Two schemes, and this calculator covers one
Most employees in the ACT are covered by the general Long Service Leave Act 1976 (ACT), which this calculator applies. But the ACT also runs a separate portable long service leave scheme under the Long Service Leave (Portable Schemes) Act 2009, administered by the ACT Long Service Leave Authority (“ACT Leave”), covering building and construction, the community sector, security, and services industries, with hairdressing, beauty, food and accommodation services due to join the services scheme from 1 January 2027. Workers in a portable scheme carry their accrued service between employers in the same industry and are generally not covered by the general Act at all. If a business sits in one of those industries, check with ACT Leave directly before relying on this page.
A 7-year entitlement, expressed unusually
Under the general Act, an entitlement to take leave arises after 7 years of continuous service. The Act itself doesn’t state a clean weeks figure. It accrues at 1/5 of a month’s leave for each year served, and the ACT Government’s own guidance converts that to 6.0667 weeks at the 7-year mark, which is where this calculator’s 0.8667-weeks-per-year rate comes from. That’s a government-guidance conversion rather than a number printed in the Act’s own text (worth flagging, because it’s a step removed from the primary legislation in a way most of the other seven jurisdictions’ headline rates aren’t).
A pro-rata gate from 5 years
From 5 years, a pro-rata payment is available on termination for a defined set of reasons: illness or incapacity, domestic or other pressing necessity, reaching minimum retiring age, the worker’s death, or an employer ending the job for any reason other than serious and wilful misconduct. A plain resignation with none of those reasons attached gets nothing until the full 7-year mark, at which point, like every other length-of-service test on this site, the reason for leaving stops mattering.
Continuity, and the interruption that doesn't count toward it
Continuous service already includes leave taken, up to 2 weeks a year of illness or injury leave, an employer-caused interruption meant to avoid the Act’s obligations, and apprenticeship time where the same employer re-engages the worker within a year. Beyond that, continuity survives, without resetting the clock, an industrial dispute (if the worker returns per the settlement), a stand-down for slackness of trade with re-employment within 6 months, employer-approved leave, injury-related absence, any other interruption with re-employment within 2 months, Defence Force service, temporary absence outside the ACT, and seasonal-work gaps longer than 2 months. The catch: except for Defence Force service and absence outside the ACT, that interruption period itself doesn’t count toward the years served. It just doesn’t reset them either.
Pay is the employee’s ordinary remuneration excluding overtime and penalty rates; for part-time or casual staff it’s averaged over the preceding 12 months, or over the preceding 5 years if their hours changed from full-time within the last 2 years.
How the portable scheme actually works
The general Act above tracks service against one employer. The portable scheme doesn’t. A worker in building and construction, the community sector, security, or the services industries ACT Leave covers has their service registered and tracked by the authority itself, not by whichever employer they happen to be working for this month. Employers in a covered industry register with ACT Leave and contribute for each worker; the worker’s recorded service carries across every registered employer in that industry, not just one. It’s a genuinely different mechanism from the general Act’s continuous-service test, built for industries where short-term, multi-employer work is the norm rather than the exception.
Why a worker might not realise they’re covered
Most people think of long service leave as a reward for staying with one employer for years. That assumption runs backwards for a portable-scheme worker in the ACT. A labourer who’s worked eight years across four different building sites, for four different employers, none of them individually anywhere near 7 years, can still be entitled under the portable scheme, because it’s the industry service that counts, not any single employer relationship. Plenty of workers in these industries assume they’ve got nothing because no single job lasted long enough. That assumption is worth checking with ACT Leave directly, not just accepted at face value.
Getting the classification wrong
Classification causes more trouble here than arithmetic does. An employer who assumes the general Act covers everyone can under-register staff who actually belong in the portable scheme, missing contribution obligations that build up quietly in the background. The reverse happens too: a business just outside one of the covered industries treats itself as part of the portable scheme out of caution, paying into a system its workers were never going to draw from. Both mistakes trace back to the same root cause, not checking industry coverage properly before setting up payroll, and both are cheaper to fix before years of records need untangling than after.
When someone’s hours changed years ago
The general Act’s pay averaging reaches back further than most, five years if someone’s hours shifted from full-time within the last two. That’s a longer memory than most employers keep rostering records for. A worker who dropped to part-time three years ago, inside a business that’s only kept detailed hours records for the last twelve months, can leave an employer working with incomplete information right when a precise number matters most. Worth keeping roster history further back than payroll software defaults to, for exactly this reason.
Defence Force service is treated differently from every other exception
Most of the interruptions covered above preserve continuity without adding to the years actually served. The clock pauses, then picks up again. Defence Force service and temporary absence outside the ACT are the two exceptions to that pattern under the general Act: the time away counts toward the years served, not just toward not breaking continuity. For a business with a staff member on Reserve service, or working interstate or overseas for a period, that distinction changes when the 7-year mark is actually reached. It’s easy to miss if the interruption gets treated the same as every other approved absence on the list.
Moving between the two systems
A worker who starts in a portable-scheme industry, security work, say, then moves into a role covered by the general Act instead doesn’t carry service between the two systems automatically. They’re genuinely separate: one tracked by ACT Leave against an industry, the other by an individual employer against continuous service with that employer alone. Years built up under the portable scheme don’t count toward the general Act’s 7-year mark, and the reverse is also true. Anyone who’s changed industries partway through their ACT career is worth checking against both systems separately, rather than assuming one continuous total.
Get the classification right at the offer stage
The cleanest time to work out which system applies is before a new starter’s first day, not years into their service. A job offer in building and construction, community services, security or the services industries should flag the portable scheme at the outset, with registration handled as part of onboarding rather than an afterthought. Waiting until someone’s departure to work out which Act ever applied to them is the expensive way to find out the classification was wrong from day one.
In practice
The ACT’s two gates sit closer together than most other jurisdictions’ (5 years for a restricted-reason pro-rata payment, 7 years for any reason at all), so the window where the reason for leaving actually decides the outcome is narrower here than in NSW or Queensland, where that gap runs three to five years rather than two. A worker who resigns at 6 years without a qualifying reason still gets nothing, but the wait to reach certainty is shorter. The bigger practical risk in the ACT isn’t the gap itself. It’s checking, before running any of these numbers, whether the industry is building and construction, community sector, security, or services, in which case the portable scheme applies instead and this Act, and this calculator, don’t.
Two schemes, a government-derived conversion, and an averaging rule that reaches back years. This is exactly the kind of detail that’s easy to get wrong tracking leave in a spreadsheet. Delta Infotech’s business systems work keeps it straight, priced on the pricing page.