Most conversations about sick leave in Australia focus on whether someone is taking too much of it. The data tells a different story. Between casual employees with no paid entitlements at all and the sheer number of people who go to work sick rather than take a day off, the bigger problem is that too many Australians are not taking the leave they are entitled to. Here is what the numbers actually show, and how that connects to getting a medical certificate.
1 in 5 Australian Employees Have No Paid Sick Leave
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2.6 million employees, around 22% of all employees nationally, had no paid sick leave entitlements as of August 2024. This is largely a proxy for casual employment, where staff are paid a loading in place of leave entitlements but still get sick like everyone else.
For this group, the decision to take a day off is a direct trade-off against income. A medical certificate does not create paid leave that does not exist, but it does provide the documented evidence casual workers often still need to support an unpaid personal or carer's leave request, or to satisfy a workplace policy, without having to book and wait for an in-person appointment first.
Presenteeism Costs More Than Absenteeism
Medibank's long-running "Sick at Work" research puts the annual cost of presenteeism, employees attending work while unwell and operating well below capacity, at around $35 billion to the Australian economy, roughly $4,000 per employee per year. That is a larger figure than the direct cost of absenteeism, because presenteeism is rarely tracked or budgeted for the way sick leave is.
The pattern is consistent across most workplace health research: employees are more likely to under-use sick leave than over-use it. Reducing the friction involved in getting a certificate, no waiting room, no half-day booked off work just to see a GP, addresses one of the practical reasons people push through illness instead of resting properly.
Telehealth Has Settled Into Everyday Healthcare
22.5% of Australians aged 15 and over had at least one telehealth consultation for their own health in 2024-25. That is down from the pandemic peak of 30.8% in 2021-22, but it remains well above pre-pandemic levels, and 18.5% of Australians had a telehealth consultation specifically with a GP in the past 12 months.
The takeaway is that telehealth, including online medical assessments for certificates, is no longer a temporary pandemic-era workaround. It has settled into how a meaningful share of Australians access routine healthcare, alongside, not instead of, in-person care.
If cost, time, or availability is the reason you have been putting off seeing someone about a medical certificate, Med2Go removes the two biggest barriers: no appointment to book and no waiting room. Certificates are issued by AHPRA-registered clinicians, typically within hours.
How Med2Go Helps
- Complete the online health questionnaire (10 minutes).
- Submit payment (from $12 for a 1-day certificate).
- An AHPRA-registered clinician reviews your assessment.
- Your certificate is emailed as a PDF, typically within hours.