Why there's no single national calculator
Long service leave is one of the few employment entitlements the National Employment Standards doesn’t cover. Fair Work’s own long service leave overview is explicit about this: it’s state and territory law, and each jurisdiction has run its own Act since well before national workplace relations existed. That’s why this calculator is eight calculators wearing one front door rather than a single tool with a dropdown. The qualifying period, the accrual rate, what counts as continuous service and when a pro-rata payment becomes payable on resignation are all genuinely different laws, not the same rule with different labels.
Victoria’s Long Service Leave Act 2018 (Vic) is a good example of how far that difference goes: it grants an entitlement after 7 years and pays it out on termination for any reason at all, with no special category for redundancy or illness. New South Wales’ Long Service Leave Act 1955 (NSW), by contrast, gates an early pro-rata payment behind specific reasons (illness, incapacity, domestic or other pressing necessity, or an employer-initiated termination) until 10 years, when it opens up to any reason. Queensland doesn’t even have a standalone Act: the entitlement sits inside the Industrial Relations Act 2016 (Qld) ch 2 pt 3 div 9. Same broad idea (reward long tenure with paid leave), four different sets of rules just among these three.
The three things worth knowing before picking a state
Three questions decide almost everything a business or employee needs to know, and every state answers them differently. First: how long before any entitlement exists at all, as short as 7 years in Victoria and the ACT, as long as 10 years everywhere else. Second: is there an earlier partial payment available on termination before that full mark, and if so, does it require a specific reason (illness, redundancy, domestic necessity) or does it cover a plain resignation too. Western Australia and South Australia are clearly more generous here than New South Wales or Queensland. Third: how is the accrual actually calculated once those gates are cleared. Most states use a fixed rate close to 8⅔ weeks per 10 years, but South Australia and the Northern Territory run a materially higher 1.3 weeks per year, and some states calculate on a smooth continuous basis while others count only whole completed years. Get any one of those three wrong and the estimate is wrong, which is exactly why this calculator asks which state applies before it does any arithmetic at all.
Continuous service is the other recurring theme across all eight Acts, and it’s worth understanding once rather than state by state: every jurisdiction treats a business sale, transfer or restructure as preserving an employee’s accrued service with the new owner, rather than resetting the clock. The exact conditions differ, but the principle doesn’t. Most also protect an employee against an employer who tries to interrupt or end employment specifically to dodge a long service leave obligation. Where the states genuinely diverge is everything else: what counts as approved leave, how long a gap can run before it breaks continuity, and whether casual or seasonal work needs its own separate test, which is exactly the detail each state page below works through on its own terms.
What the NES actually says, and why that surprises people
The National Employment Standards set the national floor for things like annual leave, personal leave and notice of termination, the same eleven minimum entitlements for every national system employee regardless of which state they’re in. Long service leave is the deliberate exception, and it catches people out precisely because everything else in the NES works the other way. Rather than setting its own national rule, the Fair Work Act preserves whatever state or territory entitlement already existed, and Fair Work’s own long service leave fact sheet points employers and employees straight back to their state or territory law rather than to the Fair Work Act itself. That’s the whole reason this page exists as a router rather than a single calculator: there was never a national scheme to build one against.
Moving interstate, or working across more than one
Which Act actually applies generally comes down to where the employment is based, usually the state the person habitually works in, not where the employer’s head office happens to sit and not simply where the worker happens to live. Most trades never have to think about this because the job, the business and the worker are all in the same state. It stops being simple the moment a Victorian-registered business sends someone to work an extended stint in New South Wales, or an employee relocates partway through a long tenure. Which state’s clock has been running, and whether it kept running across the move, is exactly the kind of question that deserves a call to the relevant state authority rather than a guess, because the answer changes the accrual rate, the qualifying period and sometimes whether anything’s accrued at all.
Portable schemes: a few industries where the clock follows the worker
Ordinary long service leave resets with every new employer. Work for four different builders over twelve years and, in most trades, none of that service adds up toward a single entitlement anywhere. A handful of industries with genuinely high job-hopping between employers run it differently. Victoria’s construction industry has its own portable long service scheme, administered by LeavePlus (formerly CoINVEST), where registered workers keep accruing service as they move between employers within the industry rather than starting again at zero each time, a structure confirmed in the State Revenue Office’s own ruling on contributions to the fund. Community services and contract cleaning have similar portable arrangements in some states. If a trade sits inside one of these industries, the ordinary employer-by-employer rules on the state pages below aren’t the whole picture, and it’s worth checking whether the industry scheme applies before assuming service reset with the last change of employer.
A sale of the business doesn’t reset the clock, mostly
Long service leave can’t usually be cashed out just because a business changes hands. Fair Work’s guidance on employee entitlements on a transfer of business is clear that service with the old employer generally counts as service with the new one for long service leave purposes. Where it gets less tidy is everything else the NES covers on a transfer. If the new employer isn’t an associated entity of the old one, it can, in some circumstances, choose not to recognise the transferring employee’s prior service for annual leave or redundancy pay, even while the state long service leave clock keeps running underneath it. Worth knowing before assuming every entitlement carries across a sale in exactly the same way.
What every state page covers
Each state page below runs the same estimate (years of service, accrual rate and the dollar value of the entitlement) against that state’s own Act, with its qualifying period, its pro-rata thresholds and how it defines continuous service. Every figure is checked against the primary legislation (or, where a state’s legislation register blocked automated verification, the state regulator’s own guidance) and dated, not carried over from memory or copied from another state’s page.
None of this is a substitute for checking the actual Act, an award, or the relevant state authority once real money and a real employment relationship are involved, see the disclaimer below. What it is useful for is knowing roughly where you stand before that conversation, and knowing which Act actually applies before assuming a rule from one state carries over to another.
If long service leave keeps surfacing as a surprise in the books, that’s usually a sign the underlying admin (timesheets, leave balances, invoicing) is scattered across tools that don’t talk to each other. Delta Infotech builds the business systems that put it in one place, and prices that work openly on the pricing page.