Tiered Leave Entitlement Milestones

Employment Hero Payroll is introducing Tiered Leave Entitlement Milestones for New Zealand businesses. This feature lets payroll admins configure automatic milestone leave grants within a leave allowance template. It replaces the need to manually track service anniversaries or maintain separate templates per tenure tier.

Many NZ businesses award long-serving employees a one-off leave grant at key service milestones (typically 10, 15, or 20 years). Previously, admins had to create a separate leave template for each tenure tier and manually transfer employees when they reached a milestone — a process that was error-prone and difficult to manage at scale.

With this feature, all of that happens automatically.

Here is what clients can do:

• Mark a leave category as "Tiered leave" within leave category settings.
• Add service year entitlement milestones to a leave allowance template (e.g. after 120 months of service, grant 40 hours).
• Configure carry-over settings to control how much leave balance rolls to the next milestone.
• Set or override an employee's entitlement date (defaults to their start date).
• Let the system automatically apply milestones when a pay run is opened — no manual tracking needed.

No action is required. The feature will appear automatically in New Zealand Payroll accounts from 14 October 2026.

More information: Configure tiered leave entitlement milestones