Payday Super: the four things it breaks in your payroll

What actually changed?

Five things at once, which is why it feels bigger than a date on a calendar.

• The deadline. Contributions must be received by the employee's fund within seven business days after you pay them, with enough information for the fund to allocate the money to the right member account. Received, not sent.
• The base. Super is now calculated on qualifying earnings rather than ordinary time earnings. Qualifying earnings bring in all commissions, salary sacrifice contributions and other amounts that already counted as salary or wages for super guarantee. The rate is still 12%.
• The reporting. Single Touch Payroll now carries both qualifying earnings and the super liability.
• The clearing house. The ATO's free Small Business Superannuation Clearing House closed to new users on 1 October 2025 and shut entirely on 30 June 2026. It is not accessible.
• What being late costs. The super guarantee charge is assessed by the ATO rather than self-assessed by you, so there is no statement to lodge. It is calculated on qualifying earnings, carries interest that compounds daily at the general interest charge rate, and adds an administrative uplift. It is now tax deductible, which the old charge was not. Penalties are 25% or 50% of the unpaid charge, depending on whether you have been penalised before.

Who you pay super for has not changed, and nor has the percentage.

Why is seven business days tighter than it sounds?

Because the clock measures arrival at the fund, and most of the elapsed time sits inside systems you do not control. Your payroll run, your bank, your clearing house and the receiving fund each take a slice. If your provider takes three business days to pass a payment through, your real margin for anything going wrong is four days.

The definition of a business day narrows it further. Any day that is a public holiday for the whole of any Australian state or territory does not count as a business day, even if the holiday is nowhere near you and your office was open. A holiday covering only part of a state, like a single city's show day, still counts as a business day.

Work out your own margin rather than trusting an average. It takes about twenty minutes.

1. Pick your last three pay runs.
2. Note the date the money actually left your account for each one.
3. Find the date each fund received it. Your clearing house confirmations or the fund's reporting will show this.
4. Count the business days between the two dates, skipping weekends and any nationwide state or territory holiday.
5. Subtract that number from seven.

What is left is your margin: how much approval delay, bank cut-off, sick payroll officer or bounced member detail you can absorb before a contribution lands late. If the answer is one or two days, the process is running on luck. If the answer is negative, you have been late since July and did not know.

The New Payments Platform is now available for super contributions and can get money to a fund the same day, though not every provider uses it. Worth asking yours directly rather than assuming.

What does per payday super do to cash flow?

It moves the timing, not the total. Over a year you owe the same amount. What changes is that money which used to sit in your account until the 28th of the month after the quarter now leaves within days of each pay run.

The arithmetic is one line. Take your annual wage bill, multiply by 12%, divide by the number of pay runs you do in a year. That is what now leaves per cycle. Then look at what used to leave four times a year and ask whether the quarterly figure was quietly acting as working capital. For a lot of small firms it was, and nobody wrote that down anywhere.

Which exceptions are worth knowing?

Four, and they explain most of the confusing due dates.

• A new employee's first contribution gets 20 business days after that payday instead of seven. The same applies to the first contribution to a new fund for an existing employee who has changed funds.
• Out-of-cycle payments such as a bonus, a commission run or a back payment are not due on their own clock. The super for them rides along with the contribution for the employee's next regular payday.
• The bunching rule covers the overlap. If a later due date for one payday falls after the ordinary due date for the next one, both are due on that later date.
• Exceptional circumstances such as a natural disaster or a widespread IT outage can extend deadlines to 20 business days, but only where the ATO issues a determination covering a class of employers. You self-assess whether it applies to you and keep the records. There is nothing to apply for, and it cannot be issued for one business.

Which parts can a system take over?

The mechanical parts, which is most of the volume. The judgement stays with a person.

A system can reasonably handle:

• Calculating on the right base, once your payroll software is configured for commissions and salary sacrifice rather than plain ordinary time earnings.
• Verifying member details before the pay run. SuperStream now supports a member verification request, so you can confirm a fund will accept a contribution before you send it rather than finding out through a rejection.
• Triggering the contribution at the same moment as the pay run, instead of leaving it as a separate task somebody remembers later.
• Tracking the exceptions above, so a new starter's 20 day window and a bonus riding to the next payday are not worked out by hand each time.
• Watching for confirmation of receipt, not just dispatch, and raising an exception when a fund has not confirmed inside your margin.
• Keeping the record of what was paid, when it was received and what the fund said.

What a person keeps: deciding what to do when the cash is not there on the day, fixing a rejected contribution, judging whether a worker is an employee for super purposes, and making any disclosure to the ATO.

The single highest value change in that list is the last automated one. Most payroll processes confirm that a payment was sent and stop there. Under a seven day rule, dispatch is not the event that matters.

What to do next

Start with the measurement, because you cannot fix a margin you have not counted.

1. Run the five step margin calculation above on your last three pay runs this week.
2. Check what your payroll software is calculating on. If you have commission or salary sacrifice arrangements and nobody has looked at the configuration since June, that is the most likely place a figure is quietly wrong.
3. Confirm what replaced the clearing house, and ask that provider two questions: how long they take to reach a fund, and whether they use the New Payments Platform.
4. Add a receipt check to the pay run, so an unconfirmed contribution surfaces as an exception rather than as a letter from the ATO months later.
5. If your margin came out at zero or negative, raise it with your registered agent now.

None of this needs a payroll replacement. It usually needs the same run to fire the contribution, a check that the money arrived, and someone told when it did not. That is a narrow, boring build, and it is the difference between a deadline you meet and one you find out about afterwards.