The Executive Resignation Letter
The letter is four sentences. Everything that matters happens before you write it.
At award level, resigning badly costs you a reference. On an executive contract it costs money, and the number is usually larger than people expect — because the single variable you control, the last day, sits at the intersection of a notice clause, a vesting schedule, a long service leave threshold and a restraint. Get the order wrong and you pay for it.
Your notice is your contract. It is not two weeks, and it is not the NES.
The National Employment Standards notice periods are an obligation on the employer when they terminate. They do not set what you owe on the way out.
Most executives are award-free, and the Fair Work Ombudsman is explicit about what that means: “An employee who isn’t covered by an award or agreement doesn’t have to give notice to an employer before resigning. However, an employment contract may require that employee to give notice.”
So your obligation is whatever the contract says — nothing more, nothing less. Executive contracts routinely run one to six months, frequently with a garden leave clause the employer can invoke at its discretion. Nominate four weeks when the contract says three months and you have breached it in your own resignation letter, in the first paragraph.
Read the clause before you pick the date. Then read the garden leave clause, because it determines whether those three months are worked or spent at home unable to start anywhere else.
The date is the only thing in the letter worth negotiating hard, and it is the one people choose last
Work it out in this order:
- Long service leave threshold. State legislation, and the thresholds differ. In Victoria, under the Long Service Leave Act 2018, “an employee with at least 7 years’ of continuous service with one employer is entitled to receive – in full – payment for any long service leave (LSL) not taken” on the day employment ends, accruing at one week for every 60 weeks. Finish at six years and eleven months and you have forfeited the lot.
- Vesting. Unvested long-term incentives and deferred short-term incentives almost always turn on a good leaver clause and a vesting date. A final day a fortnight before a tranche vests is the most expensive sentence most executives ever write, and it is usually written in a hurry on a Sunday night.
- Contractual notice, from the clause you have just read.
- The date you would prefer, which is the one most people start with.
Get the vesting schedule from the company secretary before you have the conversation, not after.
Do not name your next employer
Post-employment restraints still bind executives, and the reform under way does not change that.
Treasury’s position is that the Government announced reforms in the 2025–26 Budget banning “non-compete clauses for low- and middle-income workers”, and that “the reforms should take effect from 2027, following consultation and legislation passing parliament.”
Read that carefully. It is aimed below executive pay, it is not law yet, and it will not retrospectively release you from a restraint you have already signed.
Writing your destination into a document your current employer keeps hands them the where and the when, for free, on the day their interest in enforcing that restraint is at its highest. Tell them in the conversation if you choose to. Do not file it.
Do not negotiate in the letter
Garden leave, the treatment of your restraint, an early release, the wording of the internal announcement, the reference — all negotiable, none of them belonging in the letter.
A letter that resigns and asks is a letter that resigns. The resignation takes effect on its own terms; the requests do not. Have that conversation separately, and record what is agreed in a deed rather than an email.
You do not control the announcement
If your employer is listed, the timing is not yours to choose. ASX Listing Rule 3.16.1 requires an entity to tell ASX of “a change of chair, director, CEO, CFO or secretary”, and the company decides when and how that is said.
A letter drafted as a farewell — copied to the executive team, or written for an audience — takes that control away from the people who will be asked to describe your departure to the market and to the next board that calls them.
The letter
Dear [name],
I am writing to confirm my resignation from the position of [title]. In accordance with clause [x] of my employment contract, my final day of employment will be [date].
I will do everything I can to support an orderly handover before then.
Yours sincerely,
[Your name]
That is the document. Signed, sent to the person you report to, copied to the company secretary or the head of people.
Add a line of thanks if it is true. Leave it out if it is not — a paragraph of warmth about a relationship that was not warm reads worse than silence, and the people who receive it can tell.
What we would do
Get the contract out first and read three clauses: notice, garden leave and restraint. Get the vesting schedule. Work out the long service leave date.
Then pick the final day, in the order above. Then have the conversation — in person with the person you report to, before anyone else hears it. Then send four sentences.
If the resignation is the front end of a move rather than the end of a story, the work worth doing is on the version of your career you will put in front of the next board, and that is easier to write while the numbers are still in front of you than six months after you hand back the laptop.
If you are not on an individual contract — if an award or enterprise agreement covers you — the rules on notice and final pay are different, and the general version of this is here.
Sources
- Fair Work Ombudsman, Resignation — read 19 August 2026.
- Business Victoria, Long service leave: employment termination, under the Long Service Leave Act 2018 (Vic) — read 19 August 2026.
- The Treasury, Non-compete clauses and other restraints — read 19 August 2026.
- ASX Listing Rules, Chapter 3, rule 3.16.1 — read 19 August 2026.
