Law + guidance
Can you take annual leave while on workers compensation? The federal default is no
It is one of the most-asked questions after an injury and one of the
least explained, because the answer does not live in your workers compensation scheme. It
starts in the Fair Work Act, whose section 130 says an employee
is not entitled to take or accrue any leave of absence (whether paid or unpaid)
during a period when they are receiving workers compensation. Every scheme then decides
whether to switch that back on. Queensland, Western Australia, the ACT and
Tasmania do, in their own words and by section number.
The Northern Territory scheme is silent, so the federal default stands. And
if you are covered by Comcare, Seacare or the DRCA, you cannot be granted
paid leave at all while on compensation leave, other than maternity leave.
The rule almost nobody starts with
Ask about leave and workers compensation and you will be pointed at your state scheme. That
is the wrong end. The starting position is federal, and it is restrictive: under section 130 of
the Fair Work Act 2009, while you are off work and receiving compensation you are not entitled
to take or accrue leave, paid or unpaid. There is one carve-out named in the same passage. It
does not prevent an employee from taking unpaid parental leave during a compensation period
.
What makes the question confusing is that section 130 only applies where nothing else
displaces it. Most Australian workers compensation Acts do displace it, and say so. The ACT
provision is the clearest statement of the mechanism: its section 46
removes the restriction under the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cwlth), s 130 on taking or accruing
leave.
So the real question is not what the law says. It is which law reaches you.
Scheme by scheme
| Scheme | Taking and accruing leave while on compensation |
|---|---|
| Qld | Entitled to take or accrue annual, sick and long service leave under an Industrial Act or industrial instrument while receiving payments, s 119A. If leave is taken with employer approval, WorkCover continues weekly benefits for its duration |
| WA | Entitled to take annual or long service leave, and compensation is not affected by taking it. The report calls them concurrent entitlements. Annual, long service and sick leave accrue while receiving income compensation, s 61 |
| ACT | Entitled to take or accrue annual and long service leave, s 46, which the report says removes the section 130 restriction |
| Tas | Leave may be taken by arrangement with the employer, but weekly payments stop for that period. The employer must not attempt to cause or require it, s 84. Leave taken while a claim is pending is recredited, s 84B |
| SA | May continue to accrue depending on the award or agreement. Taking annual leave may suspend weekly payments, s 50(7). After 52 weeks of total incapacity payments the annual leave entitlement is treated as satisfied for that year, s 50 |
| NSW | Section 49 does not expressly permit taking leave. It permits compensation to be paid even where the worker has received holiday or long service leave pay for the same period |
| Vic | Not covered by the compensation legislation. WorkSafe Victoria refers employers and workers to the employment agreement and the Fair Work Act |
| NT | The Return to Work Act 1986 is silent, so Fair Work Act s 130 applies and there is no entitlement to take or accrue leave |
| Comcare | Cannot take leave other than maternity leave during post-determination compensation leave, s 116. Recreation and sick leave accrue for the first 45 weeks; long service leave accrues throughout |
| Seacare | Cannot take leave other than maternity leave while on compensation leave, s 137. Long service leave continues to accrue under the applicable instrument |
| DVA | MRCA has no relevant provisions. Under the DRCA, sick, recreation and long service leave continue to accrue, s 116, but no paid leave other than maternity leave may be granted |
| NZ | Not covered by the accident compensation legislation. Annual leave continues to accrue under the Holidays Act 2003 |
Summarised from Table 5.10 of the 2025 comparison. Section references are the report’s. This is a description of the schemes, not advice about any individual claim.
Three things in that table that will catch people out
Accruing and taking are different questions, and a scheme can say yes to one and no to the other. Under the DRCA, sick, recreation and long service leave keep accruing while no paid leave other than maternity leave can be granted. The balance grows and the door is shut. Comcare is the same shape with a clock attached: recreation and sick leave accrue for the first 45 weeks of post-determination compensation leave, and long service leave accrues throughout.
In some schemes taking leave costs you the payment. Tasmania is explicit that a worker who arranges leave during incapacity is then not entitled to weekly payments for that period. In South Australia, taking annual leave may see weekly payments suspended under section 50(7). Queensland runs the opposite way: if the employer approves the leave, WorkCover keeps paying weekly benefits for its duration. Same question, opposite financial consequence, depending on the border you work inside.
South Australia has a deadline nobody mentions. If you are entitled to accrue annual leave but have received weekly payments for total incapacity for 52 weeks or more, whether continuous or in separate periods, your annual leave entitlement is treated as satisfied for the year of employment that coincides with or ends during that period. The report notes that where a worker is not entitled to keep accruing, they may instead be entitled to the monetary value of the leave that would have accrued.
The protection worth knowing about
Tasmania’s section 84 carries something the other schemes in this table do not state
as plainly: an employer
must not attempt to cause or require a worker to take annual recreational leave or long service leave during a period of incapacity for which compensation is payable
.
Given that in Tasmania taking that leave switches off weekly payments, a worker pressed into
taking it would be funding their own injury out of their own entitlements. The prohibition and
the payment rule only make sense read together.
Our view, labelled as such: the striking thing about this table is not that the schemes differ, which is true of every table in this report. It is that the underlying default is restrictive and almost nobody encounters it that way. A worker in the Northern Territory and a worker in Queensland can ask their employer the same question in good faith and get opposite and equally correct answers, and neither the question nor the answer mentions the Fair Work Act, which is where the difference actually comes from.
What this does not tell you
This is a description of what the schemes provide, not advice, and not a substitute for your insurer, your union or your award. The report itself is a comparison rather than the legislation: we have quoted its wording and its section numbers, not read every Act behind it. Awards and enterprise agreements sit on top in several schemes, notably South Australia, where the report makes accrual conditional on the relevant instrument. And the report is current as at a fixed date, given below, so a scheme that has changed since will not show here.
How we did this
Everything above comes from Table 5.10 of Safe Work Australia’s Comparison of Workers’ Compensation Arrangements in Australia and New Zealand 2025, the 30th edition, read directly on 26 August 2026. The table has two parts, leave accrual and the effect of taking leave, and we read both for all twelve schemes rather than summarising one.
One access note for anyone repeating this, because it is the difference between usable and unusable. Read this report’s wide tables in the HTML edition, never the PDF. The PDF renders them as many narrow columns and a layout-preserving text extraction interleaves the cells into nonsense, truncating mid-word and merging jurisdictions. The HTML edition gives each table its own page, which parses cleanly as a real table. The chapter pages themselves contain no tables; the tables sit on child pages linked from the chapter menu.
Where the report quotes or paraphrases a provision we have kept its wording and its section numbering. We have not independently read the Acts themselves, and we say so rather than implying a check we did not do.
Sources
- Safe Work Australia, Comparison of Workers’ Compensation Arrangements in Australia and New Zealand 2025, Table 5.10: Leave while on workers’ compensation, read directly 26 August 2026: both parts of the table and every scheme row, section reference and quotation above.
- Safe Work Australia, Comparison of Workers’ Compensation Arrangements in Australia and New Zealand 2025 (publication page): the 30th edition designation and that the report is current as at 31 December 2025.
Spotted an error? Request a correction and we will check it against the source and log the outcome here.