Employment Hero Leave Accrual Wrong: What’s Really Happening

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Checked against Employment Hero’s Help Centre and current Australian guidance on 13/08/2026.

The short version

1. The accrual method must fit the workforce: hours per pay run can over-accrue while hours per hour worked can accrue nothing when no hours are recorded.
2. Leave-category changes do not update existing employees automatically and must be applied to their Leave Allowances records.
3. Stopping an entitlement requires its accrual to be set to zero; it does not stop by itself.

Full detail below.

Signs your Employment Hero leave accrual is wrong

If an Employment Hero leave balance looks wrong, start by separating the symptom from its cause. Payd Co, an Employment Hero Certified Partner, checks the accrual method, employee allowance, migration balance and pay-run inputs before deciding whether vendor support is needed.

The pattern usually looks like:

• Part-time or casual accruals running too high or too low
• Annual leave not matching four weeks pro-rata for the hours worked
• Opening balances that look wrong from the day a migration went live

If your numbers are wrong in a different way, penalty rates or overtime instead of leave, that’s a different setting entirely. Our guide on Employment Hero award rates not calculating correctly covers that case specifically.

Employment Hero leave accrual wrong: why it happens

Leave accrual in Employment Hero’s Payroll classic platform, the generation these settings are documented for, runs off the leave category’s allowance settings. A Leave Allowance Template carries any custom accrual ratio, expressed as hours of leave earned per hour worked, for a sub-group that shouldn’t sit on the category default. Leave a part-time or casual employee on a full-time rate, whether that’s the category default or a template never adjusted for them, and the accrual is wrong from their first pay run.

Payroll-side template changes also need a separate push to sync with the HR platform. Fix the template in payroll settings and skip that push, and the correct rate sits in one system while the old rate keeps running in the other. This split is the most common cause of “accruals too high or too low” we see across Employment Hero payroll and HR platform builds.

Migrated opening balances carry a separate risk. They can be entered on an employee’s Opening Balances screen or bulk imported from the Opening Balances Settings template. A mapping or source-data mistake can therefore repeat across the migration batch. A different trap looks similar but has nothing to do with migration: switching an existing leave category to front-loading can produce an unexpected number where the historic accruals do not provide the leave-year anchor needed for the upfront calculation. One is a data problem and the other a configuration-timing problem, so they need different fixes.

Leave loading percentages can drift too, since a rate change to a leave category only applies to employees added afterwards, not the ones already on it. That divergence carries into superannuation once Payday Super applies, live since 1 July 2026, a mechanism we cover in full in our guide on superannuation calculating wrong in Employment Hero.

Checks to run yourself

Run these in order. Each one rules out a specific input before you assume the balance itself needs correcting.

Check 1: Accrual method matches the entitlement

Confirm the employee’s leave category is set to accrue automatically, and that the method matches the workforce. Employment Hero supports standard days per year, standard weeks per year, hours per hour worked and hours per pay run. For variable-hours staff, hours per hour worked produces no accrual when a pay run contains no recorded hours. A fixed hours-per-pay-run template can over-accrue when hours fall. Neither mismatch produces a warning.

Check 2: Changes reached the existing employees

Changing a leave category does not update employees already assigned to it. The corresponding adjustment must also be made on each affected employee’s Leave Allowances record. We export the affected cohort, apply the change systematically and reconcile a sample before the next pay run so the category and employee settings cannot drift apart.

If an entitlement should stop accruing, set the accrual to zero. Removing future leave requests or leaving the category unused does not stop the balance from growing.

Check 3: Pro-rata rate matches employment type

Check the employee’s Leave Allowance Template against their actual hours, not their job title. Fair Work’s annual leave entitlement is four weeks a year based on ordinary hours worked, so a part-time employee on 20 hours a week should accrue 80 hours a year, not the full-time figure. If a custom template was cloned for them, confirm the change was pushed through to the HR platform as well as saved in payroll.

Check 4: Opening balances match the old system

Spot-check a handful of employees’ opening balances against the final balance report from the previous platform. Balances can be entered on an employee’s Opening Balances screen or loaded through the bulk-import template. A batch of wrong figures usually points to a source-data or mapping error repeated across a migration cohort instead of one isolated entry.

One timing trap is worth ruling out first. If an employee’s leave-year anniversary falls inside a pay period instead of on its start date, the balance doesn’t flip over until the pay run after that one. Checking it on the anniversary run itself, and expecting the new figure to already show, reads exactly like a bug. It’s the same “check the setting before you call it broken” pattern we walk through in our guide on Employment Hero award rates not calculating correctly.

Setting	What wrong looks like	What right looks like
Accrual method	Category set up for the wrong employment type or entitlement	Accrual pattern matches how that entitlement applies
Pro-rata rate	Part-timer left on a full-time template, or template never synced to HR	Template matches actual hours and is pushed through to both systems
Opening balances	Figures don’t match the old system, wrong across several employees	Spot-checked against the last payslip from the previous platform

WA long service leave needs its own check

For employees covered by the Long Service Leave Act 1958 (WA), the full entitlement is 8.667 weeks after 10 years, followed by 4.333 weeks for each further five years. In most cases, employment ending after at least seven years can create a pro-rata entitlement, subject to the reason employment ended. Construction employees may instead fall under the MyLeave portable scheme. We confirm the governing scheme and service history before configuring or correcting a balance; Employment Hero cannot decide that coverage question from the employee’s job title alone.

When these checks don’t fix it

A migrated balance error can affect an entire template or import cohort. If the accrual method was wrong at go-live, or opening balances were imported incorrectly, correcting one payslip leaves the remaining records unresolved.

That’s a reconciliation job, not a one-off edit. Payd Co’s payroll implementation and support work includes running that reconciliation against your old system’s data, part of the Data Migration stage of a six-stage Employment Hero payroll implementation. We check every affected employee’s balance, correct the setting causing it, and confirm the batch is clean instead of assuming one fix covers the rest.

We build and configure Employment Hero; we don’t vary a Modern Award or provide legal advice on what an entitlement should be. If duplicate employee records came out of the same migration, we resolve the matching and balance records as part of the migration reconciliation.

When we reconcile a migration cohort, we group the variances by template, employee allowance and import source. That pattern identifies the setting or data batch to correct, while an unexplained variance is retained for product escalation.

Why are my part-time or casual employees’ leave accruals too high or too low in Employment Hero?

Their leave category or allowance template usually doesn’t match their actual employment type or hours. In Payroll classic, a part-time employee left on a full-time rate accrues at the full-time ratio, and a casual employee sitting on a standard leave category can accrue paid leave they’re not entitled to at all. Checking the settings against the employee’s real hours, and confirming any custom rate was pushed through to the HR platform, resolves most cases.

How do I fix opening leave balances that were entered incorrectly after a payroll migration?

Reconcile the affected cohort against the final report from the former system. A small number of balances can be corrected on individual Opening Balances screens; a larger cohort can be corrected with Employment Hero’s Opening Balances Settings export and bulk-import template. Back up the export, validate the mapping and recheck a sample before the next pay run.

Does annual leave keep accruing while an employee is on paid sick leave?

Yes. Under the Fair Work Act, annual leave keeps accruing during paid sick and carer’s leave, plus paid annual leave and some other paid leave types. It stops accruing during unpaid leave, including unpaid parental leave. If a balance looks lower than expected after a stretch of paid sick leave, that’s a setting worth checking, not a broken entitlement.