Service Anniversary Leave Calculator NZ 2026
This calculator prices the extra leave your team earns for length of service, across every tenure band at once. You enter how many staff sit in each band and how many additional days each of them gets, along with average daily pay and your employer on-costs, and it returns the total extra days a year, what they cost, the average per eligible person and the liability if the days are accumulating rather than being used. The first thing to be clear about is that none of this is required by law. Unlike Australia, New Zealand has no statutory long service leave: the minimum is four weeks of annual holidays after twelve months and it does not increase with tenure. Extra days for service are entirely a matter of your own policy, an individual agreement or a collective agreement, which makes them a retention tool you control rather than a cost imposed on you. The second thing is that once you write it into an agreement it becomes an enforceable entitlement, so two details are worth settling in writing before anyone reaches the first milestone: whether unused days accumulate or lapse, and whether they are paid out when someone leaves. Statutory annual holidays must be paid out on termination; extra contractual leave is only paid out if the agreement says so, and a policy that stays silent tends to be read in the employee's favour. It is built for owners and HR managers designing or costing a service leave policy.
| Service milestone | Staff in this band | Extra days each | Days a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 years | 3 | ||
| 10 years | 6 | ||
| 15 years | 5 | ||
| 20 years | 0 | ||
| 25 years | 0 |
New Zealand has no statutory long service leave, so this is your policy rather than a legal minimum. If unused days accumulate rather than lapsing, this annual figure is also the amount your leave liability grows by each year, and it belongs on the balance sheet alongside accrued annual holidays.
How it works
Each band contributes the number of staff in it multiplied by the extra days each of them receives, and the total is the sum across the bands. The annual cost prices those days at average daily pay and adds the employer KiwiSaver and ACC work levy that ride on the pay, because a day of paid leave costs the same on-costs as a day worked. Staff earning extra leave counts everyone in a band with at least one day, and the average shows how concentrated the benefit is: a high average with few people means the cost sits with a small group of long servers. The cost of one day is the loaded daily figure, which is the number to use when someone asks what adding a day to a milestone would cost.
Worked example
A team has three people who have passed five years and receive one extra day each, two who have passed ten years and receive three days each, and one who has passed fifteen years and receives five. That is 3 days, 6 days and 5 days, so 14 extra days a year across six people, an average of 2.3 days each. At an average daily pay of $240 those 14 days cost $3,360, and with employer KiwiSaver at 3.5 percent and an ACC work levy of 0.67 percent the loaded figure is about $3,500 a year, or roughly $250 for each day granted. If the days accumulate rather than lapsing, that $3,500 is also the annual increase in a liability the business is carrying.
Related calculators
- Annual Leave: the statutory four week entitlement.
- Employee Turnover Cost: what this policy is trying to prevent.
- Holiday Pay: how a day of leave is valued.
- Garden Leave Cost: leave that keeps accruing after they resign.
- True Cost of an Employee: where leave sits in the total.