Payroll rules for Australian employers changed on 1 July 2026, and most of the expensive mistakes we now find are mistakes that did not exist before that date. If your payroll process has not been reviewed since then, it is probably wrong in at least one of the ways below.
None of these involve dishonesty. Every one of them compounds silently, every pay run, until somebody actually checks. That is usually when an employee resigns, asks a question, or the ATO writes to you.
Super is now due every payday, not every quarter
This is the big one, and it catches employers who have run payroll correctly for twenty years.
From 1 July 2026, quarterly super is gone. Contributions must be received by the employee’s super fund within 7 business days of you paying them. The day you pay is day zero. There is one exception: for a brand new employee, the first contribution has an extended deadline of 20 business days after their first payment.
Note the word received. The deadline is not the day you press pay in your software. Clearing houses and funds take time, and if the money lands on day eight the obligation is late even though you paid on day five. Build the lag into your process rather than discovering it after the fact.
When a contribution is not received in time, the super guarantee charge applies. That is not a small administrative penalty, and it is the single most avoidable cost in Australian payroll right now.
If you pay weekly, you now have roughly 52 super deadlines a year instead of four. The failure mode has changed from one missed quarter to dozens of small near misses nobody is watching. This is the thing to check first.
Super is calculated on a different base now
The earnings base changed at the same time. Ordinary time earnings and salary and wages have been replaced by a single concept, qualifying earnings, and super is 12 percent of that.
Qualifying earnings include ordinary time earnings, all commissions, salary sacrificed super contributions, and other amounts that previously counted in salary or wages for super guarantee purposes. If your payroll is still configured to the old ordinary time earnings definition, commission-paid staff and anyone salary sacrificing are the two groups most likely to be underpaid.
Underpaid super is the most expensive error in payroll because it is cumulative, it attracts the super guarantee charge, and it does not quietly go away. It gets found.
The contribution cap works differently too
The maximum contribution base, which is the earnings ceiling above which super guarantee stops applying, is now assessed across the whole year rather than quarter by quarter. For 2026-27 it is $270,830.
In practice this mostly affects high earners and anyone with irregular income such as bonus-heavy or commission-heavy roles. Under the old quarterly test, a single large quarter could hit the cap on its own. Under an annual test it is total yearly earnings that matter, so the point at which super stops moves. If you have staff anywhere near that figure, check how your software is applying it.
Your STP reporting has to carry more
From 1 July 2026 employers report the year to date amount of qualifying earnings for each employee through Single Touch Payroll every payday.
Most payroll software handles this once it is configured, which is the catch. Files that were set up years ago and never revisited are the ones filing incomplete data, and because STP submissions usually succeed without visible complaint, nobody notices. Open a recent submission and confirm qualifying earnings year to date is actually populating.
Not sure your payroll survived 1 July?
We will check your super base, your payment timing and your STP reporting, and tell you in writing what needs fixing.
Award classification, which has not changed and is still wrong
The rules above are new. This one has been quietly costing employers money for years.
Most underpayments we find are not rate errors, they are classification errors. Someone was hired at a level, gained experience and responsibility, and was never moved up. The rate applied is correct for the level recorded and the level recorded stopped being true two years ago.
The related trap is the assumption that paying above the award settles it. It does not. Award conditions such as penalty rates, overtime, allowances and breaks apply on their own terms, and a flat rate only absorbs them if it genuinely covers everything the employee would have earned under the award, tested properly and documented. An hourly rate that looks generous can still fall short in a fortnight heavy with weekend or late night hours.
Award rates and conditions change, most commonly from the first full pay period in July. If your rates have not moved in over a year, that is worth checking against the current award rather than against last year’s payroll. We cover this in more detail under awards and timesheets.
Termination pay, where mistakes are public
Final pays combine several calculations that each behave differently: accrued annual leave, leave loading where it applies, notice, redundancy where relevant, and the tax treatment of each component. They are also the payment an employee is most likely to scrutinise, because they have left and they are checking.
Two things make this worse than an ordinary error. A departing employee has every reason to look closely, and a final pay is often processed quickly by whoever is available rather than carefully by whoever normally does it. If you only audit one category of payment, audit this one.
What to actually do this week
- Check when your last few super contributions were received, not when they were paid. If any landed outside 7 business days, you have a live problem rather than a theoretical one.
- Check your super base is qualifying earnings, not ordinary time earnings, and pay particular attention to anyone on commission or salary sacrifice.
- Open your most recent STP submission and confirm year to date qualifying earnings is populated for every employee.
- Pick three employees and check their award classification against what they actually do now, not what they were hired to do.
- Re-check the last termination payment you made, line by line.
If that list is uncomfortable reading, the honest position is that payroll became materially harder on 1 July 2026 and a process that was fine in June may not be fine now. Our payroll service exists for employers who would rather not carry that risk, and STP and superannuation covers the compliance side in detail.
Rules and figures in this article apply for the 2026-27 financial year and are drawn from the Australian Taxation Office. Payroll obligations commonly change from 1 July, so confirm the current position before relying on this for a specific pay run.
