How much annual leave do you actually accrue in Australia?
The National Employment Standards give four weeks of annual leave a year. What that converts to in days depends entirely on how your hours are arranged, which is where most payroll disagreements start.
The short answer
Four weeks of your ordinary hours a year, accruing progressively rather than arriving on an anniversary. On a 38-hour week that is 152 hours a year, or 2.923 hours for every week worked. Part-time employees accrue at the same rate proportional to their ordinary hours.
Why the entitlement is measured in hours
The National Employment Standards express annual leave as four weeks of ordinary hours, not as a number of days. That distinction is invisible for anyone on a standard five-day pattern and matters enormously for everyone else.
On 38 hours across five days, a working day is 7.6 hours and four weeks is twenty of them — 152 hours. On four ten-hour days, four weeks is still 152 hours but only fifteen and a bit days, because each day off costs more hours.
So an employer tracking leave in days and an employee working a compressed week will reach different numbers from the same entitlement. The hours figure is the one the standard actually sets.
Accrual is progressive, not annual
Leave builds up as you work rather than appearing in a block on your anniversary. Divide the annual entitlement by 52 and you have the weekly accrual rate: 152 ÷ 52 = 2.923 hours a week on a full-time pattern.
That is why a balance exists at all before twelve months of service are complete, and why leave taken in the first year is normally taken in advance rather than from an accrued balance.
Unpaid leave is the exception — periods of unpaid leave generally do not accrue annual leave, which is what produces the small discrepancies people notice after extended time off.
Long service leave is a separate entitlement again, set by state and territory legislation rather than the NES, and it accrues on its own timetable.
Part-time is proportional, casual is nothing
A part-time employee accrues at exactly the same rate as a full-time one, scaled to their ordinary hours. Someone on 19 hours a week accrues 1.462 hours weekly — precisely half the full-time rate, not a reduced entitlement of a different kind.
Casual employees accrue no paid annual leave at all. The casual loading on the hourly rate is what compensates for that, alongside the absence of paid personal leave, notice and redundancy pay. It is the single most common misunderstanding in this area, and it cuts both ways: casuals sometimes expect leave they have no entitlement to, and sometimes forgo loading they should be receiving.
Leave loading is not part of the NES
The 17.5 per cent figure everyone knows comes from awards and enterprise agreements, not from the National Employment Standards. Plenty of employees have no loading provision at all.
Where it applies it is paid on top of base pay when leave is taken. Whether it is also payable on termination differs between instruments, which is worth checking before assuming a final payment is wrong.
If you are unsure which award covers you, the Fair Work Ombudsman publishes a tool for finding it — award coverage is determined by the work and the industry, not chosen by either party.
Cashing out has real conditions
Annual leave can be cashed out, but only where an award or registered agreement permits it, only by separate written agreement each time, only if at least four weeks remain untaken afterwards, and only if the employee receives at least what they would have been paid had they taken the leave.
An employer cannot require it, and a blanket standing agreement to cash out future leave is not valid. Those conditions exist because the entitlement is meant to be rest, not a savings account.
Excessive accrued leave is handled differently — many awards let an employer direct an employee to take leave once a balance passes a threshold, typically eight weeks.
Where these numbers come from
- Fair Work Ombudsman — annual leave National Employment Standards entitlement and accrual
- Fair Work Ombudsman — cashing out annual leave Conditions on cash-out agreements
Method last reviewed 2026-10-28 This guide is re-checked against the sources above at least once a year, and again whenever a rule it explains changes. Out of date? Tell us and we will fix it.