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August small business sick leave up 14 percentage points year on year, new data from MYOB

Victorians took the most sick leave in August, up 51% compared to pre-COVID levels

Early indicators from MYOB payroll data from business management platform MYOB shows at its peak, the amount of sick, carers or personal leave taken by employees of small businesses nationally was 38.1% above a pre-COVID baseline, 14.3 percentage points higher than in August last year when this type of leave peaked at 23.8%.  

At a state level, last month, Victorian small business employees took the most time off for sick, carers and personal leave (51% above baseline), followed by New South Wales (41%), Queensland and Tasmania (both 40%), Western Australia (39%), ACT (37%), South Australia (35%) and the Northern Territory (30%). 

These state-based figures are all higher than they were in August last year, when Victoria peaked at 40%. In August 2023 the next most impacted state was Tasmania (31%), followed by Western Australia and New South Wales (25%) and, Queensland and ACT (24%) and South Australia (23%) and Northern Territory (17%) 

Ninety-seven per cent of Australia’s businesses are small businesses. These 2.5 million firms employ 42% of workers – the largest share of any business type – and represent nearly a third of total economic activity in Australia every year. 

Paul Robson, CEO of MYOB, said in today’s economic climate, businesses are under pressure to drive productivity, and this can be particularly impacted when employees are on sick leave. 

“It is essential workers have the time to recover when unwell. However, the cumulative effect of unplanned absences can lead to significant disruptions in day-to-day operations for small businesses. This often results in reduced output, project delays, and an increased workload on remaining team members, all of which can hinder the overall performance of a business.  

“When employee sickness peaks it’s important to proactively manage and ensure businesses have the right support systems and contingencies in place to minimise its impact. 

"Business owners are looking for efficiencies to balance increasing operational costs, and the strain of personal leave adds another challenge. The key is finding a balance between prioritising employee wellbeing and sustaining productivity.” 

For more information contact

Collette Betts

Corporate Affairs Manager

E: collette.betts@myob.com

About MYOB

MYOB is a leading business management platform with a core purpose of helping more businesses in Australia and New Zealand start, survive and succeed. MYOB delivers end-to-end business, financial and accounting solutions direct to businesses employing between 0 and 1000 employees, alongside a network of accountants, bookkeepers and consultants. For more information visit myob.com or follow MYOB on LinkedIn.

About the data 

Data sourced from a subset of MYOB SME customers, subscribed to payroll-enabled tiers of the platform and performing payroll runs at least monthly. The data represents more than a million Australian small business employees. 

Personal Leave Index is computed as a number of employees that received “Personal Leave”, “Sick Leave” or “Carer’s Leave” for a payrun, divided by the total number of employees paid during payruns per period. Monthly values represent the maximum weekly rate of personal leave usage observed during the month. Weekly seasonal adjustment applied based on 2019-2020 data.  

Payroll categories can be user-defined, thus the keyword searches used to identify personal leave usage may not include all recorded usage of leave. This may cause an underestimation in the absolute value of the index, but would have less impact on the trends over time.