Accrued Sick Days.

How to work out the sick days you have accrued

Your bank is a running total across the whole job, not a yearly allowance. Section 96(2) of the Fair Work Act 2009 says paid sick and carer’s leave accrues progressively according to your ordinary hours and accumulates from year to year. To count it yourself:

1. Count the weeks from your start date (or permanent start date) to today.
2. Multiply by your ordinary weekly hours and divide by 26.
3. Take off 1/26 of the hours in any unpaid leave, which is not service.
4. Take off every hour of sick and carer’s leave you have used.
5. Divide what is left by your shift length to see it as days.

Accrual per week is simply your weekly hours divided by 26: 1.46 hours on a 38-hour week. A rate of about 7.3 hours a week, which some online tools show, is five times too high. It comes from multiplying weekly hours, rather than daily hours, by 10.

Why your “days” may not be 10 a year

A sick “day” under the National Employment Standards is a slice of your hours, not one of your shifts. The Fair Work Ombudsman’s own example compares two workers on 36 hours a week. Len works a 36-hour week. Joss works the same 36 hours as three 12-hour shifts. Both accrue 72 hours a year (1/26 of 1,872 hours), and for Joss that is the equivalent of 6 days of 12 hours.

That is why one balance can be described three ways: in your own shifts, in standard 7.6-hour days, and in the NES notional day, which is one tenth of your ordinary hours over two weeks. The table shows the same 426 days of service under four patterns, with no leave taken.

1/26 of ordinary hours, Fair Work Act 2009 s 96(2). Notional day = ordinary hours over two weeks / 10. Service from 5 August 2025 to 5 October 2026.

Read across a row and the pattern becomes clear. The part-timer on three 7.6-hour days has 53.37 hours, which is 7.02 of her shifts, yet 11.70 notional days, exactly the same notional count as the full-timer. Spread the same 22.8 hours over four days and the identical bank covers 9.36 shorter shifts. The 12-hour shift worker has 84.26 hours, only 7.02 shifts. The sick leave calculator explains the High Court decision that settled this.

What pauses your sick leave bank, and what does not

Accrual follows service. Paid time away keeps the bank growing; most unpaid time stops it.

Fair Work Ombudsman, Paid sick and carer’s leave and Accruing and taking other leave during parental leave; Fair Work Library K600635; Fair Work Act 2009 s 22(2)(b).

A paused period does not break your continuous service under section 22(3). It just does not count towards it, so the bank picks up where it stopped when you return. The cost is easy to measure: each week of unpaid leave removes 1/26 of a week’s hours. In the worked example above, two weeks of leave without pay cost 2.92 hours. Falling sick during annual leave is its own question, covered in Sick during annual leave.

Your bank never resets

There is no use-it-or-lose-it rule. The Act says the leave accumulates from year to year, and the Fair Work Ombudsman puts it plainly: the balance at the end of each year carries over to the next. The NES sets no cap on how much you can bank, and you can take as much paid sick or carer’s leave as you have accumulated.

Awards and enterprise agreements can give you more than 10 days a year, but never less than the NES minimum. If yours does, set the days per year in the calculator and it scales the accrual. A payslip that drops back to zero, or to 10 days, on your work anniversary is a payroll error worth raising.

What happens to accrued sick days when your job changes

Unlike annual leave, a sick leave bank is never cashed out. It either travels with your service or it lapses.

The transfer rules are stronger for sick leave than for other entitlements. On a transfer to a new employer that is not associated with the old one, the new employer may decline to recognise your earlier service for annual leave and redundancy pay. It has no such option for sick and carer’s leave. If an employer pays out unused sick leave voluntarily when you leave, the ATO taxes it as an employment termination payment, and the ETP tax calculator works out that tax. The final pay calculator covers what is owed on your last day.

What a big balance buys you

The bank is income protection for illness. Sick and carer’s leave is paid at your base rate for your ordinary hours, without loadings (section 99). More importantly, section 352 stops an employer dismissing you because you are temporarily absent through a prescribed illness or injury. The Fair Work Ombudsman explains that an employee who uses paid sick leave the whole time cannot be dismissed because of the absence, regardless of how long they are away.

Once paid leave is exhausted, the protection still covers an absence of less than 3 consecutive months, or less than 3 months in total over the last 12 months. So the practical measure of your bank is how many weeks of full pay it covers: balance divided by weekly ordinary hours. In the worked example, 66.15 hours / 38 = 1.74 weeks of fully paid absence. The calculator shows the same figure as weeks off on full pay.

Checking your payslip balance

Payroll systems track the bank in hours, so compare hours with hours. If your figure and the payslip disagree, these are the usual causes:

• Accruing by shifts instead of hours. A 12-hour shift worker credited with 10 “days” a year, or debited 7.6 hours for a 12-hour sick day, has a balance that is wrong in one direction or the other.
• Accruing through unpaid leave. Weeks of unpaid parental leave or leave without pay should not add to the bank.
• Not accruing through paid leave. Annual leave, long service leave, jury duty and half-pay leave should all add to it.
• Resetting each year. The balance accumulates with no expiry.
• Counting casual time. Only service as a permanent employee accrues.

If your hours vary and you are award-free, the Fair Work Library method is to total the hours you worked over the last 4 weeks and divide by 4 to get your ordinary weekly hours. Awards can set their own method. To compare what counts as sick leave and what counts as carer’s leave, see Personal leave vs sick leave, and for certificates see Sick leave evidence.

Related calculators and guides

• Sick leave calculator for your yearly entitlement and how the 10 days are counted.
• Sick during annual leave, when you fall ill on a holiday.
• Carer’s leave, which draws on the same bank.
• Final pay calculator for what is paid when a job ends.
• ETP tax calculator if unused sick leave is paid out voluntarily.