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National Employment Standards

How much annual leave you have actually accrued

Four weeks a year of your ordinary hours, not a notional 38-hour week. Enter your hours and your service and this works out the balance, and what it is worth if it is paid out.

Fair Work rules · verified

Entitlements verified against the official sources — how we check.

Ordinary hours only. Overtime does not count towards the entitlement.

How is your pay quoted?
Your entitlement

Leave this at zero unless your award or agreement provides loading. It is not part of the NES, and not everyone gets it. Where it applies it is most often 17.5%.

Annual leave balance

244hours

That is 6.4 weeks of your own working time, from 304 hours accrued less 60 taken.

Still owing to you 244 hrsAlready taken 60 hrs

Worth if paid out today

$10,496.88

At a base rate of $43.02 an hour, before tax.

How it’s made up

Four weeks of your hours152 hrs a year
Accrued over your service304 hrs
Less leave already taken−60 hrs
Balance244 hrs
Paid at your base rate$10,496.88

Accrual is spread evenly across your service. Payroll accrues against hours actually worked, so the two agree on steady hours and drift if yours changed.

Your balance from here

An estimate of your NES entitlement. Awards and enterprise agreements can give more than the NES, never less, and your payslip is the authoritative record. General information only — not financial, tax or employment advice.

Four weeks of your hours, not four weeks of someone else’s

This is the thing calculators get wrong for part-timers. The National Employment Standards give every employee except a casual four weeks of paid annual leave a year, and those weeks are measured in the employee’s own ordinary hours. Fair Work’s own example is a part-timer on 20 hours a week, who accrues 80 hours a year — still four weeks of work for her.

Assume a 38-hour week for everybody and you overstate her balance by nearly double. That is why the first field on this page is your hours, and why the answer is given in your weeks as well as in hours.

The arithmetic underneath is simple enough to check by hand: every ordinary hour worked earns 4/52 of an hour of leave, which is where four weeks in a fifty-two week year comes from. A fifth week, where an award grants it, makes that 5/52.

What builds your balance, and what pauses it

Leave accrues from your first day, probation included, and rolls over indefinitely. It keeps accruing through most paid absences and stops during unpaid ones.

Types of leave during which annual leave does and does not accrue
Annual leave keeps accruing duringIt does not accrue during
paid annual leaveunpaid annual leave
paid sick and carer's leaveunpaid sick or carer's leave
paid family and domestic violence leaveunpaid parental leave
community service leave including jury duty—
long service leave—

The Australian Government's Paid Parental Leave Scheme is not paid leave for this purpose. Somebody on unpaid leave from their employer while being paid by the scheme does not accrue annual leave. Leave does not accumulate for a period of annual leave that has been cashed out.

What it is paid at

The employee's current base pay rate for all hours of leave taken. Base rate is the part people underestimate: it excludes overtime rates, penalty rates, allowances, bonuses. If you normally earn penalty rates, a week of annual leave is worth less in your hand than a week of work, and that gap is not an error on your payslip.

Leave loading is a separate question. Annual leave loading is an additional amount paid to SOME employees when they take annual leave. It is not part of the NES — it depends entirely on the award or enterprise agreement. Commonly 17.5%, but it is not universal and it is not a default. Where an award sets it as the higher of a flat percentage and the shift loading you normally receive, the higher one applies — in Fair Work’s published example a 17.5% flat loading beat a 15% shift loading, so 17.5% was paid.

When you leave the job

When employment ends the employer must pay out all unused accumulated annual leave, at the same amount the employee would have received had they taken it. If leave loading would have applied to the leave, it must be included in the payout — and that holds even where an award, agreement or contract says it does not.

That last clause is worth reading twice. A contract cannot sign away your leave payout, and it cannot strip the loading out of it either. If you would have been paid loading on the leave, the payout includes loading.

Your payout is taxed, and unused leave paid on termination can be taxed differently from ordinary pay depending on why you left. That is its own subject and it is not modelled here.

Frequently asked questions

How much annual leave do I get in Australia?
Four weeks a year, under the National Employment Standards, for every employee except a casual. The important part is that it is four weeks of your own ordinary hours, not a fixed number of hours. Full time on 38 hours a week that is 152 hours a year; part time on 20 hours a week it is 80 hours, which is still four weeks of work for you. Some shiftworkers get a fifth week, but only where their award or agreement provides it.
How does annual leave accrue?
From your first day, including during probation, and gradually across the year rather than in a lump on your anniversary. Anything you do not use rolls over, with no cap. It keeps accruing while you are on paid leave — 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 stops during unpaid leave.
What rate is annual leave paid at?
Your current base pay rate for every hour of leave taken. Base rate excludes overtime, penalty rates, allowances and bonuses, which is why a week of leave can be worth noticeably less than a week of work for anyone who normally earns penalties. An award or agreement can set a different method, and can add leave loading on top.
Does annual leave accrue while I am on annual leave?
Yes. Paid annual leave is one of the paid absences during which leave keeps accruing, so a four-week holiday earns you roughly a day and a half of further leave while you are on it. The same goes for paid sick and carer’s leave and long service leave. The only absences that pause accrual are unpaid ones, which is what the unpaid leave field above is for. If your award provides leave loading, that is a separate question about the rate the leave is paid at, not about how much accrues.
Do I get paid out my annual leave when I leave a job?
Yes. Every hour of unused accumulated annual leave must be paid out when employment ends, and it must be the same amount you would have received had you taken the leave. So if leave loading would have applied to it, loading has to be in the payout. That holds even if an award, agreement or contract says otherwise.
Do casuals accrue annual leave?
No. Casual employees are the one exception to the NES entitlement, and casual loading is paid instead of leave. If you are unsure whether you are genuinely casual, that is a question about the nature of your employment rather than about arithmetic, and Fair Work is the place to take it.
Why does this differ slightly from my payslip?
This accrues evenly across the service you enter. Payroll accrues against ordinary hours actually worked, so the two agree for anyone on steady hours and drift apart if your hours changed, if you were on unpaid leave beyond what you entered, or if you have cashed leave out. Your payslip is the authoritative figure; this shows you whether it is in the right region and what it is worth.

Where these rules come from

The entitlement, the accrual rules and the payment rules on this page are read from a dated file that cites Fair Work for each one, and the engine is pinned by automated tests to Fair Work’s own published examples — including the part-time one above.

Awards and enterprise agreements sit on top of the NES and can only give more, never less. Fair Work’s own tools are authoritative on what your specific award says; we do not model awards, and we say so rather than guessing. The methodology page sets out what every calculator here models and what it does not.