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Australia: 38 ordinary hours, and the premium comes from your award

The National Employment Standards set 38 ordinary hours a week, not 40. That two-hour difference is easy to skim past and it is worth about five per cent on the hourly rate of any given salary: 90,000 over 1,976 paid hours is 45.55 an hour, where a 40-hour assumption would report 43.27. If you are converting an Australian salary with an American calculator, this is where the number goes wrong.

The NES then say nothing at all about what an hour beyond 38 is worth. Overtime and penalty rates come from the modern award or enterprise agreement covering your job, there are over a hundred awards, and they differ. The common pattern is time and a half for the first two hours of overtime and double time after that, which is what the calculator applies, but it is a convention drawn from the awards rather than a statutory floor. An employee on an annualised salary under an award can be paid one flat figure instead of hour-by-hour rates, but only if the employer reconciles that salary against what the award would have paid and makes up any shortfall. An employee no award covers has no statutory overtime entitlement at all.

Annual leave is four weeks, and five for certain shift workers, which is one of the few statutory entitlements here that varies by the pattern of work rather than by length of service. Public holidays range from ten to thirteen depending on the state or territory, and several are regional, Melbourne Cup Day in Victoria, Adelaide Cup Day in South Australia, so the eleven used here is a national average rather than anyone's exact entitlement.

For how the calculation works, the formula behind it and what it leaves out, see the full guide.

Data sources

  • Australian National Employment Standards

    Effective 2010-01-01 onward · retrieved 2026-08-30

    Public holidays vary by state and territory, from ten to thirteen days.

    How we checked these figures

    National Employment Standards: a 38-hour week and four weeks of paid annual leave for a full-time employee.

    Current

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