How to calculate your annual leave

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• published: 07 Oct 2015
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Hi, welcome to HKT Law’s tutorial session, my name is Melanie Thorley and today I am going to show you how to calculate your annual leave. The tool we are going to use today is found on the Fair Work Ombudsmen website https://calculate.fairwork.gov.au/ and to find it we are going to google FWO PACT. You can use this tool to make a number of calculations but today we are going to use the tool to calculate annual leave. Remember it is important to understand that based on the National Entitlement Scheme leave may be taken at any time agreed between the employer and the employee and the employer must not unreasonably refuse to agree to a leave request from an employee. Additionally all leave entitlements must be paid out on termination of the employment contract. Let’s start now by clicking the leave calculator. The first thing we come to is a page asking whether you are an employee or employer and what the date is today. I am going to leave the employee box highlighted, keep todays date and choose next. Since we are going to calculate our leave based on the national employment standards (the NES) I going to go ahead the choose that, then choose my annual leave balance because that is what we are calculating today. From here we go through a number of questions including if I am an apprentice or trainee. You will see that there are question marks to help you decide what you are. To keep this simple I am going to say no to apprentice and trainee and state that I am a full-time employee who is not a shift worker under the NES. The next question is about when you want to start and finish your calculation and what ordinary hours you have worked. Remember ordinary hours do not include overtime. Have a think about what your base hours are and put that in. You will see that if I put over 38 hours it will ask me to do it again, so I am going to add some hours in that add up to 38 hours over a period between Monday to Friday. If you usually work the weekend then you may be considered a shift worker but go ahead and put those hours in there instead. This next question is asking about any unpaid leave you have taken – remember that if you take unpaid leave it will not count towards your annual leave balance. I am going to leave it all at 0, next it is asking for unpaid parental leave, again I am going to leave that at 0 to make the calculation easy. Now this next page is asking you if you have taken any paid leave between the dates you entered at the beginning, if you have taken any leave here is your chance to put it in. I am going to leave that at 0. It states that I have 155 hours of leave left, you can show the calculation by clicking “why”. I don’t know about you but 155 hours doesn’t mean too much to me. I like to think about my annual leave in terms of days so I am going to get a calculator and calculate that 155/7.5 is I am doing this because 7.5 hours is an average day and it will give a pretty good idea of how many days I can take off and still have annual leave left – it looks like I have about 28 days of annual leave accrued. This means that I can either take those days off or if I am thinking about leaving I am entitled to be paid out for those unused days. I hope that this tutorial has helped you figure out your annual leave balance, I suggest you match this against your payslip and see if there is any difference as to what you think you have left and what your employer thinks you have left. If you have any questions, just let me know or you can find me at www.hktlaw.net.au