Hourly Leave Accrual Calculator
The Employment Leave Bill would change the unit leave is measured in, and that single change is what makes the rest of it work. Under the Holidays Act 2003 annual leave is four weeks, and a week is whatever a week means for you, which is exactly the ambiguity that has generated two decades of payroll remediation. Under the Bill leave accrues in hours against your standard hours, from your first day: 0.0769 hours of annual leave and 0.0385 hours of sick leave for every standard hour you work. Those rates are chosen so a full-time year lands on the familiar figures, four weeks of annual leave and ten days of sick leave, but for anyone who is not full-time and regular they produce a different and more proportional answer. This calculator shows the hours, converts them into days at your own day length, and applies the 160 hour ceiling on sick leave.
How the balances build
The same rates across common work patterns
A full year at each pattern. Your pattern is highlighted. Notice that the day count barely moves while the hours halve, which is the whole point of an hourly system.
| Pattern | Standard hours a year | Annual leave | Sick leave | Sick leave in days |
|---|
Why hours rather than weeks
The Holidays Act 2003 grants four weeks of annual leave, and the entire difficulty of the last twenty years flows from the fact that nobody could reliably say what a week was worth for an employee whose hours varied. Payroll systems had to reconstruct it, they reconstructed it differently from one another, and the result was hundreds of millions of dollars of remediation across the public and private sectors. Accruing in hours removes the question. An hour worked produces a fixed fraction of an hour of leave, the balance is a number of hours, and taking leave subtracts hours. There is nothing left to interpret, which is why the reform is framed as fixing a payroll problem rather than as a change to how generous the system is.
The rates are calibrated to the familiar answers
The two accrual rates look arbitrary and are not. A full-time year at 40 hours a week is 2,080 standard hours. At 0.0769 that produces 160 hours of annual leave, which is exactly four weeks of 40 hours. At 0.0385 it produces 80 hours of sick leave, which is exactly ten days of eight hours. The 160 hour cap on sick leave is twenty such days, matching the current twenty day maximum accrual. So for the regular full-time employee the new system is designed to land precisely where the old one did, and it largely does.
Part-timers are the group that changes
Sick leave is where the proposal has a real distributional effect. Under the Holidays Act every eligible employee gets ten days of sick leave a year regardless of hours, so someone working two days a week gets the same ten days as someone working five, and those days are worth much less to the employer. Under hourly accrual the part-timer accrues proportionally: half the standard hours means half the sick leave hours. In days at their own shorter day length the number looks similar, but the underlying entitlement has moved from equal-days to proportional-hours. Whether that is fairer depends on whether you think sick leave compensates lost income or covers illness, and reasonable people differ.
Worked example
An employee works 40 standard hours a week over 52 weeks, which is 2,080 standard hours. Annual leave accrues at 0.0769 hours per standard hour, giving 160.0 hours. Sick leave accrues at 0.0385, giving 80.1 hours, comfortably under the 160 hour cap.
They usually work 5 days a week, so their average day is 8.0 hours. That makes the annual leave balance 20.0 days and the sick leave balance 10.0 days, which is the four weeks and ten days the current system already delivers to a regular full-time employee.
How this is calculated
Standard hours worked is your standard hours a week multiplied by the weeks worked. Annual leave accrued is that figure multiplied by 0.0769. Sick leave accrued is the same figure multiplied by 0.0385, added to any balance carried in, then capped at 160 hours, since accrual pauses at the cap rather than continuing. Leave taken is subtracted in hours from each balance and balances are floored at zero. Your average day is standard hours a week divided by the days you usually work, and the day equivalents are each balance divided by that day length.
Official sources
- Holidays Act reform: Employment Leave Bill, MBIE
- Employment Leave Bill 2026, Employment New Zealand
- Employment Leave Bill, legislation.govt.nz
- Leave and holidays, Employment New Zealand, for the law that applies now
Related NZ calculators
- Annual Leave Calculator for your entitlement under the current Holidays Act
- Holiday Pay Calculator for the OWP and AWE comparison that applies today
- Sick Leave Calculator for the current ten day entitlement
- Final Pay Calculator for leave paid out on leaving
- Lump Sum and Redundancy Tax Calculator for the tax on a leave payout
This page explains how the law works and estimates figures from what you enter. It cannot tell you what will happen in your situation, because employment outcomes turn on facts, evidence and the wording of your own agreement. Nothing here creates a lawyer and client relationship.
It has not been reviewed by a lawyer. The legal descriptions are drawn from Employment New Zealand, MBIE and Inland Revenue and were checked against those sources on 7 August 2026. They are our reading of published guidance, not a practitioner's opinion, and parts of this area are very new: the Employment Relations Amendment Act 2026 has been in force only since 21 February 2026 and there is little case law on how it will be applied.
The Employment Leave Bill is not law. Every figure on this page may change before it passes, and it will not apply until about 2028.
Before you act, get advice. A community law centre is free. Employment New Zealand provides free information and mediation. An employment lawyer will tell you things no calculator can. Time limits are short and unforgiving: a personal grievance must generally be raised within 90 days, so seek advice early rather than waiting for certainty.