How to use a leave payout calculator for final pay
When you resign, are fired, or are made redundant in Australia, your employer is legally required to pay you for any accrued but unused leave. This is known as your final pay or termination pay.
To accurately use our leave payout calculator, you need to check your final payslip to find your exact unused leave balances in hours. You then multiply these hours by your base hourly pay rate. The result is the gross dollar value that your employer must include in your final settlement.
Don't know how many hours you have accrued? Use our annual leave calculator to figure out your exact hours based on your weekly schedule.
Does sick leave get paid out?
This is a very common question. The simple answer is no. Under the National Employment Standards (NES), unused personal/carer's leave is wiped clean on your termination date. If you have 100 hours of sick leave remaining, you will not receive a single dollar for it. For more information on how medical leave works, visit our sick leave calculator page.
Calculating annual leave payout vs. LSL
Your annual leave payout is unconditional. If you have 1 hour of annual leave left, it must be paid out to you.
Long Service Leave (LSL), on the other hand, is highly conditional. If you have not crossed the statutory threshold (for example, the 7-year mark in Victoria), your accrued LSL means nothing and will not be paid out. If you are unsure whether you qualify, check our LSL Calculator VIC before entering hours into the payout tool above.
Is my leave payout taxed?
Yes. The large number you see in the calculator above is your Gross Payout (before tax). The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) requires employers to withhold tax from leave payouts. Because it is usually processed as a "lump sum payment", it may be taxed differently than your standard weekly wages depending on whether you simply resigned or were made genuinely redundant. You should expect your final cash-in-bank (Net Pay) to be lower than the gross figure shown.