Same rate as NSW, wider pro-rata gate
Western Australia’s Long Service Leave Act 1958 (WA) runs the same underlying accrual rate as several eastern states, 8⅔ weeks on completing 10 years, then 4⅓ weeks for each further 5 years, a constant 0.8667 weeks a year throughout, but it opens the door to an early payout much wider than NSW or Queensland do.
The 7-year test that covers plain resignation
From 7 years, WA pays a pro-rata entitlement on termination “by the employee’s death; or in any circumstances other than by the employer for serious misconduct.” Read that carefully: it excludes only one thing, an employer dismissing someone for serious misconduct. Everything else is covered, including a worker who simply resigns to take a better offer. That’s a materially different test from NSW or Queensland, both of which restrict the early pro-rata gate to illness, incapacity, domestic necessity or an employer-initiated ending. WA doesn’t require a reason at all once someone reaches 7 years. Even a dismissal for serious misconduct doesn’t necessarily wipe the slate: any entitlement the worker had already fully accrued before that point still gets paid out, on Wageline WA’s reading of the Act, only the incomplete final stretch of service is forfeited.
Continuous employment, deliberately generously defined
WA’s continuity provisions run long and are, if anything, more employee-favourable than most: annual leave, illness or injury leave, LSL itself, parental leave, compassionate, bereavement and family-and-domestic-violence leave, and public holidays all count as service without breaking continuity. So does a stand-down under an award or the Fair Work Act, reasonable time on legitimate union business that was requested and refused, and, unusually, an unspecified absence, UNLESS the employer gives written notice within 14 days that it’s treating continuity as broken. Re-employment within 2 months of an ordinary termination, or 6 months after a termination for slackness of trade, also preserves continuity, as does a transfer of business where the employee moves with it.
How the pay rate is worked out
For most employees, ordinary pay is the normal weekly hours at the ordinary time rate applying when leave starts, averaged if hours varied. For piecework, commission or results-based pay, WA averages the rate over the 365 days before leave starts (or before termination, or before an employee’s death), excluding any unpaid leave or stand-down periods from that count. Shift premiums, overtime and penalty rates are excluded from the calculation for everyone, except casuals, whose ordinary pay specifically includes any casual loading they’re entitled to. Board or lodging the employer provides is added at its fixed or regulated value if it isn’t actually being taken during the leave period.
In practice
Compare WA to NSW on the same scenario: a worker resigns at 8 years to take another job, with no illness or domestic reason behind the move. In NSW, that gets nothing until 10 years. The restricted-reason test doesn’t cover plain resignation. In WA, the same worker is entitled to a pro-rata payment straight away, because the 7-year gate only excludes an employer dismissing someone for serious misconduct, not an employee simply choosing to leave. The one scenario WA doesn’t cover before 10 years is the mirror image. An employer sacking someone for serious misconduct at, say, 8 years forfeits the incomplete stretch of service since the last full accrual, even though the same misconduct dismissal in some other states might still leave a smaller pro-rata amount on the table. Reading “other than serious misconduct” correctly, in other words, matters more in WA than in most other jurisdictions.
Redundancy tells the same story, from the other direction
The resignation example above shows WA’s wide gate at its most generous. A redundancy scenario shows the same wording from the other side. An employer restructuring and letting someone go at, say, 6 years and a bit, hasn’t reached 7 years yet, so nothing is owed under the early gate regardless of how the termination happened. The same employee let go one year later, at just past 7 years, is covered immediately, redundancy plainly isn’t “serious misconduct.” There’s no assessment of whether the redundancy was genuine or whether proper process was followed the way there might be under unfair dismissal law. WA’s Act only asks one question at this gate: was the reason serious misconduct, yes or no. Everything else clears the bar.
The 14-day notice most employers forget to send
Buried in WA’s continuity provisions is a trap worth naming on its own. An unspecified absence, leave with no fixed return date, no clear category, generally keeps counting toward continuous service. It stays that way unless the employer sends written notice within 14 days stating that it’s treating the absence as breaking continuity. Miss that 14-day window, and the absence keeps counting by default, whether or not that was the intention.
This flips the usual assumption. In most other states, an employer doesn’t need to do anything for a long unexplained gap to eventually stop counting. In WA, silence works in the employee’s favour. An employer who wants an ambiguous absence to break continuity has to act on it, in writing, inside a fortnight, or the service keeps running. Worth building that 14-day clock into whatever process handles extended leave requests, because it’s the kind of deadline that’s easy to let slip past unnoticed.
When a WA business changes hands
A transfer of business, one owner selling or handing the operation to another, doesn’t reset an employee’s clock in WA as long as the employee moves across with it. Service before and after the change is treated as one continuous run, which matters for anyone approaching the 7-year or 10-year marks around the time a sale settles. And because WA’s pro-rata gate is already wide, a business changing hands doesn’t give either side much room to argue that a termination around settlement date was for some reason other than serious misconduct. If the old employer lets someone go around the sale and it isn’t for serious misconduct, the wide gate above still applies on its own terms.
Who enforces it in WA
A dispute over a WA long service leave payment, or a question about whether a particular absence or termination reason actually triggers the wide pro-rata gate described above, goes to Wageline, run by the WA department that administers the 1958 Act. It fields complaints from workers, and can confirm for an employer whether specific dates and circumstances actually trigger a payment. That’s worth getting in writing before a final pay run goes out, particularly given how wide this Act’s gate is compared with the eastern states.
Family and domestic violence leave counts too
Worth flagging on its own, because it’s easy to miss inside a longer list: WA specifically names family and domestic violence leave as service that keeps continuity intact, alongside compassionate and bereavement leave. An employee who takes that leave isn’t at risk of the clock resetting on their long service leave entitlement because of it. For a WA employer, that means treating a period of family and domestic violence leave the same way as any other protected absence on the continuity list, not as an unexplained gap that needs a decision about whether it breaks service.
Slackness of trade gets a longer re-employment window
Most re-employment gaps in WA need to close within 2 months to preserve continuity. There’s one exception worth knowing: termination for slackness of trade gets a 6-month window instead. A seasonal or cyclical business that lays staff off when work dries up, then brings the same people back a few months later, has more room here than it might assume. Bring someone back within 6 months of a slackness-of-trade layoff and their earlier service still counts toward the 7-year and 10-year marks, rather than starting again from zero. Miss that window, even by a few weeks, and the earlier period is gone.
Keeping the record straight
A pro-rata gate this wide means more WA employees are entitled to something on resignation than the headline “10 years” figure suggests, worth knowing before assuming nothing’s owed. Delta Infotech’s business systems work keeps that kind of entitlement tracked properly, priced on the pricing page.