through that tool yourself.