Calculate your leave loading

Leave loading is a percentage on top of ordinary pay while an employee is on annual leave, most commonly 17.5 percent under Australian awards. The arithmetic is simple: weekly ordinary pay, multiplied by the weeks of leave, multiplied by the loading rate. Four weeks of leave on ordinary pay of $1,500 a week carries loading of $1,500 x 4 x 0.175, which is $1,050. The background is in our glossary entry on leave loading.

It depends on the industrial instrument, not the state. Many Australian awards and enterprise agreements provide leave loading, some contracts mirror it, and award-free employees only receive it if their contract says so. Searches for leave loading in NSW or Queensland find the same answer: the award or agreement decides, and the common rate is the same nationally.

Generally yes. Where an award or agreement provides leave loading, accrued annual leave paid out at termination is usually paid with the loading included, the same as if the leave had been taken. It also has to be included when leave is cashed out under the rules described in our entry on cashing out annual leave.

It dates from an era when overtime made up a large share of take-home pay, and a week of leave at base rate meant a pay cut. The loading topped a holiday week up toward a working week. Overtime patterns have changed; the entitlement, where an instrument provides it, has not. Clean leave records make it a calculation instead of an argument, which is the same reason leave accrual belongs in a system rather than a spreadsheet. More free resources live in the HybridHero Hub.