Since 1 July 2026 your employees’ super has to reach their fund within seven business days of payday. If yours goes out on payday and lands without an error, there is nothing here for you. If you have missed a few, the ATO is running a first year approach until 30 June 2027 that turns on what you do next rather than on the mistake itself.
First, who this is not about
Most employers we deal with are already fine, and did not have to do anything clever to get there.
- Your payroll software pays super on payday and you get no error messages. You are done. The software was updated for this months ago and it is doing the work.
- You have no employees. Nothing here applies to you.
- You pay a few days after payday and it still arrives inside seven business days. That is on time. Tight, but on time.
Read on if you are still thinking in quarters, if you used to use the Small Business Super Clearing House, if you pay contractors, or if you have had a payment bounce back from a fund and have not sorted it out.
One thing worth saying plainly up front, because it catches people out. Who you pay super for has not changed. That still includes contractors paid mainly for their labour, whatever their invoice says and whatever ABN they quote. If that is news, start with our note on who counts as an employee for super and come back.
What actually changed on 1 July
More than the timing, which is the part most of the coverage stopped at.
| Until 30 June 2026 | From 1 July 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Deadline | Received by the fund within 28 days of the end of the quarter | Received by the fund within 7 business days after payday |
| Calculated on | Ordinary time earnings | Qualifying earnings, which adds all commissions and salary sacrifice contributions |
| Rate | 12% | 12%, unchanged |
| Reported through STP | Ordinary time earnings or super liability | Qualifying earnings and super liability, both |
| If you are late | You worked out the charge yourself and lodged a statement | The ATO works it out and sends you an assessment |
| Interest on the charge | 10% a year, flat | Compounds daily at the general interest charge rate |
| Is the charge deductible | No | Yes, every part of it |
| Penalties on top | Up to 200% of the charge | 25% or 50%, depending on whether you have been penalised before |
| Clearing house | The ATO ran a free one for small business | Closed. It is gone |
Two of those are quietly in your favour. The charge is now tax deductible, which it never used to be, and the maximum penalty came down a long way. The interest is the one that got worse, because daily compounding on an old debt adds up in a way a flat 10% did not.
The seven days are not yours to use
This is the single thing we have had to explain most often, so it is worth being blunt about.
Payday is day zero. The clock does not stop when the money leaves your account. It stops when the fund has received it with enough information to put it in the right member’s account. Everything in between, your clearing house, the fund’s processing, a wrong member number, is inside your seven days.
One of the ATO’s own worked examples is an employer who pays on day seven without allowing for clearing house processing. The ATO’s verdict is one word: late. Not nearly on time. Late.
So the seven days are not a payment window you can plan around. They are the buffer that absorbs a rejected contribution or a bank holiday. Pay on payday and the buffer is there when something goes wrong. Pay on day six and you have spent it before you needed it.
There are a few exceptions where you get longer, new employees being the common one, but do not build a process around the exceptions.
The three zones you can be in this year
The ATO set out its first year approach in PCG 2026/1. It only applies to paydays between 1 July 2026 and 30 June 2027, and it sorts employers who have got something wrong into three groups. If everything you pay is on time, in full and to the right fund, none of this touches you at all.
| Zone | What puts you there | What the ATO does |
|---|---|---|
| Low | You tried to pay on time and for the right amount, something went wrong at the fund’s end, you fixed it as soon as you reasonably could, and no super is left unpaid for that payday | Nothing. It has said it will not spend compliance resources reviewing you |
| Medium | You do not meet the low test, but you cleared the unpaid super within 28 days after the end of the quarter the payday fell in | You may be looked at, but behind the high risk cases |
| High | Everything else. In particular, super still unpaid 28 days after the end of that quarter | Top of the list for compliance action |
Notice what the old quarterly deadline has become. It is no longer when your super is due. It is the line between being a lower priority and being a target. That is a useful thing to know if you are behind right now.
You can also move between the zones during the year. Getting it wrong in August and then running clean since does not leave you marked for the rest of the year.
Why you are suddenly hearing about super from two years ago
If a letter has turned up about quarters you had stopped thinking about, you are not being singled out. We are seeing them across our own client base, and they have been enough of a pattern that the ATO was questioned about them at a Senate Economics Committee hearing on 28 October 2026.
The letters come from matching what you reported through Single Touch Payroll against what your employees’ funds reported receiving. Any gap will do it, including a payment that arrived a day or two late.
A nudge letter is not an assessment and it is not a penalty. The ATO has said so plainly: it does not issue automated super guarantee assessments, a nudge letter does not impose one, and it does not automatically turn into an audit. It is the ATO showing you what its data says and asking you to fix it or explain it.
So do not pay it just because it arrived, and do not put it in a drawer either. Check it against your own payment records first. The ATO’s data can be wrong, and a gap it thinks it has found may be a reporting error rather than unpaid super.
Then there is the part that is genuinely hard, and it is worth knowing before you ring anyone. For a quarter before 1 July 2026, paying the super late did not fix it. The charge crystallised the day you missed the quarterly deadline. A late payment across to the fund could be offset against that charge, but only if you lodged the statement, and the interest and the administration fee stayed either way. That is why employers who are certain they paid their super are getting letters saying they did not. Both things are true at once.
Those old quarters also sit under the old penalty regime, where the maximum was 200% of the charge rather than the 25% or 50% that applies from July. That number is doing a lot of work in the news coverage at the moment. It is a maximum, not a default, and it can be reduced. What moves it is lodging before you are audited and being able to show what happened, which is the same thing that helps you everywhere else on this page.
We wrote about how the ATO finds missed super before any of this started, and the mechanism has only got sharper. Under the old system the ATO largely had to wait for a quarterly statement, which the employers most likely to be behind were the least likely to lodge. From 1 July 2026 you report qualifying earnings and your super liability through STP every single payday, and the fund reports what it actually received. The gap the ATO used to go looking for is now reported from both ends, every fortnight.
That is also why the ATO no longer asks you to self assess the charge. It does not need you to.
If you have already missed some, do this
None of it is clever and all of it helps. In roughly this order.
Pay it to the fund now
Not to the ATO, and not once an assessment turns up. Paying the super across to the employee’s fund before the ATO issues an assessment reduces what you end up owing. Waiting does the opposite.
Write down what happened
What went wrong, when you noticed, what you did. The whole first year approach turns on whether you were trying and whether you fixed it quickly, and that is a question about evidence. A short note written now is worth more than a good memory next year.
Fix the process before the next payday
A single missed payday that you corrected is a very different conversation from the same error repeating for six months. The ATO says so directly: repeated late payments increase your risk, and updating your process can lower it again.
Work out your zone before you lodge anything
You can lodge a voluntary disclosure statement, and lodging early reduces the charge. But the ATO has said it will not review low risk employers even if they lodge one. Decide which zone you are in first, because for some employers the honest answer is that there is nothing to disclose.
Keep your records of how you worked out qualifying earnings too, including any corrections for an earlier payday. Qualifying earnings is a wider base than ordinary time earnings, and the arithmetic is where the quiet shortfalls are now.
The one that catches Albury and Wodonga employers
Crossing the border does not change any of this, but having staff on both sides of it usually means more than one payroll run, and more than one pay cycle is where paydays get missed. If you pay your office staff monthly and your crews fortnightly, you now have two separate seven day clocks running, not one quarterly deadline covering the lot.
The same goes for anyone who has been paying super as a single quarterly lump out of habit while the payroll software was quietly set up to do it properly. Check which one is actually happening.
If you think you are behind
Bring us your last six months of pay runs and we will tell you where you actually stand. Specifically, we will:
- check whether your contributions were received by the funds inside seven business days, which is not the same as when they left your account
- check your qualifying earnings calculation against what you were using before July, because that base got wider
- work out which risk zone you are in, and whether a voluntary disclosure helps you or is simply unnecessary
- tell you what to fix before the next payday, in the order that matters
