How to calculate annual leave in Australia

How much annual leave am I entitled to?

Paid annual leave is one of the minimum entitlements of Australian workers under the National Employment Standards.

All full-time workers are guaranteed a minimum of 4 weeks paid annual leave. If you’re a shift worker you may be entitled to 5 weeks.

How do I accrue annual leave?

Annual leave accrues gradually throughout the year. You’re entitled to accrue annual leave from the day you start work, regardless of employment probation periods.

By law, any unused leave rolls over from year to year.

You don’t accrue annual leave when you’re on unpaid leave.

How do I work out how much annual leave I’ve accrued?

First let’s go through some numbers we will need.

1. The NES considers a full-time work week to be 38 hours.
2. A normal working day is therefore 7.6 hours (38 hours / 5 days).
3. 4 weeks annual leave equals 20 days, (5 days × 4 weeks).
4. Every calendar day you accumulate 0.416438356 hours of leave (20 days × 7.6 hours / 365 days).

Yes, you accumulate less than half an hour of annual leave per day. Depressing, isn’t it? Let’s call this the accumulation rate.

Two formulas give us your annual leave entitlement in hours and days.

Hours accumulated = Calendar days employed × Accumulation rate

Days accumulated = Calendar days employed × Accumulation rate / 7.6

Let’s say you’ve worked hard for 9 months and need some time off. All you have to do is plug in the numbers.

9 months is around 274 calendar days (yes, we counted)

274 days × 0.416438356 = 114 hours accumulated

274 days × 0.416438356 / 7.6 = 15 days accumulated

If you work part-time, forget days and count hours instead. You get 4 weeks of leave a year at your own ordinary hours, which means 4 weeks of leave for every 52 weeks of work.

Hours accumulated = Ordinary hours worked × 4 / 52

That’s about 0.0769 hours of leave for every ordinary hour you work. Count your hours on paid leave too, because annual leave keeps accruing while you’re on paid leave.

Take the Fair Work Ombudsman’s own example. Jane is a part-time employee who works 20 hours per week.

20 hours × 4 / 52 = 1.54 hours accumulated per week

20 hours × 52 weeks × 4 / 52 = 80 hours accumulated per year

That’s 80 hours a year, or 4 weeks of Jane’s usual 20 hour week. It doesn’t matter whether she works those hours over 3 days or 5 days, so don’t scale the full-time rate by days.

Easier ways, by Bindle

Now you’ve got the hang of the formulas, you might be tempted to fire up Excel and create a spreadsheet. Hold that thought…

We created Bindle to solve all the problems you hit when you try to manage Annual Leave using email and spreadsheets.

Bindle gives your staff self-service access to Annual Leave information and shows when everyone’s off in the calendar program you already use. Check it out.