Abandonment of Employment

Last updated: 19 January 2026

Your employee hasn’t turned up for work; hasn’t let you know of their intentions and cannot be contacted. For a number of consecutive days. Is this abandonment of employment?

What is abandonment of employment?

Abandonment of employment is generally when an employee doesn’t:

• come to work for an unreasonable length of time
• have a reasonable excuse
• speak to their employer about being away.

Initial steps to addressing an abandonment of employment situation

The employer should make a genuine attempt to contact the employee to ascertain the reason/s for their absence from the workplace. We suggest any contact emails to the employee have automatic receipt notification activated, and you retain a record of calls or text message contact attempts.

If verbal and email contact is unsuccessful, the employer should send a letter to the employee’s last known postal address via registered post. This letter should:

• describe the employer’s attempts to contact the employee; and
• notify the employee of a specific date by which if no contact is made by the employee to explain their absence, the employer will deem the employee to have abandoned their employment and that appropriate termination payments will be made.

Any Fair Work/legal considerations to consider?

For an employee to have abandoned their employment, it must be clear that the employee has demonstrated an intention to no longer be bound by the terms of their Contract of Employment. A court or industrial tribunal is likely to focus on the likely intention of the employee rather than the period of their unexplained absence.

Should the matter make its way to the Fair Work Ombudsman, an intention to abandon employment will not lightly be found or inferred. The two key factors are:

1. that the employee has made no attempt whatsoever to contact his or her employer; and
2. the period of unauthorised and/or unexplained absence is sufficient.

Bottom line?

Prior to actioning an abandonment of employment termination, the employer should review the employee’s Contract of Employment for any applicable content. While most situations involving dismissal involve the employer checking the Award applying to the worker’s employment, Modern Awards do not contain abandonment of employment clauses. A small number of Awards did contain such clauses but the provisions stopped applying from the first full pay period on or after 20 December 2018.

Your options? Do it yourself and hope for the best or, if you prefer the concept of “better safe than sorry”, contact an experienced HR consultant like Bare Bones Consulting…we make all things HR simple for employers.