Payday Super
Calculator AU 2026-27

Super must be RECEIVED by your employee's fund — with enough information for the fund to allocate it to their member account — within 7 business days after each payday. Two details trip people up. First, it is the date the fund receives and can allocate the money, not the date you send it, so clearing time through a clearing house sits inside your 7 days, not outside it. Second, "business day" excludes Saturdays, Sundays and any public holiday that applies across an entire State, the ACT or the Northern Territory — and a whole-of-state holiday anywhere in Australia stops the clock for every employer in the country, wherever you are. Western Australia's King's Birthday on 28 September 2026 extends a Sydney employer's deadline by a day. A holiday covering only part of a state — the Royal Hobart Show, Brisbane's Ekka Wednesday, the Northern Territory regional show days — does not; those are still business days. A new employee's first contribution gets 20 business days instead of 7.

Qualifying earnings is the new SG base introduced with Payday Super from 1 July 2026. It brings together ordinary time earnings and the other amounts that were previously counted in an employee's salary or wages for super guarantee purposes — including all commissions and salary-sacrificed amounts. In practice the base is broader and simpler than the old OTE-versus-salary-and-wages split, which is exactly why it was changed: the two-base system was a persistent source of underpayment. Super guarantee is 12% of qualifying earnings (the rate reached 12% on 1 July 2025 and is not scheduled to rise further). If your payroll system still calculates on ordinary time earnings alone, check whether commissions and sacrificed amounts are being picked up — that gap becomes a shortfall on every single payday now, not once a quarter.

The SGC has been rebuilt for Payday Super and it is materially more expensive than the old quarterly version. Four components apply for each qualifying-earnings day: (1) the individual final SG shortfall — the super that did not arrive; (2) individual notional earnings — interest on that shortfall at the ATO's general interest charge rate, accruing daily from payday until the money is paid or the ATO assesses you; (3) an administrative uplift; and (4) any choice loading of 25% where contributions went to the wrong fund. The old flat $20 per employee per quarter administration component is gone. The administrative uplift starts at 60% of the shortfall plus notional earnings, drops by 20 percentage points if you have had no ATO-initiated SGC assessment in the previous two years, and drops further if you make a voluntary disclosure — potentially to nil. On a $720 shortfall paid ten days late by an employer with a clean two-year history and no disclosure, the SGC is roughly $1,011: the $720 itself, about $2 of notional earnings, and about $289 of uplift.

Partly, and this is a genuine change. From 1 July 2026 the SG shortfall, the notional earnings component, the administrative uplift and the late contributions themselves are tax deductible. Under the old regime the entire SGC was non-deductible, which is what made a small late payment so punitive. What stays non-deductible is the general interest charge that accrues on an unpaid SGC assessment after the ATO issues it, and the additional late-payment penalties (25% or 50%) that can be imposed on top. The practical read: being a few days late is now an expensive but survivable cost of doing business, while ignoring an ATO assessment is still the thing that compounds against you. This calculator estimates the SGC before tax — it does not model the deduction, which depends on your entity's tax position.

Notional earnings are interest on the unpaid super, calculated for each employee by applying the ATO's general interest charge rate to that employee's base SG shortfall and accruing it daily across the late period. The GIC rate is reset every quarter: for the quarter beginning 1 July 2026 the annual rate is 11.43%. This calculator compounds daily at that rate — GIC itself compounds daily under the tax law — from the day after payday until the date the fund receives the money or the ATO assesses. Because the GIC rate changes quarterly, a shortfall spanning several quarters accrues at more than one rate, and the ATO's own assessment is the authoritative figure. Notional earnings are usually small in dollar terms on a single late payday; the administrative uplift is what actually hurts.

Yes — and it is the single most common misreading of the rule. For Payday Super, a business day is any day that is not a Saturday, not a Sunday, and not a public holiday applying across an entire State, the ACT or the Northern Territory. The test is whether the holiday is whole-of-state somewhere in Australia, not whether it applies to you. So Picnic Day in the Northern Territory on 3 August 2026, King's Birthday in Western Australia on 28 September 2026, and Melbourne Cup Day in Victoria on 3 November 2026 each remove a business day from every Australian employer's count. The mirror image also holds: a holiday that only covers part of a state does not count for anyone, including the employers inside it — a Hobart employer gets no extra day for the Royal Hobart Show. This calculator applies the whole-of-state list and shows you exactly which days it skipped.

Time in the market, which is worth more than it sounds. Under the old quarterly rules an employer could legally hold super for up to 28 days after the end of a quarter, so a contribution earned in the first week of a quarter might not reach the fund for about four months. Under Payday Super the same money is invested within 7 business days. Averaged across a quarter, contributions now land roughly two months earlier than they used to. Compounded over a full career at a 7% return, that shifts the final balance by about 1.2% — for someone retiring with $500,000 of employer contributions and growth, on the order of $6,000. The bigger effect is not the compounding at all: it is visibility. Super that should appear within 7 business days of every payday makes underpayment obvious in weeks rather than years, which is why the reform was introduced — the ATO estimated billions in unpaid super each year under the quarterly system.