You might be entitled to paid leave from work and be completely unaware of it.

Some employers offer paid days off for staff to volunteer in the community — and it could be in your contract, too.

Under the National Employment Standards, community service leave allows employees to skip work when participating in a specified community service activity, jury duty or voluntary emergency management activities.

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Voluntary emergency management activities include volunteering in the State Emergency Service or rural fire organisations and other recognised emergency response bodies.

The leave is unpaid, except for jury duty, during which full-time and part-time employees get make up pay for the first 10 days of selection and duty.

However, some employers also choose to offer volunteer days for workers to invest their time with charities and other causes.

In these cases, employees can apply for paid leave to volunteer with registered charitable groups and not-for-profit organisations.

Company rules will outline exactly which groups and organisations are included and what the volunteering must involve, so check your contract and ask your manager for more details.

At least 78 per cent of companies have a volunteering program, with more than half intending to increase the levels of participation, according to Volunteering Australia’s latest Corporate Volunteering Snapshot.

Only 15 per cent of employees participated in volunteering in 2018, up 3.7 per cent from 2006.

The snapshot indicated while corporate volunteers contributed more than one million hours to the community in 2018, there was an additional 500 FTE of corporate volunteering capacity that was not being used.

While companies will ultimately decide where their employees can spend paid volunteer time off, SEEK suggests there is a volunteer role to suit every lifestyle.

For students and people new to the workforce, it recommends people look for skilled volunteering roles to build skills, networks and confidence.

Part-time workers have the chance to offer organisations consistency and may be better suited to longer-term, fixed ongoing volunteer positions.

Time-poor full-time workers should look to their employee volunteering programs to figure out if they can give up time during work hours, SEEK suggests.