When I was working full time, public holidays were something I looked forward to.
Not just the day off. The money.
Here in South Australia we get around 14 public holidays a year, sometimes more when Christmas or Boxing Day falls on a weekend and the government tacks on an extra substitute day. If you worked on a public holiday, your employer had to pay somewhere between 200% and 250% of your base rate. That is a serious bump in the pay packet for a single day’s work.
If you did not work, you still got paid your normal rate for doing nothing at all. And on top of that, annual leave came with a 17.5% loading, meaning you actually got paid more to go on holidays than to sit at your desk. After ten years with the same employer, long service leave kicked in: 13 weeks paid at your normal salary.
The Australian public holiday pay rates system is genuinely one of the better setups for employees anywhere in the world. Most workers just accept it as the way things are, without ever really stopping to think about what those entitlements are worth in dollar terms.
But here is what happens when you retire.
Every single one of those entitlements disappears overnight.
No public holiday penalty rates. No annual leave loading. No long service leave. A Tuesday is the same as a Saturday is the same as Anzac Day. The calendar becomes almost meaningless, apart from one frustrating detail: most of the shops close on public holidays, and if you did not notice one coming up, you find that out the hard way.
That is exactly what happened to me recently. I had no idea there was a public holiday until the day arrived and things were shut. When your days do not have the rhythm of a working week behind them, the markers that used to tell you a holiday was approaching simply vanish.
So what are Australian public holiday pay rates actually worth to an employee?
Let’s make it concrete. If your base hourly rate is $35, a standard eight-hour day earns you $280. On a public holiday at 250% pay, that same day earns $700. The difference is $420 for a single day. Across 14 public holidays a year, that is nearly $6,000 in penalty rate entitlements sitting there for workers who qualify.
The annual leave loading of 17.5% adds another layer. Four weeks of annual leave on a $70,000 salary comes with roughly $2,300 in loading on top of your base pay. Most employees receive this and give it little thought.
Long service leave is the big one that people forget to factor in. After ten years, 13 weeks of paid leave at your full salary is a substantial sum. At that same $70,000 annual salary, 13 weeks works out to around $17,500. That is not a trivial entitlement.
The combined value of these conditions over a working life is enormous. And when employment ends, so does every bit of it.
For retirees or people who have moved to self-employment or online income, there is no equivalent mechanism. Your income does not double because it is a public holiday. Nobody pays you a loading for the days you choose to rest. You build what you build, steadily, day after day, whether the shops are open or not.
That shift in mindset is one of the bigger adjustments that comes with leaving traditional employment. The calendar stops working in your favour automatically. You have to create your own momentum because the system that used to reward you for simply showing up no longer applies.
For me, that has meant becoming more deliberate about what I do each day. Because drifting is far too easy when every day looks the same. And drifting does not pay the bills.
If you are in a similar position and want a straightforward approach to setting and achieving your goals so that something actually gets done each day, this is worth a look:
How to set and achieve your goals
