Personal Leave

Personal leave, formally called personal/carer's leave, is the National Employment Standards entitlement that lets you stay home when you are genuinely unwell, or when someone in your immediate family or household needs your care, without losing pay. Full-time employees get 10 paid days each year of employment. Part-timers get the same entitlement pro-rated to their ordinary hours. Casuals get none of it, which is part of what their 25% loading is compensating for.

The leave accrues progressively from your first day of work, based on ordinary hours, and any balance you do not use carries over to the next year with no cap. Your employer can ask for reasonable evidence, such as a medical certificate or statutory declaration, even for a single day off. The balance on your payslip labelled "Sick Leave" or "Personal Leave" is this entitlement, quietly accumulating in case of flu, surgery, or a kid with gastro.

Accrual is based on ordinary hours, not calendar days. A full-timer working 38 hours a week accrues 76 hours of personal leave per year, which is the 10 days. That accrual happens progressively, so after six months you hold roughly 38 hours, and your payslip balance should tick upward every pay cycle. A part-timer working 19 hours a week accrues 38 hours per year, which is still 10 of their working days.

When you take a day, payroll converts it at your base rate of pay for ordinary hours, no loading, no penalties. If you were rostered for a 10-hour day, 10 hours come out of the balance. Evidence rules live in the Fair Work Act: the requirement must be reasonable, and a stat dec counts when a doctor's certificate is overkill for a 24-hour bug. Fair Work (fairwork.gov.au) confirms employers cannot demand you disclose your specific diagnosis.

Two adjacent entitlements get confused with this one constantly. Casuals and everyone else get 2 days of unpaid carer's leave per occasion when paid leave runs out or does not exist. Compassionate leave is a separate 2 days per occasion when an immediate family member dies or suffers a life-threatening illness. Neither touches your 10-day balance.

Personal leave is the payslip line that decides whether a bad flu costs you a week's groceries or nothing at all. Because it accrues and never expires, it quietly becomes a disability buffer: a worker who banks 60 unused hours over three years can survive surgery without touching annual leave or going unpaid. Treating it like a use-it-or-lose-it perk is structurally backwards.

A colleague named Brent (yes, that Brent) treated his personal leave balance as a hidden annual leave account he was too honest to use. Seven years, zero sick days taken, balance sitting at roughly 530 hours. Then he resigned for a new job and discovered the hard ending: personal leave is not paid out on termination, ever, unlike annual leave. Seven years of accrued buffer evaporated on his final payslip, worth about $20,000 at his rate, gone because nobody told him the rules.

The highest-leverage thing most Australians can do is actually use the leave when sick and stop donating wages to the business out of martyrdom. Meanwhile, check your accrual each pay cycle with the sick leave accrual calculator and make sure the balance is growing, because a frozen number is the first symptom of a payroll error.