Final Pay Calculator

Fair Work sets out two parts every final pay carries:

• wages owing for hours worked, including penalty rates and allowances
• any unused annual leave, including annual leave loading if it would have been paid when you took leave during employment.

Where they apply, the final pay can also include:

• payment in lieu of notice
• redundancy pay
• accrued or pro rata long service leave.

The leave payout has to equal what you would have been paid had you taken the leave while employed. And the loading rule has teeth: Fair Work says annual leave loading is paid out on termination even when an award, enterprise agreement or contract says it is not. To work out the leave dollar figure itself, the annual leave payout calculator converts hours owing to dollars.

Marginal rates on leave use a seven-step method. Your employer works out the tax on your normal pay, spreads the leave across a year of pays (52 weekly, 26 fortnightly or 12 monthly), drops the cents, adds one slice to your normal pay, works out the tax on that, takes the difference and multiplies it back up. The effect is to tax the lump sum at roughly the marginal rate you would have paid on it had it come in over a year, instead of the rate a single inflated pay would trigger. Our guide to tax on annual leave payouts walks through it.

Under $300: on a normal termination, if the post-1993 leave comes to less than $300, the employer withholds the lesser of the marginal-rate amount and 32%.

Payment in lieu of notice is an ETP. For 2026-27 the rate is 32% under preservation age (17% at 60 or over) up to the smaller of the $270,000 ETP cap and the $180,000 whole-of-income cap, and 47% above it. The whole-of-income cap shrinks by every other taxable dollar you are paid in the year, including your wages and the leave in the same final pay. Every rate includes the 2% Medicare levy. The ETP calculator works through the caps in detail. On a genuine redundancy, pay in lieu joins the redundancy payment instead: the ATO ruling TR 2009/2 (paragraph 64) treats it as part of the genuine redundancy payment where it would not be paid on a voluntary resignation, so it uses the tax-free limit first. The calculator does this when you pick redundancy.

Study loan repayments are not withheld from unused leave payments. The amounts above are withholding, not your final tax: your 2026-27 return settles the difference.

The flat rate is not automatically the better deal. On $800 and $1,500 a week, the marginal method withholds less than 32%. On $3,000 a week it withholds more, because the slice added to each pay lands in a higher band. Neither choice is yours to make: the reason for the termination sets the method. A redundancy only qualifies if it is genuine, meaning the employer decided the job no longer exists.

Most awards: within 7 days after your last day of employment. The rule comes from your award or enterprise agreement, and your employer has to follow it. Where the NES requires an entitlement to be paid sooner than the award does, the NES wins.

• Payment in lieu of notice: on or before the day of termination. This is an NES requirement.
• No award or agreement rule: the Fair Work Act applies, which requires pay at least monthly.
• Best practice: Fair Work suggests paying as soon as possible, for example in the next pay cycle, and without unreasonable delay.

Fair Work's final pay page lets you filter by industry to see the rule in your award, including how untaken rostered days off, time off in lieu of overtime and annual leave taken in advance are handled.

Sick and carer's leave is not paid out when employment ends. A balance of several weeks simply lapses, unlike annual leave. If an employer pays unused sick leave anyway, under a contract or as a goodwill gesture, the ATO classes the payment as an employment termination payment and it is taxed like pay in lieu of notice, not under the leave schedule.

Short notice can also cost you. Most awards let an employer withhold up to one week's wages if you are 18 or over and resign without the notice the award requires. The notice period calculator covers that rule and the NES notice table.

Redundancy pay is worked out at your base rate for ordinary hours, with no bonuses, loadings, allowances, overtime or penalty rates. Unused annual leave and long service leave are paid out on top. You still get notice, or pay in lieu of it, as well.

The drop to 12 weeks at 10 years is in the Act. Some awards replace the NES scale with their own (Black Coal, Building and Construction, Joinery, Manufacturing, Plumbing and Timber among them), so check with Fair Work's Notice and Redundancy Calculator.

The tax-free column is the ATO genuine redundancy limit for 2026-27: $13,598 plus $6,801 per complete year of service. Only a genuine redundancy gets it. The redundancy payout calculator splits a package into the tax-free and ETP parts in full.

A full-time employee on $1,500 a week resigns. The final pay covers one week of wages, plus 3 weeks of unused annual leave and a 17.5% loading. Resident, tax-free threshold claimed, paid weekly.

Had the same employee been made genuinely redundant, the leave and loading would carry a flat 32%: $1,692 instead of $1,664.

Schedule 7 publishes this one, and the calculator reproduces every figure. Norman retires on 31 December 2026 on $1,155 a week, TFN quoted and tax-free threshold claimed. His long service leave accrued across all three periods.

Check the step 1 figure against the weekly tax table: $1,155 a week on scale 2 is $188, the same Schedule 1 amount our weekly tax table prints.