Severance package

The statutory floor differs wildly by country

The same restructure produces different mandatory costs depending on geography: Australia's redundancy scale runs 4 to 16 weeks by service; the UK adds age-weighted statutory redundancy pay; Ontario stacks termination and severance pay to a possible 34 statutory weeks, with common law reasonable notice above; New Zealand and Singapore mandate no severance amount at all, only process and norms. The country terms linked below carry the detail; the planning point is that a multi-country exit plan has no single formula.

What sits above the floor

The negotiated layer: ex gratia amounts (often expressed in weeks or months of pay), payment in lieu of the full notice period, benefits continuation, accelerated or preserved equity vesting, agreed references and announcement language, and outplacement support. In exchange, employers almost always want a deed of release settling claims, and the enforceability rules for those vary by jurisdiction, which is where legal advice belongs on both sides.

Designing packages that end things well

Consistency beats generosity: packages that vary with negotiating stamina leak, and the differences do more damage than the average level ever saves. A published framework (statutory entitlements plus a formula-based ex gratia scale, flexed only for defined circumstances) is defensible to those leaving, explicable to those staying, and faster to execute, which matters, because the second-most expensive part of most restructures is how long they take to land.