There are three public holidays coming up in April: Good Friday 19 April, Easter Monday 22 April and ANZAC Day Thursday 25 April.
Whether you are working part-time, full-time, fixed-term or casual, you are entitled to a public holiday if it falls on a day that you would normally have worked.
What you get for a public holiday depends on:
- whether or not you actually work on the holiday and
- whether or not the day is a day you would normally have worked, were it not for the fact that it was a public holiday.
You can only be made to work on a public holiday if:
- it falls on a day that you would have normally worked on, and
- your employment agreement says you have to work on the public holiday.
If you are asked to be available to work on a public holiday that is not within your agreed and guaranteed hours, this must be in your employment agreement. Your employer must also have genuine reasons based on reasonable grounds for including this in your contract and for requiring you to be available on the public holiday.
In all other circumstances, you work on a public holiday only if you agree to.
Your employer can’t take you off a roster on a public holiday when it’s a day that you would otherwise have worked on, to avoid giving the employee public holiday entitlements. Not recognising an employee’s holiday entitlements is against the law.
If you are working on a public holiday and that public holiday falls on a day that you would usually have worked, you will get:
- paid at the rate of at least time and a half for the hours worked.
- an alternative holiday ('a day in lieu') for working on a public holiday that is an otherwise working day.
For more information, please see Alternative Holidays and Working on Easter Sunday
