Personal and Carer's Leave in Australia: Sick Leave, Compassionate Leave, and FDV Leave

Most Australian employees accrue 10 days of paid personal and carer's leave a year, casual employees instead get 2 days of unpaid carer's leave and 2 days of unpaid compassionate leave per occasion, and everyone, including casuals, is entitled to 10 days of paid family and domestic violence leave.

This article covers personal and carer's leave, compassionate leave, and paid family and domestic violence leave under the National Employment Standards in the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), current as at August 2026. It does not cover the general definition of casual employment, covered on recordinglaw.com's casual employee rights guide, or the consequences of an employer disadvantaging an employee for taking or being eligible for this leave, covered on the general protections and adverse action guide.

Paid Personal and Carer's Leave

Section 96 of the Fair Work Act gives an employee, other than a casual, 10 days of paid personal and carer's leave for each year of service. This is the only leave type in this Division of the Act that expressly excludes casual employees; the other entitlements discussed below apply to casuals too, just on different terms.

Leave accrues progressively during the year according to the employee's ordinary hours of work, rather than arriving as a lump grant on an anniversary date, and it accumulates from year to year with no expiry. A part-time employee accrues leave pro rata, tied to their ordinary hours rather than a flat day count. The leave can be taken because the employee is unfit for work due to their own illness or injury, or to provide care or support to an immediate family or household member who needs it because of illness, injury, or an unexpected emergency. It is paid at the employee's base rate of pay for their ordinary hours in the period taken.

Cashing out this leave is restricted in the same way as annual leave: it is only available under a modern award or enterprise agreement term that requires the employee's remaining balance to stay at least 15 days after the cash-out, that each cash-out be agreed separately in writing, and that payment equal what the employee would have been paid had the leave actually been taken.

What a "Day" of Leave Actually Means

Whether "10 days" means 10 full shifts or something else was directly tested by the High Court of Australia in Mondelez Australia Pty Ltd v Automotive, Food, Metals, Engineering, Printing and Kindred Industries Union, known as the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union, decided in 2020. Mondelez employees working three 12-hour shifts a week, averaging 36 ordinary hours, argued that 10 days meant 10 absences from work regardless of shift length, which would have given them the equivalent of eight 12-hour shifts a year. A majority of the Full Federal Court had agreed with that reading before Mondelez and the Minister for Jobs and Industrial Relations appealed to the High Court.

The High Court rejected that "working day" reading. It held instead that a "day" for the purposes of the 10-day entitlement is a notional day: one-tenth of the equivalent of an employee's ordinary hours of work over a 2-week period, which the Court also described as calculable as one twenty-sixth of an employee's ordinary annual hours. In practice, this means an employee working long shifts does not get 10 full shift-length days of paid leave; their leave is calculated proportionally to their ordinary hours rather than by counting rostered days off. The same notional-day method also applies to paid family and domestic violence leave under the Fair Work Act, discussed below, because the Act cross-references the same calculation.

Evidence and Notice

An employee must give notice of personal or carer's leave as soon as practicable, which can be after the leave has already started, and must tell the employer the period or expected period of the leave. If the employer requires it, the employee must also give evidence that would satisfy a reasonable person that the leave was taken for a genuine reason under the Act. Failing to comply with the notice and evidence requirements means the employee is not entitled to take the leave.

The Fair Work Ombudsman's practical guidance describes a medical certificate or a statutory declaration as examples of acceptable evidence, noting there is no strict rule on the exact form it must take, only that it needs to convince a reasonable person the leave was genuine. This example illustrates how the Act's own reasonable-person evidence standard tends to be applied in practice, though a writer relying on the exact current wording of the Fair Work Ombudsman's page should confirm it directly, since the version available for this article was accessed through an archived capture rather than a live fetch. A modern award or enterprise agreement can add further terms about the kind of evidence required for personal and carer's, unpaid carer's, or compassionate leave.

Unpaid Carer's Leave

Unpaid carer's leave is the entitlement casual employees actually have in place of the paid 10-day entitlement above, because the Fair Work Act's casual exclusion applies only to paid personal and carer's leave, not to this provision. Every employee, including casuals, gets 2 days of unpaid carer's leave for each permissible occasion, where an immediate family or household member needs care or support because of illness, injury, or an unexpected emergency. It can be taken as a single continuous 2-day period or as separate periods agreed with the employer.

For an employee who is not a casual, unpaid carer's leave is a backstop rather than a parallel entitlement: they cannot take it for a period where they could instead take their paid personal and carer's leave. For a casual, who has no paid leave to exhaust, this unpaid entitlement functions as their standing carer's leave right.

Compassionate Leave

Compassionate leave gives every employee, including casuals, 2 days for each permissible occasion where an immediate family or household member develops a life-threatening illness or injury or dies, where a child is stillborn who would have been an immediate family or household member, or where the employee or their spouse or de facto partner has a miscarriage. It can be taken as a single continuous 2-day period, as two separate 1-day periods, or as separate periods agreed with the employer, and where the triggering illness or injury persists, the leave can be taken at any time while it continues rather than only in a short window right after the triggering event.

For employees other than casuals, compassionate leave is paid at the base rate of pay for ordinary hours. For casual employees, the Fair Work Act states explicitly that compassionate leave is unpaid. This is a different pattern from both paid personal and carer's leave, where casuals are excluded from the paid entitlement entirely and instead get unpaid carer's leave, and from paid family and domestic violence leave below, where casuals get the same paid entitlement as everyone else.

Paid Family and Domestic Violence Leave

Every employee, including full-time, part-time and casual employees, is entitled to 10 days of paid family and domestic violence leave in a 12-month period. This entitlement works differently from the personal and carer's leave described above in three ways: it is available in full at the start of each 12-month period of employment rather than accruing progressively, it does not carry over or accumulate from year to year, and it is available in full to casual employees, paid, unlike every other leave type covered in this article.

The leave can be taken because the employee is experiencing family and domestic violence and needs to do something to deal with its impact, where it is impractical to do that outside working hours. Family and domestic violence is defined broadly as violent, threatening or otherwise abusive behaviour by a close relative, a household member, or a current or former intimate partner that seeks to coerce or control the person or that causes them harm or fear. It can be taken as a single continuous 10-day period, as separate periods of one or more days, or in periods of less than a full day, by agreement.

Payment differs slightly for casuals: a non-casual employee is paid their full rate as if the leave had not been taken, while a casual is paid at their full rate as if they had worked their rostered hours for that period, including hours they had already accepted an offer of work for. A casual can still take the leave to cover periods they were not rostered for, but the employer is not required to pay for that unrostered part. This entitlement was phased in by employer size when it was introduced: employees of larger employers became eligible from 1 February 2023, and employees of small business employers, generally those with fewer than 15 employees, became eligible from 1 August 2023. Both dates are now well in the past, so for a current reader the practical position is simply that the 10-day paid entitlement, including for casuals, has applied to all employers since 1 August 2023.

An employer must keep any notice or evidence connected with family and domestic violence leave confidential so far as reasonably practicable, and must not use that information for any purpose other than assessing the entitlement, including that it must not be used to take adverse action against the employee. This entitlement also does not exclude or limit any separate state or territory law providing leave for victims of crime, which can apply in addition to it. State and territory leave for victims of crime, along with dismissing or disadvantaging an employee for taking or being eligible for family and domestic violence leave, are covered on recordinglaw.com's general protections and adverse action guide. These leave entitlements sit within the wider set of National Employment Standards minimums covered on recordinglaw.com's Australia employment law hub.

This article provides general legal information about the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) and related Fair Work Ombudsman guidance, current as at August 2026. It is not legal advice and does not account for individual circumstances, including the terms of a specific award or enterprise agreement, which can add further requirements. For advice about a specific situation, consult a legal practitioner admitted in the relevant Australian state or territory.