About Annual Leave Hacks

Annual Leave Hacks is a free tool that shows Australian workers the smartest way to place their annual leave around public holidays and weekends, so a modest leave balance turns into a long run of consecutive days off. No sign-up, no account, and we store none of your data.

How the optimiser works

For your state and the number of leave days you have, we look at the whole year's calendar and find every stretch where placing leave next to public holidays and weekends gives you an outsized number of days off. Specifically:

• Only full-day, state-wide public holidays create a free day off. Part-day holidays (like Christmas Eve in QLD, SA and NT) and regional-only holidays (like the Ekka or Tasmanian show days) are shown for reference but never counted as a full day off.
• We evaluate every window (up to about two weeks) that is bookended by free days and contains at least one public holiday, scoring it by days off per leave day spent.
• We keep the highest-value, non-overlapping stretches, then allocate your leave budget across them, best return first. Leftover leave is suggested as Friday long weekends.

Where the dates come from

Every public holiday date is transcribed from the official state and territory government source and checked before publishing. We re-verify each September when the next year's dates are gazetted. The sources we use:

• Victoria: business.vic.gov.au
• New South Wales: www.nsw.gov.au
• Queensland: www.qld.gov.au
• Western Australia: www.wa.gov.au
• South Australia: www.safework.sa.gov.au
• Tasmania: worksafe.tas.gov.au
• Australian Capital Territory: www.act.gov.au
• Northern Territory: nt.gov.au

Public holidays can change, and some variable-date holidays (such as the Victorian AFL Grand Final Friday) are proclaimed later each year. Always confirm with your employer and the official source before booking travel.

Affiliate disclosure

Some of the "Flights for these dates" links are affiliate links: if you book after clicking one, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It keeps the tool free. We only ever link to searches for the exact dates a hack suggests. We don't change our recommendations based on commissions.

Contact

Spotted a date that looks wrong, or have a feature idea? We'd love to hear it. In the meantime, jump back to the planner and start stacking.