How to write an excessive sick leave warning letter in Australia

At some point in most small businesses, an employee's sick leave stops looking like a run of bad luck and starts looking like a pattern. The absences cluster on Mondays and the day after public holidays, they arrive on short notice, and every time one happens a shift goes uncovered or a client deadline slips. You have raised it informally and given the employee the benefit of the doubt, but the pattern continues, and you are wondering whether it is time to put something in writing.

An excessive sick leave warning letter is the document that marks that moment. Done well, it records the facts, sets out what you expect around notification and evidence, gives the employee a genuine chance to explain, and puts the business in a defensible position if the issue keeps going. What it is not is a punishment for being sick, and it is not a dismissal step on its own. There is no legal definition of "excessive" sick leave in the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), so the letter only means something when it sits inside a fair, documented process. This guide walks through that process in the order you should run it.

What you need in place before you write

Before the letter exists, six things should be true. These are the prerequisites, and each one is checkable:

Accurate absence records: dates, durations, whether evidence was provided, and how the employee notified you for each absence.
A policy or instrument you can point to: your own leave and notification policy, plus any relevant modern award or enterprise agreement, setting out the notification and evidence you can expect.
An earlier conversation: the employee has already been told, informally or formally, that their absences are a concern.
A factual reason it matters: a concrete account of the operational impact, such as shifts left uncovered, overtime paid or deadlines missed.
A check for protected territory: you have considered whether the absences connect to a disability, a workplace injury or a recent complaint the employee has made, because those change how you must proceed.
A support plan: something constructive to offer, such as an employee assistance program or temporary adjustments, so the letter is not purely disciplinary.

The prerequisite that trips most employers up is the check for protected territory. A letter written when the real issue is a disability, a workers compensation claim or a complaint the employee made last week is the letter that comes back to bite. The other prerequisites are mostly administrative. That one is legal.

The process, step by step

The order matters. Each step produces something the next one needs, and skipping a step is usually where the process becomes indefensible.

Step 1: Pull the records and map the pattern

Start with data, not impressions. Pull together, for a defined period:

the dates and duration of each absence;
whether evidence was provided, and what it was;
whether notification met the policy's timing and method;
the operational impact of each absence.

Keep this purely factual. A note that says "she's always sick when it's busy" is an impression. A table of dates, days of the week and notice times is evidence.

Step 2: Check what the law lets you ask for

Paid personal/carer's leave is a genuine entitlement under the National Employment Standards. Under s 96 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), full-time employees accrue 10 days each year of service, part-time employees accrue proportionally to their ordinary hours, and the balance accumulates from year to year. Casual employees do not accrue paid personal/carer's leave. The leave can be taken when the employee is not fit for work because of illness or injury, or to care for an immediate family or household member (s 97). An employee with the entitlement and the medical reason is entitled to use it. The question for a warning letter is not whether the leave is "deserved" but whether the absence pattern is being notified, evidenced and managed the way the law requires.

Section 107 is the key provision. An employee must give notice of leave as soon as practicable and, if you ask for it, must give evidence that would satisfy a reasonable person that the leave was taken for a permitted reason. That reasonable person standard is your legal hook for requesting evidence, and it is also the boundary. It supports asking for a medical certificate, or a fitness-for-work clearance where the role genuinely needs one. It does not support demanding a diagnosis or a detailed medical history. Privacy law, including the Australian Privacy Principles, reinforces the same idea: collect only what is reasonably necessary, not everything that would be interesting to know.

Finally, check your award or enterprise agreement. Many set out specific notice periods, evidence rules and consultation obligations, and the expectations in your letter must match them. If your policy demands something the award does not, fix the policy first.

Step 3: Hold a welfare and attendance meeting first

The letter should never be the first time the employee hears there is a problem. Hold a meeting framed around welfare and attendance rather than discipline, and use it to:

set out the attendance pattern and its business impact in factual terms;
ask whether there is an underlying issue affecting their ability to attend work;
remind them of the notification and evidence requirements;
discuss what support or temporary adjustments might help.

Listen properly and document what was said. If the employee reveals a health condition, the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) is now in the room: you may need to consider reasonable adjustments, and dismissal is only defensible where the person cannot perform the inherent requirements of the role even with adjustments (s 21A). A file note of this conversation is what shows a tribunal you took that seriously rather than pressing ahead.

Step 4: Draft the warning letter

If the absences continue, or the employee does not engage with the meeting, the written warning is the next step. A defensible letter contains seven parts:

Purpose: one line stating this is a formal warning about attendance and/or failure to meet notification or evidence requirements.
The facts: the absences by date and pattern, and why they are a problem. No accusations of dishonesty without strong evidence and advice.
The impact: a brief, factual account of how the absences have affected the business.
The expectations: how and when to notify an absence, what evidence to provide and by when, and any expectation about attending scheduled shifts.
The response: an invitation to provide context, including any underlying health issue, and an offer of a follow-up meeting.
The support: employee assistance program availability, temporary adjustments if feasible, and any fitness-for-work clearance the role requires.
The consequences: what will happen if the pattern continues, up to and including further disciplinary action and termination.

Keep the tone neutral and assume the Fair Work Commission will read it one day. For small business employers there is a sharper reason to get this right. Under the Small Business Fair Dismissal Code, a dismissal for conduct or capacity, anything short of serious misconduct, is only fair if the employee was warned that they were at risk of dismissal and given a reason and a chance to improve. A written warning that does exactly that is the documentary backbone of a Code-compliant dismissal later.

Step 5: Issue the letter and set the monitoring period

Hand the letter over in person where possible, or schedule a follow-up meeting to confirm the employee understands it. Then set a defined monitoring window, typically four to eight weeks depending on the pattern, and say so in the letter. Apply the same standards to everyone on the team. Nothing undermines an attendance process faster than a warning issued to one employee for behaviour that is tolerated from another.

Step 6: Monitor, document and decide the next step

Track every absence in the monitoring window and file everything: the letter, the file note of the meeting, evidence received, and any further absences. What happens next depends on the reason for the continuing pattern:

Attendance improves: the process ends. Keep the records, take no further action.
Notification and evidence rules keep being breached: further disciplinary action may be appropriate.
The absences look like an ongoing capacity issue linked to a medical condition: you may need a medical capacity process and reasonable adjustments before any termination is considered.
You suspect falsified evidence: that is misconduct, and it needs a proper investigation, not assumptions.

One temptation to resist is standing the employee down without pay while you investigate. Section 524 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) only allows unpaid stand down in narrow circumstances, such as industrial action, a breakdown of machinery, or a stoppage of work outside the employer's control. Attendance issues are not among them. Directing the employee not to attend on full pay while enquiries are made is usually the safer course, and it should still be run past a lawyer.

Where employers get held up

Most attendance warnings go wrong in one of four recurring ways, so check your draft against each of these:

Writing before the meeting: a warning that arrives before the employee has heard the concern fails the procedural fairness test at the first hurdle.
Asking for a diagnosis: demanding detailed medical information goes beyond the reasonable person standard and creates privacy and discrimination exposure.
Warning for being sick: framing the letter as punishment for taking leave invites a general protections claim; the letter should target notification, evidence and operational impact.
No defined monitoring period: an open-ended warning is neither fair nor useful. Set a window and stick to it.

Where professional help is usually required

An employment lawyer's role here is not just to write the letter for you, though they can. It is to stress-test the process around it: checking the letter against your award or agreement and the National Employment Standards, identifying adverse action exposure where the employee has a disability, has been injured at work or has recently complained, advising on what medical evidence you can lawfully request, and mapping the escalation path if the situation moves toward termination. If the case does reach the Commission, the same advice underpins an unfair dismissal or general protections defence, including the 21-day window that applies to unfair dismissal applications and the six-month minimum employment period, extended to 12 months for small business employers, that gates eligibility in the first place.

What decides whether this process holds up

The warning letter is not what saves the process. The process is what saves the letter. When the Commission assesses a dismissal, it asks whether there was a valid reason, whether the employee was notified of that reason, and whether they were given a genuine opportunity to respond. A letter written after the decision to dismiss was already made is a liability dressed up as paperwork. A letter that follows a recorded pattern, a real conversation, a considered response and a defined monitoring period is the one that survives scrutiny, because it shows the decision was made last, not first.

Run the process in order: records first, then the legal frame, then the meeting, then the letter, then the monitoring window. Keep every document. Apply the rules to everyone. And if the pattern is tangled up with a health condition, a workplace injury or a recent complaint, slow down and get advice before the letter goes out.