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Question

How are you managing Long Service Leave when employee hours change?

  • September 8, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 47 views

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping to understand how other Australian organisations are handling Long Service Leave in HiBob when an employee's contracted hours change over time.

As many of you will know, HiBob stores leave balances in hours or days, rather than weeks. This has raised a question for us regarding Long Service Leave, which accrues as a weeks-based entitlement.

For example (VIC):

  • Employee works for 7 years at 0.5 FTE (19 hours per week).
  • At 7 years, they become entitled to approximately 6.067 weeks of LSL.
  • We assign a balance of 115.273 hours (19 × 6.067).
  • The employee later increases to full-time (38 hours per week).

Our concern is that if the balance remains at 115.273 hours, the employee can only take around 3 weeks of leave at their new hours, even though their underlying entitlement is still 6.067 weeks.

This raises a couple of questions:

  • Has anyone received payroll or legal advice on how this should be managed?
  • How are you configuring HiBob to ensure employees retain their full LSL entitlement when moving between part-time and full-time arrangements?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from organisations that have already encountered this scenario and how you chose to manage it in practice.

Thanks in advance for any insights or lessons learned.

3 replies

  • Mel Duran
  • September 8, 2026

I have the same issue at Ball & Doggett. We currently have to complete a monthly accrual reconciliation, which means we’re constantly having to manage and make manual adjustments in Bob.

Ideally, I’d love to have the flexibility to accrue leave on a weekly basis rather than having to manage it by days and hours. I think this would make the process much more accurate and significantly reduce the manual work involved.

 

    Charlotte Leefe

    To be honest, every state/territory has slightly different rules regarding this.
    We have staff across regions who move, move back ect.

    We store the records in hours, but before they take the leave, we internally cross check their employment with gaps in service, unpaid leave, medical leave ect, and adjust as needed with notes.

    I did seek legal advice on this, and there was no clear way forwards when an employee is moving states, so the balances need to be checked against service regardless 

    • Oli Sanders
    • Author
    • September 10, 2026

    Thanks ​@Charlotte Leefe! 

    We're probably a bit luckier in that most of our employees are NSW and VIC based, so while the entitlement dates differ, the accrual rates are generally the same.

    I'm interested in how your cross-check process works in practice. Do you display an LSL balance to employees in the system, or do you keep the balance at zero and ask employees to contact P&C/Payroll when they're considering taking leave so their entitlement can be reviewed?

    Our challenge is that employees can see their available LSL balance in HiBob. If an employee accrued their entitlement while working part-time and later moved to full-time hours, they may see a balance that only equates to around three weeks of leave at their current hours, even though their underlying entitlement is still closer to six weeks. My concern is that employees could understandably assume the balance shown is their full entitlement.

    It feels like the only way to avoid that is to manually review and update balances whenever an employee changes their contracted hours or transfers to a different state. I'm curious whether you've found a better approach or if that's ultimately the process you've had to adopt as well.

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