Casuals do not get paid sick leave or annual leave. They get a 25% loading on the hourly rate instead, which is the trade. Permanent full time and part time employees accrue four weeks of annual leave and ten days of personal leave a year.
What do permanent employees accrue?
Under the National Employment Standards, full time employees accrue four weeks of paid annual leave and ten days of paid personal and carer's leave each year, part timers pro rata. Compassionate leave is two days per occasion, and public holidays are paid at base rate if you do not work and at penalty rates if you do.
Accrued annual leave that has not been taken is paid out in the final pay when the job ends. Working holiday makers most often leave that behind, because they resign expecting only hours worked and never check the last payslip against what had accrued.
What do casuals get instead?
The 25% loading, applied to the award rate for every hour worked, in exchange for no paid leave and no notice of termination. From 1 July 2026 the casual minimum is $33.05 an hour, being the $26.44 national minimum with the loading applied, and most awards sit above that.
Calling in sick as a casual means an unpaid shift, with no accrual building quietly to be paid out later. The compensation was already paid hour by hour, which is why a casual payslip showing the bare base rate with no loading is an underpayment, not a rounding issue.
How do you tell which one you actually are?
By how the work runs, not by the word on the contract. A genuinely casual arrangement has no guaranteed hours and a roster that varies, and either side can decline. A fixed weekly pattern of the same shifts over months, expected by both sides to continue, looks like part time employment whatever the paperwork says.
It is worth money in both directions. Someone labelled casual but working a fixed permanent pattern may be owed accrued leave. Someone labelled permanent but paid the casual loaded rate is a different problem again. Our guide to full time, part time and casual sets out how the categories are tested.
What happens to leave when you quit?
Unused annual leave is paid out in full at your ordinary rate, plus any leave loading the award provides. Personal and sick leave is not paid out, and neither is anything a casual might feel they accrued.
For a working holiday maker in a permanent role for six months that payout can be meaningful, and it is a common exit underpayment because nobody checks. Read the final payslip line by line against your start date rather than trusting the total.
How is a leave payout taxed?
As ordinary income in the year it is received, at the working holiday maker rate. A lump sum in a final pay can look heavily withheld, because payroll systems sometimes apply a rate calculated as though that pay period repeated all year.
That over withholding comes back at assessment, which is a good reason not to close the Australian bank account when the job ends. Our guide to tax on your final pay and leaving Australia covers what else lands in that last payslip.
Does long service leave ever apply?
Almost never. It generally requires seven to ten years with one employer depending on the state, well beyond what a 417 or 462 visa allows.
The exception is people who return to Australia repeatedly on other visas and stay with the same employer, where prior continuous service can count. The entitlement is then paid out on departure and taxed as income.
Did anything accrue for you at all?
Your entitlements are decided by your employment category and by your award, both facts you can check today.
- Whether you are genuinely casual or working a permanent pattern under a casual label.
- Whether the 25% loading actually appears on your payslip, which is the first thing to check.
- Which award covers you, since annual leave loading and public holiday treatment vary by award.
- How long you were with a single employer, which decides whether meaningful annual leave accrued.
- Whether accrued leave was paid out in your final pay, and at the right rate.
- Whether you are engaged under an ABN, in which case none of these entitlements exist at all.
Leave payouts are taxed with the rest of your wages, and you can estimate your tax refund from your year to date figures.