Estimate the full termination payout under the National Employment Standards, notice period, redundancy pay, and accrued annual leave and long service leave, with the small-business exemption built in.
Takes ~2 minutes · Based on the NES · Your figures stay in your browser until you choose to share them
Notice Period
NES notice incl. over-45
Redundancy Pay
Full NES scale
Leave Payout
Annual leave & LSL
Small Business
Exemption built in
When a role becomes redundant, the final payout is rarely just "a few weeks' pay". Under Australia's National Employment Standards (NES), a genuine redundancy can trigger several separate entitlements at once — notice (or pay in lieu), redundancy (severance) pay based on length of service, and any accrued annual leave and long service leave owing on termination. Getting the arithmetic wrong in either direction causes real problems: underpay and you expose the business to a Fair Work claim and back-pay; overpay and you've handed out money you didn't owe. The Redundancy Calculator gives an owner or manager a clear, itemised estimate of the total termination payout before they commit to a decision, so the conversation and the cash-flow impact are both grounded in the actual entitlements.
You enter the employee's start and termination dates, their annual base salary (excluding super), accrued annual leave and long service leave in hours, whether the employee is above the age at which the extra notice applies, and whether the business is a small business under the NES threshold. From the dates it works out completed years of service, converts salary to a weekly and hourly rate, then calculates each component: the NES notice period (with the additional notice that applies to older, longer-serving employees), redundancy pay from the NES service scale, and the value of accrued annual leave and long service leave. It applies the small-business redundancy-pay exemption where relevant, and lets you switch annual leave loading on or off because many awards don't pay it out on termination — it's deliberately defaulted off so the estimate isn't overstated. The result is a gross, before-tax total with a line-by-line breakdown and the full service scale shown. It uses the NES entitlements as the baseline; it doesn't know your specific Modern Award or enterprise agreement, which may be more generous.
Business owners, managers and back-office staff who need to estimate what a redundancy will actually cost — and what the employee is owed — before making the decision.
The short answers are here. For anything else, ask below or get in touch.
Under the NES, businesses below the small-business employee-count threshold are generally exempt from paying redundancy (severance) pay. Notice and accrued leave entitlements still apply, though — the exemption only covers the severance component. It's also worth checking the relevant Modern Award, because some awards impose redundancy obligations on small businesses that the NES alone would not. The calculator applies the exemption when you flag the business as small, so you can see the difference it makes.
These tools work together to give you a clearer picture of your business.
Use these results to make better decisions. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on them, an advisor can walk through what they mean for the business.
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