Jury Service Leave Calculator NZ 2026
This calculator works out what jury service costs an employer in New Zealand, and separates the part the court pays from the part you might. The starting point surprises people: there is no legal requirement to pay an employee while they are on jury service. The Ministry of Justice pays an attendance fee instead, at $31 for each half day for the first five days and $40 for each half day from the sixth day onwards, with a whole day counting as two half days. That fee is explicitly not meant to replace a wage, and on a normal salary it falls a long way short, which is why many employers top it up to normal pay and why some employment agreements require it. You enter the days of attendance, the person's normal daily pay, whether you are topping up, and your cover arrangements, and the calculator returns the court fee, your top up, the cost of cover and the total. What you cannot do is worth knowing as clearly as what you can. An employer cannot require someone to use annual holidays to cover jury service, and cannot dismiss, threaten or disadvantage them for attending, with a fine of up to $10,000 for getting that wrong. An employee can apply to the court to be excused or to defer, and you can support that application in writing, but it is the court's decision rather than yours. It is built for employers and payroll staff who have just had a summons handed to them.
You are not required to pay anything: the court fee of $710 is the employee's statutory entitlement and your top up is voluntary unless the employment agreement requires it. You cannot make them use annual leave, and you cannot disadvantage them for attending.
How it works
The court fee is calculated per half day: $31 each for the first five days of attendance and $40 each from the sixth day, so a full day is $62 early on and $80 later. If you are topping up to normal pay, your share is normal pay for those days less what the court already paid, and it never goes below zero, because a court fee larger than normal pay does not become a refund to you. Employer KiwiSaver and the ACC work levy apply to the top up you pay, not to the court fee, which is not employment income from you. Cover is priced separately at the hours and rate you enter. The cost per day divides the whole cost by the days of attendance.
Worked example
An employee is called for ten days of jury service and normally earns $240 a day. The court pays $31 a half day for the first five days, which is $62 a day or $310, then $40 a half day from the sixth day, which is $80 a day or $400 for the remaining five, giving $710 in total. Their normal pay for ten days would be $2,400, so topping up costs you $1,690, and with employer KiwiSaver at 3.5 percent and an ACC work levy of 0.67 percent that comes to about $1,760. Covering the ten days at $30 an hour for eight hours a day adds $2,400. The absence therefore costs about $4,160 in total, or $416 a day.
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