Annual Leave Payout Calculator

Multiply your unused leave hours by your current base hourly rate. Fair Work sets the floor: the payment has to be the same amount you would have received had you taken the leave, at base rate, with no overtime, penalties, allowances or bonuses folded in. Add leave loading on top where your award pays it.

The balance itself comes from the National Employment Standards. Full-time and part-time employees accrue 4 weeks of paid annual leave a year based on their ordinary hours of work. Fair Work's own part-time example puts it plainly: someone working 20 hours a week accumulates 80 hours of leave over a year, the equivalent of 4 weeks of work for them. The balance builds from the first day of employment even during probation, keeps building while you are on paid leave, does not build on unpaid leave, and rolls over year to year. Casual employees accrue none of it. Some shiftworkers get a fifth week where their award says so.

The arithmetic is short. A balance of 152 hours, which is 4 weeks on a 38-hour week, at a base rate of $45.00 an hour comes to $6,840. Add 17.5% loading and the gross payout becomes $8,037. On a salary the rate is worked backwards instead: $85,000 over 38 hours a week is $43.02 an hour, so the same 152 hours are worth $6,538. This tool sits alongside our other tax calculators for every kind of pay event.

It turns on why the job ended. Resign or retire and your employer withholds at marginal rates using the seven-step averaging method in ATO Schedule 7. Lose the role to a genuine redundancy and a flat 32% applies instead. Neither is your final tax; the return settles it.

The averaging method exists so a single lump does not get taxed as though you earned it every pay period. Step one works out the withholding on your normal gross earnings for a regular pay period. Step two divides the leave payment by the number of normal pay periods in 12 months, either 52 weekly, 26 fortnightly or 12 monthly. Step three ignores the cents. Step four adds that slice to a single pay period of normal earnings, step five works out the withholding on the combined figure, step six takes the step one amount away from it, and step seven multiplies what is left back out over the full 12 months.

Steps 1 and 5 above use our own annualised figure for a fortnightly pay rather than the ATO coefficient table, so a payroll system running the same steps can land a small margin either side. The method is the current one; the older worked examples still sitting on the ATO detail page were built on a tax table two scales out of date, so do not measure yourself against those dollars. For the full walkthrough of both routes, read the full Schedule 7 walkthrough.

Three smaller rules round it out. Where a post-17 August 1993 payment on a normal termination is under $300, the employer withholds the lesser of the tax table amount and 32% of the payment. Where no tax file number has been quoted, 47% comes out for a resident and 45% for a foreign resident. And every amount worked out under Schedule 7 is rounded to the nearest dollar, with 50 cents rounding up. Working holiday makers sit outside all of this: their payments run under Schedule 15 instead.

Read it plainly. At $40,000 the redundancy route holds back $307 more than marginal rates, and that money comes back at assessment rather than being lost. From $45,000 to $135,000 the two routes produce the same figure to the dollar. Above the bracket the concession is real: at $200,000 the flat rate holds back $2,308 less than marginal rates would. One wrinkle sits just under the band. Between $45,000 and $66,667 of total income the low income tax offset tapers away at 1.5 cents in the dollar on top of 30% plus the 2% levy, so a payout landing in that stretch can face an effective rate above 32% even though the bracket reads 30%. The rates themselves are set out on our 2026-27 tax brackets page.

If a redundancy is the reason you are here, the leave is only one line of the payout. The severance itself carries a tax-free limit and the balance is an employment termination payment with its own concessional rates, which the redundancy tax calculator splits apart.

Yes, where you would have received loading on leave taken during employment. Fair Work is blunt about it: loading is paid out on termination even when an award, agreement or contract says it is not. For withholding, the loading is added to the annual leave amount and takes the same rate as the leave.

That last point trips people up. Loading is not withheld as its own line at its own rate. The ATO instruction is to add any leave loading to the annual leave amount first, then run the calculation on the combined figure. So on a resignation the loading is averaged along with the leave, and on a genuine redundancy the whole lot takes the flat 32%.

The 17.5% figure everyone quotes is an award or enterprise agreement entitlement, not a National Employment Standards one, and the base it attaches to varies clause by clause. Some awards pay the higher of the loading or the penalty rates you would have earned. Check your own instrument through Fair Work's Find my award tool, and read the annual leave loading guide for who qualifies and how it is taxed in the ordinary course.

No. The ATO is explicit that employment termination payments do not include lump sums for unused annual leave or long service leave. Unused sick leave and unused rostered days off do sit inside an ETP, which is where the confusion starts. The leave runs under Schedule 7 in its own lane.

The practical consequence matters more than the label. Because the leave is outside the ETP, the ETP cap never touches it and the genuine redundancy tax-free limit never shelters any of it. A leave payout is taxable in full whatever the reason for leaving, and it shows at Lump sum A or Lump sum B on your income statement rather than in the ETP boxes. The ETP side of a termination payout is worked through on the redundancy tax calculator.

No. Unused leave paid on termination, including annual leave and leave loading, is not qualifying earnings for super guarantee, and the ATO says that holds regardless of why the job ended. Payment in lieu of notice sitting in the same final pay is different: that one does carry the 12%.

The contrast with cashing leave out while still employed is sharp. Annual leave taken, annual leave loading in the ordinary course, and leave cashed out during employment are all qualifying earnings, so they all attract the 12% super guarantee. The same $6,538 of leave would have carried $785 of super if it had been cashed out before the job ended, and carries nothing once it is paid on termination. Same money, same person, different super outcome. The super guarantee calculator handles the ordinary case.

Still in the 2026-27 schedule and still 32%. Your employer apportions the payout by days: the payment multiplied by the days accrued before 18 August 1993, divided by the total days of service. It only bites where your service reaches back past that date, so most final pays never touch it.

Take a service period running from 1 January 1990 to 30 June 2027, which is 13,694 days, of which 1,324 fall before 18 August 1993. That is 9.67% of the accrual period. On a $20,000 payout it carves out $1,934 to be withheld at 32%, or $619 of tax, with the rest going through the averaging method. That arithmetic is ours, applied to the ATO formula, not an ATO figure. The advanced panel in the calculator above takes the two day counts and does the same split.

Long service leave in the same final pay follows its own date bands under the same schedule: only 5% of leave accrued before 16 August 1978 is taxed and it goes at marginal rates, leave accrued from 16 August 1978 to 17 August 1993 is withheld at 32%, and anything after that takes the annual leave treatment.

Most awards require final pay within 7 days of your last day. It carries wages owed with penalty rates and allowances, unused annual leave with its loading, and where they apply, payment in lieu of notice, redundancy pay and long service leave. Sick and carer's leave is never paid out.

Payment in lieu of notice is on a tighter clock than everything else: under the National Employment Standards the employer must pay it before or on the termination day. It is also the one line in the final pay that attracts super guarantee, and it sits inside the ETP rather than in the leave lane.

A bonus or commission landing in the same final pay is withheld under Schedule 5 rather than Schedule 7, covered on the Schedule 5 tax table page. Once the final pay is behind you, rebuild the budget on the next salary with the take-home pay calculator.

One line that catches leavers with a study loan: Schedule 7 tells the employer to withhold nothing for study and training support loans, so a payout that lifts your repayment income produces a bill rather than a deduction. On $85,000 with 4 weeks owing, that is about $981 of extra compulsory repayment at assessment on our own 2026-27 calculation. Size it against your own income with the HECS repayment calculator.