An employee who spent eighteen days working in Queensland, out of a ten year career spent almost entirely interstate and overseas, walked away with a Queensland long service leave entitlement, and the Court of Appeal said the legislation means exactly that. If your business has employees who transfer between states, work remotely across borders, or finish long careers with a short Queensland posting, the liability may already exist on your books without anyone having accrued for it. Long service leave is the entitlement employers ignore for a decade at a time, and Queensland's version has sharper edges than many realise.
This guide covers the Queensland scheme under the Industrial Relations Act 2016: the core entitlement, the pro-rata rules on termination, how casuals accrue, the interstate problem, and what to record now. Long service leave is state and territory legislation, so this is the Queensland position specifically; other jurisdictions differ on thresholds and triggers, and a multi-state workforce needs each state's rules applied to the right employees.
The Queensland entitlement at a glance
Under section 95 of the Industrial Relations Act 2016 (Qld), an employee who completes 10 years of continuous service with the same employer is entitled to 8.6667 weeks of long service leave on full pay. After the first 10 years, an employee becomes entitled to a further 4.3333 weeks once they complete another 5 years of continuous service, and beyond that point access to accrued leave is not subject to a further qualifying period. The entitlement applies to employees in Queensland whether or not the employer sits in the federal industrial relations system, because long service leave is one of the matters state law continues to govern.
Continuous service is the load-bearing concept. It survives many interruptions that employers assume break it, including approved leave and, for casuals, gaps between engagements of up to 3 months. Whether a particular history counts is a records question first and a legal question second, which is why the record-keeping section below matters more than it looks.
The rate it is paid at
Payment is at the ordinary rate the employee is on when the leave is taken, with a rule that catches employers out: if the employee is being paid at a higher rate than their ordinary rate immediately before taking leave, the higher rate applies. The Act also contains an anti-avoidance provision, so reducing an employee's rate on the eve of their leave to cheapen the liability invites the commission to order payment at the usual rate anyway. If rates rise during the leave, the increase flows through to the balance of the leave period.
Taking the leave, and directing it
When the leave is taken is a matter for agreement between employer and employee, and agreement is how it usually happens. Where agreement cannot be reached, the Act gives the employer a default power with formalities attached: the employer may decide when the employee takes the leave, by giving at least 3 months written notice of a date on which the employee must take at least 4 weeks of it. Public holidays falling during long service leave do not come out of the balance; the leave is exclusive of them. An employer sitting on a large accrued balance for a key employee has a lawful lever to bring it down, but only with the notice period and the paperwork done properly.
Cashing out, and what happens when the business is sold
Cashing out long service leave in Queensland is far more restricted than cashing out annual leave, and an employer cannot simply agree to pay the entitlement out instead of granting the leave. On the Queensland Government's guidance, cashing in long service leave is available only where an award, enterprise agreement or certified agreement permits it, or where the employee applies to the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission for an order, which is limited to compassionate grounds or financial hardship and available only once the employee has qualified for the leave. An informal cash payment by agreement is not one of the options, and it does not discharge the entitlement.
The entitlement also survives a change of ownership. Where a business changes hands and the new employer continues to employ existing staff, accumulated long service leave transfers with them, and the transferred employee is entitled to leave accrued across the total period of employment including service with the previous employer. The same applies where an employee is dismissed at the time of the transfer, or in the month before it, and is re-employed by the new owner within 3 months. This provision is not negotiable between the parties, which is why the liability is a purchaser's problem the moment the contract settles.
Long service leave on termination: pro-rata at 7 years
An employee who has completed at least 7 years of continuous service is entitled to a proportionate payment for long service leave when their employment ends. Between 7 and 10 years, though, the payment is not automatic on every exit. Where the employee has less than 10 years of service, the proportionate payment is only payable if the employment ends in one of the circumstances the Act lists:
- The employee dies
- The employee resigns because of illness, incapacity, or a domestic or other pressing necessity
- The employer dismisses the employee for a reason other than the employee's conduct, capacity or performance, which captures redundancy
- The employer dismisses the employee because of illness, or unfairly dismisses them
- A fixed engagement ends through the passing of time, where the employee reasonably expected the work to continue to 10 years and was prepared to continue
A resignation for a better job at year 8 does not trigger the payment. A redundancy at year 8 does. Termination processing is where this entitlement is calculated under pressure, usually by whoever runs the final pay, and the difference between the qualifying and non-qualifying exits is exactly the detail a rushed final pay gets wrong.
Casuals and part-timers are included
Queensland's scheme covers casual and regular part-time employees, and the design is more generous to broken service than employers expect. A casual's service remains continuous despite gaps between engagements, multiple contracts with the same employer, and even other jobs worked in between; continuity only breaks when more than 3 months separates the end of one contract and the start of the next. A regular summer casual who returns every season can be accruing continuous service across a decade of interrupted engagements. Seasonal employees in the sugar industry and meat works have their own subdivision of the Act, with a pro-rata entitlement scaled to the part of each year actually worked and specific rules for the periods between seasons.
The hours-based formula
For an employee who was casual or regular part-time at any point in the relevant service, section 105 of the Act prescribes a minimum payment formula built on hours actually worked rather than notional weeks:
(total ordinary hours worked ÷ 52) × (8.6667 ÷ 10) × the hourly rate
The hourly rate is the rate payable when the leave starts or when employment ends. As a worked example: a long-serving casual who worked 14,560 ordinary hours across their period of continuous service, on $30.00 per hour at the end of it, is entitled to a minimum of 14,560 ÷ 52 × 0.86667 × $30.00, which is $7,280.03. A casual or part-time employee can also agree with their employer to take the leave as its full-time equivalent instead. For mixed histories, where an employee moved between full-time, part-time and casual over the years, the hours-based method is the one the Act prescribes, and it is exactly what the Queensland long service leave calculator is built to handle.
Interstate employees and the Infosys v Fox problem
The Act defines continuous service as service with the same employer "whether wholly in the State or partly in and partly outside the State", and in Infosys Technologies Ltd v Fox [2025] QCA 45 the Queensland Court of Appeal decided what "partly in" means: there is no requirement that the Queensland portion be a substantial proportion of the total. The employee in that case had roughly ten years of continuous service with the same employer, worked mostly in India and Melbourne, and spent his final eighteen days employed in Brisbane. The Court held the entitlement crystallised, assessed on all the circumstances of where the employment was located, and the High Court refused special leave, so the position stands.
The employer consequences are practical, not theoretical. A decade-long service history elsewhere can convert into a Queensland entitlement late in the piece, double entitlement risk needs managing where an employee's service touches schemes in more than one place, and the exposure lands at exactly the moment employment ends, when the final pay is being calculated.
If interstate service histories touch your Queensland workforce, the time to work out the exposure is before a resignation letter arrives, not after. Brookvale HR Solutions reviews service histories and final pay positions on fixed fees with no lock-in contracts. Call Daniel on 1300 23 44 23.
Portable schemes and other variations
Three Queensland industries run portable long service leave schemes administered by QLeave, where the entitlement follows the worker across employers within the industry:
- Building and construction
- Contract cleaning
- Community services
Employers in those industries register and pay a levy, and the scheme, not the individual employment relationship, carries the entitlement. If your business sits in one of the three, the portable scheme obligations run alongside the Act and the two must not be confused. Outside Queensland, every state and territory has its own long service leave legislation with different qualifying periods and pro-rata triggers, so the rules on this page stop at the border: apply each jurisdiction's law to the employees whose service belongs to it. The Queensland Government's guidance on long service leave obligations for business is the reference point for the state scheme.
What to put in your records now
Every hard long service leave question is answered by records that many businesses have not kept:
- Start dates and service history for every employee, including breaks and their reasons, going back further than the seven year document retention habit
- Ordinary hours actually worked for every casual and part-time employee, because the section 105 formula runs on hours, not averages
- Where the work was performed, for any employee whose service touches more than one state
- The current liability, calculated and reviewed annually, so long service leave appears in the accounts as the real accruing cost it is rather than a surprise at year ten
A business that starts keeping these four things today is in a defensible position whenever the entitlement crystallises. A business that starts reconstructing them the week an employee with a complicated history resigns is negotiating from memory against legislation that keeps score in decimals.
