Annual Leave Loading Calculator Australia

Annual leave loading is an extra amount paid on top of your ordinary pay while you're taking annual leave — designed to cover the overtime and penalty rates you'd have missed out on by not being at work. It is not part of the National Employment Standards and is not automatically owed to every employee.

Whether you get leave loading — and at what rate — depends entirely on your award, enterprise agreement or employment contract. Some awards provide it, many don't, and award-free employees generally have no entitlement to it unless their contract says so. Check your specific award on Fair Work's annual leave page before assuming this calculator's default rate applies to you.

Where an award or agreement does provide leave loading, 17.5% of base pay is the most common rate — it's the figure set in many modern awards and is this calculator's default. Loading is calculated on your ordinary base pay for the leave period, not on any allowances or overtime.

A number of awards instead use a "higher of" rule: the employee is paid whichever is greater, the standard 17.5% loading, or the weekend and other penalty rates they would have earned had they worked their normal rostered shifts instead of taking leave. Because that comparison depends on award-specific penalty rates this calculator doesn't compute automatically, use the editable loading % field to enter whichever rate your award or payslip shows.

When employment ends, any unused annual leave must be paid out. Under Fair Work Act s.90(2), that payout must be at least what the employee would have been paid had they actually taken the leave while still employed — in plain terms, if loading would have applied to leave taken during your employment, it must also be included in the termination payout.

If your award, agreement or contract never provided for leave loading in the first place, none becomes payable just because employment has ended — the termination payout mirrors whatever would have applied had you taken the leave, nothing more.

This calculator does not compute tax — it only works out base pay, loading and the total dollar amount. When annual leave (with or without loading) is paid out on termination, it's taxed as a lump sum at rates linked to your marginal tax rate, with the specific treatment depending on the circumstances of your termination.

Both examples use the same $1,200/week pay and 4 weeks, so the dollar totals match — the only difference is that the second is a termination payout under Fair Work Act s.90(2) rather than pay for leave actually taken, and is taxed as a lump sum rather than as ordinary pay.

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