Payday Super is the federal law that requires Australian employers to pay super guarantee at the same time as wages, not once a quarter. It applies to qualifying earnings paid on or after 1 July 2026. Each contribution must be received by the employee's super fund within 7 business days of payday (ATO, 2026).
This is law, not a proposal. The Treasury Laws Amendment (Payday Superannuation) Act 2025 and the companion Superannuation Guarantee Charge Amendment Act 2025 both received Royal Assent on 6 November 2025 (Parliament of Australia, 2025). Supporting regulations followed in early 2026, announced by Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino (Treasury, 2026). Almost four months into the new system, the real questions for a design studio, a venue with casual bar staff or a production company paying crew after a shoot are practical ones. What does each pay run now trigger? Where does it tend to go wrong? And how is the ATO treating mistakes in the first year?
Under the old rules, super guarantee (SG, the compulsory super employers pay for eligible workers) was generally due 28 days after the end of each quarter (Senate Hansard, 2025). That gave small businesses a buffer. Wages went out weekly or fortnightly, and super could be sorted in one batch a few weeks after the quarter closed.
That buffer is gone. Employers now work out, pay and report super on every payday, whether the business pays weekly, fortnightly or monthly. The policy reason is the size of the unpaid super problem. The ATO estimated the net SG gap at $6.2 billion in 2022-23, or around 6% of the theoretical SG liability (ATO, 2025). Treasury estimated in 2023 that around 8.9 million Australians would benefit from the reform (Treasury, 2023).
Here is how the main pieces line up.
| Element | Before | Under Payday Super |
|---|---|---|
| When SG is due | Quarterly due dates | Every payday, measured from the day wages are paid |
| When a payment counts | When paid by the due date | When the fund receives it with enough detail to allocate it to the member |
| Earnings base | Ordinary time earnings | Qualifying earnings |
| Super guarantee charge | Worked out per quarter | Worked out per payday |
| Is the charge deductible? | No | Yes, for paydays under the new system |
| STP reporting | Ordinary time earnings or super liability | Year-to-date qualifying earnings and super liability every pay event |
| Government clearing house | Small Business Superannuation Clearing House available | Closed |
For a creative business with lumpy cash flow, this is the most important change. Super is now a cost of every pay run, in the same way PAYG withholding is (the tax taken out of wages and sent to the ATO). Super can no longer be treated as a quarterly bill to plan for later.
For the 2026-27 income year, SG is 12% of "qualifying earnings" (ATO About Payday Super, 2026). Qualifying earnings, or QE, is a new concept. It starts with ordinary time earnings, which covers wages, paid leave, allowances and bonuses. It then adds all commissions, amounts that would have been qualifying earnings had they not been salary sacrificed to super, and certain payments to people who fall within the "extended employee" definition.
That last part matters a lot in creative industries. The extended definition covers contractors paid mainly for their labour. Think of a freelance illustrator, a session player or an editor who is engaged for their own work and labelled a contractor. The SG legislation has also long included people paid to perform or present in music, entertainment and similar activities within its extended employee definition, and the ATO explains how it works in Taxation Ruling TR 2023/4. Holding an ABN does not take someone outside these rules. Whether a particular arrangement falls inside the definition depends on the facts, and a registered tax agent can confirm how it applies.
Agencies and studios that rely on a pool of freelancers face the biggest exposure here. Under quarterly payments, a misclassified contractor was a problem that built up slowly. Under per-payday rules, each invoice paid to someone who is legally an employee for SG purposes creates a separate super obligation with its own deadline.
The payday is called the "QE day" and counts as day 0. The business-day count starts on the next business day. Weekends and public holidays fall outside the count. A day that is a public holiday across the whole of any state or territory is excluded for every employer, wherever the business is based, while a holiday that covers only part of a state still counts as a business day (ATO payment deadlines guidance, 2026). So a given payday has the same deadline for every employer in Australia.
The detail that trips businesses up is where the deadline is measured. The contribution must be received by the fund with enough information to allocate it to the right member account. If a clearing house holds the money for a few days, or a new casual gave a wrong member number and the fund bounces the payment, the contribution is late even though the employer pressed "pay" in good time (ATO payment deadlines guidance, 2026).
Clicking pay is the start of the job, not the end of it. Under Payday Super, super only counts once the fund can match the money to a person.
Some situations get a longer deadline, including certain cases involving new employees. The ATO's payment deadlines page sets out those periods, and they are worth checking before relying on them.
This uses round hypothetical numbers. Real outcomes depend on individual circumstances. Say a studio pays a casual motion designer $2,000 of qualifying earnings on a Friday. At the SG rate above, the super is $240. Friday is the QE day (day 0). Counting from Monday as day one, and assuming no public holidays, the deadline falls on the Tuesday of the second week after payday (day 7), eleven calendar days after payday (Mon 1, Tue 2 ... Fri 5, then Mon 6, Tue 7). By that Tuesday, the $240 needs to be in the designer's fund and allocated to their account. If the studio runs a second pay run for event crew the following Wednesday, that payday has its own separate deadline. Businesses that pay one-off gig fees through several pay runs a month can end up with three or four deadlines running at once.
Single Touch Payroll (STP) is the system that sends payroll information to the ATO from your software each time you pay staff. Under Payday Super, each STP pay event has to report every employee's year-to-date qualifying earnings and year-to-date super liability (ATO employer checklist, 2026). Employers could not report QE before the start date and kept reporting ordinary time earnings or super liability until then.
The ATO has allowed a transition period. Employers who were not ready on day one are expected to start reporting QE as soon as they can. From 1 July 2027, the ATO says it will reject STP reports that do not include both amounts, and penalties may apply (ATO STP guidance, 2026).
The practical risk sits in pay item mapping. Payroll software, including Xero, calculates QE from the categories each pay item is assigned to. An allowance for carrying gear, a commission on print sales or a performance bonus put into the wrong category will push the wrong QE figure into STP and the wrong super amount to the fund. Both errors then repeat on every pay run. A review of pay item settings is the cheapest fix available during the transition year, because a mapping error is corrected once and stops repeating.
Many small creative businesses used the Small Business Superannuation Clearing House to send one payment that was split across staff funds. It stopped taking new users on 1 October 2025. Existing users had access until 30 June 2026, and it closed permanently from 1 July 2026 (ATO changeover guidance, 2026). Former users now pay super through a commercial clearing house, a payment service offered by a super fund, or the super payment function built into their payroll software.
We are not comparing providers here. The question that matters for compliance is how long each option takes to get money into the fund and allocated. A route that sat comfortably inside a quarterly deadline can sit uncomfortably close to a per-payday one. Processing times, and what happens when a fund rejects a payment, are worth understanding before the next pay run.
Onboarding has become a compliance step as well. Accurate member details, choice-of-fund forms and stapled fund lookups for new starters all affect whether the fund can allocate the first contribution on time. Casual crews that change from one production to the next carry the highest risk of a typo in a member number.
When SG is not paid correctly and on time, the employer owes the super guarantee charge (SGC). It is now worked out per QE day and has four parts:
The administrative uplift is 60% of the combined shortfall and notional earnings. It drops by 20 percentage points if the ATO has not assessed or estimated an SGC liability for the employer in the previous 24 months. Voluntary disclosure can reduce it by up to a further 40 percentage points, depending on how quickly the employer discloses (ATO SGC guidance, 2026).
The twist most coverage skips is that the SGC is now tax-deductible for QE days under the new system. The old SGC was not deductible at all. The general interest charge on late SGC payments and late-payment penalties are still not deductible (ATO SGC guidance, 2026). Deductibility does not make paying late a sensible plan. Paying a late contribution reduces the shortfall, but late contributions cannot reduce the SGC to nil, because notional earnings and the uplift still apply (ATO PCG 2026/1, 2026). A deduction softens the cost of a genuine mistake. It does not refund it.
PCG 2026/1 sets out a risk-based approach for the first year. The ATO will focus on medium- and high-risk employers and generally won't spend compliance resources on low-risk ones (ATO PCG 2026/1, 2026). An employer is treated as low risk for a payday if it tried to pay the right amount on time, ran into a payment, information or allocation problem, fixed it as soon as reasonably practicable, and left no unpaid SG for that payday.
Low risk does not make an employer immune. Any SGC that arises is still owed. Low risk means the ATO is unlikely to come looking, while the legal liability stays where it is. That makes good records important. A note of when each payment left the account, when the fund rejected it and when it was fixed is the evidence that places a business on the right side of the guideline.
Payday Super is federal and works the same way in every state and territory. Payroll tax and workers compensation are different. They are run by the states and territories, and how super is treated within them varies, so the NSW position is no guide for a studio in Melbourne or Brisbane.
For the federal side, a pay-run routine under the new rules generally covers these points:
The last point matters most to creative businesses. Irregular income is normal for agencies and venues, but super now falls due on the same cycle as wages, however uneven the work is. Businesses that treat super as part of the wage cost, and not as a separate bill, tend to find the new deadlines much easier to meet.
This article is general information only, reflects the rules at the time of writing and does not take your personal circumstances into account.
If your pay runs feel more like feedback squeal than a tight rhythm section, we're happy to help you get back in time. Call the Amplify 11 team on (02) 4715 1000 or email [email protected], and we'll help keep your super on the beat and your numbers turned up to 11.
Generally yes. The ATO's changeover guidance explains that the new rules apply according to when qualifying earnings are paid, not when the work was done. A gig or shoot completed in late June but paid in July would generally fall under the per-payday system. A registered tax agent can confirm how the changeover rules apply to a particular set of pay runs.
The contribution generally counts as not received until the fund can allocate it to the member's account. The employer would usually need to correct the details and resend the payment. Under the ATO's first-year guideline, fixing the problem as soon as reasonably practicable is one of the factors in being treated as low risk, although any super guarantee charge that arises is still payable.
A sole trader who pays no employees, and no contractors who fall within the extended employee definition, generally has no super guarantee obligations to change. The rules apply to employers. Sole traders who make personal super contributions for themselves are not affected by the payday deadlines. Engaging help for a project can change that, depending on how the arrangement is structured.
The rules set a deadline that is measured from each payday. They do not stop an employer paying earlier. What matters for compliance is that the right amount for each payday reaches the fund and is allocated within the deadline. How early payments interact with a specific payroll setup is something a registered tax agent can work through with the business.
The ATO's Payday Super payment deadlines page sets out the situations that get a longer deadline, including certain cases involving new employees. Those rules have conditions attached, so it is worth reading them against the specific onboarding situation before relying on a longer period. A registered tax agent can also help interpret how they apply.
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