A higher rate than the "2 months" states
South Australia’s Long Service Leave Act 1987 (SA) accrues at 1.3 weeks for every year of continuous service, 13 weeks on completing 10 years, which is a noticeably higher rate than the 8⅔-weeks-per-10-years figure NSW, Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania all share. Only the Northern Territory matches it. For a trade or local business with long-tenured staff, that difference compounds: a decade of service in SA is worth roughly 50% more leave than the same decade under the “2 months” states.
A 7-year gate, open to almost any reason
A pro-rata payment becomes available at 7 years, and, like Western Australia’s Act, SA’s gate is broad rather than restrictive. It applies to resignation, employer-initiated termination and genuine redundancy alike, with no requirement to show illness, incapacity or any other special reason. Only two things forfeit it: the worker being terminated for serious and wilful misconduct (defined as deliberate conduct seriously endangering health and safety, or seriously damaging the employer’s reputation or viability. Theft, fraud and assault are the Act’s own examples), or the worker unlawfully ending their own employment, such as resigning without giving the required notice. A worker who reaches the full 10-year entitlement keeps it even if a misconduct dismissal follows later. Death after 7 years entitles the estate to the same pro-rata payment; death before that entitles it to nothing.
Continuous service, and related employers
Service counts across related employers, not just the one entity. A business sale, an acquisition, or a transfer between corporations under the Corporations Act doesn’t reset continuity if the worker’s employment continues with the new owner, who inherits the liability and the records. Paid leave under the contract, sick leave (paid or unpaid, including for casuals), annual leave, long service leave itself, and non-permanent Armed Forces service all count toward service without breaking it. Some absences preserve continuity but don’t themselves count toward the years served, pre-arranged unpaid leave, a stand-down for slackness of trade with re-employment, and up to 12 months between finishing an apprenticeship and being re-engaged by the same employer (the apprenticeship period itself does count). For casual and seasonal work, whether a series of separate engagements adds up to continuous service turns on how regular they were and why the gaps happened. A cafe worker whose employer shuts for the same six weeks every summer doesn’t lose continuity over that seasonal closure.
How the pay rate is calculated
Ordinary weekly pay excludes overtime, shift premiums and penalty rates throughout. A full-time worker with at least 3 years continuously full-time is simple: current base rate. Anyone with varied or part-time hours is averaged over the preceding 156 weeks (3 years) of actual hours worked; commission or piece-rate workers are averaged over the preceding 12 months. Most allowances (uniform, locality, vehicle) are excluded on the reasoning that they compensate for costs not incurred while on leave. A pay rise during a period of leave lifts the rate for the remaining weeks taken as leave, but a lump-sum payout on termination locks in at the rate immediately before that termination.
Cashing out, or just taking the leave
Most SA employers only ever deal with long service leave two ways: the worker takes it as a block of leave, timing agreed like any other extended absence, or it’s paid out as a lump sum once employment ends and the relevant threshold has already been cleared. Whether anything else is available, cashing out a portion while someone stays employed, say, isn’t something to assume either way. That’s a question for SafeWork SA, not a spreadsheet, and worth asking before offering it as an option to a long-tenured employee.
Parental leave and other unpaid absences
Paid leave rarely causes an argument here. Annual leave, sick leave, long service leave itself, all count without much fuss. Unpaid leave sits in a greyer spot. A period of employer-approved unpaid leave, including parental leave, tends to preserve continuity even where it doesn’t itself add to the years served. That distinction, continuity kept intact versus actual service accruing, matters more than it sounds. It’s exactly the kind of detail that gets muddled when someone’s been off for the better part of a year. Confirm the specific treatment with SafeWork SA before finalising a departing employee’s number, especially where extended unpaid leave was involved.
Redundancy pay and long service leave are separate entitlements
SA’s broad gate from 7 years already covers genuine redundancy as a qualifying reason, so a long-tenured worker made redundant doesn’t need to reach the full 10 years to see a payout. That entitlement sits alongside redundancy pay under the Fair Work Act’s National Employment Standards, not instead of it. A business winding down a role after 8 years of service can be looking at both payments landing on the same final payslip. Budgeting for a redundancy without accounting for the long service leave sitting next to it is an easy number to miss.
The mistake employers make most often
The completed-year rule covered above catches more SA employers than anything else in this Act. Someone leaves the business nine years and ten months in, and it’s tempting to round up, call it near enough to ten, and pay it that way. That’s backwards. Nothing beyond the last full completed year counts toward the 1.3 weeks, so the honest number is smaller than instinct suggests, not larger. Rounding generously still costs money it didn’t need to spend. Rounding the other way, assuming nothing accrues until a milestone is fully reached, shortchanges a worker who cleared the 7-year gate long ago. Counting completed years properly, and checking with SafeWork SA when a figure looks borderline, avoids both.
Apprenticeships count toward the total
A trade business that takes on an apprentice, then re-engages them as a qualified tradesperson once they’re ticketed, doesn’t start the long service leave clock over at the qualification date. The apprenticeship time itself counts as service, and the gap between finishing it and being taken back on, provided it’s inside the window the Act allows, doesn’t break continuity either. For a business that’s grown its own tradespeople rather than hiring qualified staff externally, the 10-year mark can arrive sooner than expected, measured from the apprenticeship’s start, not from when the apprentice became a qualified employee on full pay.
What a tradie’s allowances mean for the final number
Uniform, locality and vehicle allowances are excluded from the pay-rate calculation on the reasoning that they cover actual costs, not extra income. For a trade business paying a ute allowance, a tool allowance, or travel loading on top of base pay, that matters at payout time. The long service leave figure is built from the base rate, not the total weekly pay packet a long-serving tradesperson might be used to seeing land in their account. Workers sometimes expect the payout to match their usual take-home pay. Explaining the difference before the final number is due avoids a conversation nobody enjoys having after the fact.
In practice
Because SA’s accrual is calculated per completed year rather than a smooth proportion of the exact period served, a worker who resigns at 8 years and 11 months is treated the same as one who resigns at exactly 8 years. The extra 11 months don’t yet add another 1.3-week slice until the ninth year is actually completed. That’s a genuine difference from a state like Victoria, which accrues continuously to the day. Combined with the wide 7-year gate (covering resignation as readily as redundancy), SA ends up paying out on more terminations than most other states, but the exact dollar figure at any given date depends on whether a full year has actually ticked over, not just how close the anniversary is. Worth checking the completed-years count precisely rather than rounding up.
A rate this much higher than the eastern-state norm is worth building into wage planning properly rather than discovering at payout time. Delta Infotech’s business systems work keeps that kind of entitlement tracked, priced openly on the pricing page.