For more than twenty years Australian employers have run superannuation on a quarterly rhythm: pay wages whenever you like, get the super into the fund by the 28th of the month after each quarter, and you are compliant. That rhythm ended on 1 July 2026. Under Payday Super, superannuation must now arrive in the employee’s fund within seven business days of each payday. The first quarter under the new system closed on 30 September, and the old 28 October deadline that many Adelaide business owners still have in their calendar no longer protects anyone.
This is what has changed, what we are seeing go wrong in the first three months, and what to check in your payroll before the next pay run.
What Payday Super actually requires
The rule is simple to state and harder to run. Every time you pay “qualifying earnings” to an employee, the superannuation guarantee on those earnings must be received by the employee’s fund within seven business days. Not sent, not processed by a clearing house: received. The clock starts on the day the earnings are paid, and it counts business days, with weekends and any public holiday that applies to a whole state or territory anywhere in Australia excluded. A Friday payday therefore ordinarily gives you until the Tuesday of the week after next; a Friday 2 October payday in Adelaide is due on Wednesday 14 October because of Labour Day.
There are a handful of timing concessions. For a new employee, or an existing employee who moves to a new fund, the first contribution to that fund is due within 20 business days of the first payday, not of the start date, to give you time to collect fund details; if the second payday’s normal deadline would fall earlier, it is pushed out to the same date. Where an out-of-cycle payment such as a bonus, commission or back pay is made between regular paydays, the super on it is bunched with the next regular payday and is due within seven business days of that, not of the bonus itself. And where the ATO declares exceptional circumstances, such as a natural disaster or a widespread systems outage, the deadline extends to 20 business days.
Qualifying earnings is a new term and it is wider than most people assume. It covers ordinary time earnings as before, plus the salary an employee gave up under a salary sacrifice arrangement, so super is calculated on the pre-sacrifice figure. All commissions are in, and so are bonuses unless they are solely for work performed entirely outside ordinary hours. The maximum contribution base, which caps the earnings on which super is compulsory, is now set annually at $270,830 for 2026-27 rather than per quarter, which changes the arithmetic for high earners paid unevenly across the year.
The superannuation guarantee rate is 12% and stays at 12%; the increases finished on 1 July 2025.
What happens when you are late
The old superannuation guarantee charge was a blunt instrument: miss a quarter and you lodged a statement, paid the shortfall on total salary rather than ordinary time earnings, lost the deduction, and paid interest at a flat 10% from the start of the quarter.
The new charge is recalculated to match the new system and it is assessed by the ATO rather than self-reported. It has four components:
- The shortfall: the superannuation that should have been received, calculated on qualifying earnings.
- Notional earnings: interest on the shortfall at the general interest charge rate, compounding daily from the day after the seven business days expire until you catch up the contribution or the ATO assesses you, whichever comes first.
- An administrative uplift of up to 60% of the shortfall and notional earnings, reduced by 20 points if you have had no ATO-initiated assessment in the last two years and by up to a further 40 points if you disclose before the ATO assesses. Disclosure within 30 days of the payday can take a first-time employer’s uplift to nil; waiting more than 120 days leaves most of it in place.
- A choice loading of 25% of the shortfall, capped at $1,200 per employee per notice period, where you have not followed the choice of fund rules, typically by paying a default fund instead of the employee’s chosen or stapled fund.
Two things about the new charge are better than the old one. The whole charge, shortfall, notional earnings, uplift and loading, is now tax deductible, which the old charge never was; only general interest charge and penalties for paying the charge itself late are not. And because the ATO assesses the charge from the data it already holds, there is no superannuation guarantee statement to lodge. The flip side is that the ATO sees every late payment in near real time, because single touch payroll now reports the super liability each payday and funds report what arrives, so the gap between the two is visible without anyone looking for it.
The ATO’s Practical Compliance Guideline PCG 2026/1 sets out how it will direct its compliance resources in the first year, to 30 June 2027. Employers who try to pay on time and fix any contribution that arrives late or is rejected as soon as practicable are rated low risk and will not be reviewed. Employers who have not changed their frequency but clear everything within 28 days of quarter end are medium risk and a lower priority. Anything still unpaid 28 days after the end of a quarter is high risk and the ATO’s stated priority. The guideline does not change the law: the charge still accrues from day eight. What changes is who the ATO chases first.
The Small Business Superannuation Clearing House is gone
The ATO’s free clearing house closed to new payments on 30 June 2026. Thousands of small employers in South Australia used it, often as the only way they ever paid super. If you were one of them and have not yet moved, you have not paid super since June, and every pay run since 1 July is already late.
The replacements are the clearing house inside your payroll software (most mainstream payroll products now include one, with the super payment bundled into the pay run), a commercial clearing house, or the clearing house offered by your default fund. The important difference under Payday Super is processing time. A clearing house that takes five business days to pass money to the fund leaves you two days of margin, and a pay run processed late on a Friday afternoon can lose that margin before Monday. Ask your provider for their guaranteed processing time in writing and set your super payment to run with the pay run, not at the end of the month.
The five things we are seeing in Adelaide payrolls
1. Super still set to monthly or quarterly. This is the most common one. The payroll software has been upgraded but the super payment schedule inside it has not been changed from “monthly” to “with each pay run”. Every payday since July has produced a liability that is not being met for weeks. Open the super settings and check the frequency today.
2. Paying on the due date rather than ahead of it. Seven business days is the deadline for receipt by the fund. Employers who authorise the super payment on day six and use a clearing house that takes three days are late every time. Build in the processing lag.
3. Casual and irregular pay runs. A café with a weekly pay run for permanent staff and a separate run for casuals on a different day now has two super deadlines a week, because each regular pay run is its own payday with its own seven-business-day clock. Consolidating to a single weekly run for everyone removes half the deadlines.
4. Contractors who are employees for super. Nothing has changed in who is owed super, but the timing now applies to them too. A sole trader engaged mainly for their labour, paid monthly on invoice, is owed superannuation within seven business days of each invoice being paid. Many businesses were paying those contractors’ super quarterly, if at all. The new charge applies to them in the same way.
5. Salary sacrifice arrangements. The compulsory 12% is calculated on the pre-sacrifice earnings and must arrive within seven business days. The sacrificed amount itself is not subject to the superannuation guarantee charge deadline, but it travels with the compulsory payment through the clearing house, and the old habit of accumulating it and paying it at quarter end is inconsistent with most arrangements and awards. Pay it with the pay run.
Cash flow: the real change for small business
The compliance mechanics get the attention, but the lasting effect of Payday Super on a small business is cash flow. Under the quarterly system an employer with a $400,000 payroll held up to $12,000 of employees’ superannuation, for an average of around ten weeks, before it had to be paid. That float was, for many businesses, the working capital that smoothed the gap between paying wages and collecting receivables. It is gone.
For a business that was relying on it, the adjustment is a one-off increase in working capital of up to one quarter’s super, which for that $400,000 payroll is somewhere between $9,000 and $12,000, found during the first few months of the new system. Businesses that did not plan for it in July are feeling it in October, often at the same time as the first quarterly BAS of the year and the October income tax instalment. If the cash is not there, the answer is a conversation with the bank about an overdraft or a short facility, not a decision to pay super late; the new charge with its daily compounding interest is more expensive than any overdraft.
Single touch payroll and what the ATO can now see
Single touch payroll reporting has been expanded so that each pay event reports the year-to-date qualifying earnings and the superannuation liability the payday has created. Funds must now allocate or reject a contribution within three business days of receiving it and report it to the ATO through the member account transaction service, with a three-business-day reporting deadline arriving in April 2027. Put together, the ATO now has, for every employer in the country, a running comparison between what should have been paid and what has arrived.
The practical consequence is that superannuation guarantee compliance has stopped being something the ATO discovers through an employee complaint or an audit years later. The ATO has said its approach will focus on employers’ behaviours and trends and their payment history, and that in the first year it will prioritise employers who have not paid at all or have not paid the minimum. An employer who hears from the ATO should treat it as the moment to fix the process, not as the opening of a negotiation.
What to check before your next pay run
- Super payment frequency in your payroll software is set to pay with every pay run, not monthly or quarterly.
- Your clearing house’s processing time is known, in writing, and shorter than the gap you are leaving before the seven business days expire.
- Every employee has a fund on file, including new starters within 20 business days of their first payday, and stapled fund requests are being made for employees who do not nominate one.
- Contractors who are owed super are set up in payroll as super-only payees and paid on the same timetable.
- Salary sacrifice amounts are being paid with each pay run alongside the compulsory contribution, not accumulated.
- Your bank account has the cash for super on payday, every payday, and your cash flow forecast reflects it.
- Any shortfall since 1 July has been identified and paid, because voluntary disclosure cuts the administrative uplift and the daily interest stops only when the money arrives.
Talk to us
We run payroll and bookkeeping for Adelaide businesses and have spent the last three months moving clients from quarterly superannuation to pay-run superannuation. If you are not certain your payroll is paying super within seven business days of every payday, or you used the clearing house that closed and have not replaced it, talk to us before the ATO’s data does the talking.
You can read more on our bookkeeping and small and medium business pages. Related guides: our article on payroll tax and the contractor rules, and our guide to what has changed in your 2026 tax return.
Get in touch with our Adelaide team to have your payroll checked.
This article is general information only and was prepared in October 2026. It does not take account of your objectives, financial situation or needs, and it is not tax, legal or financial product advice. The Payday Super rules commenced on 1 July 2026 and the ATO’s administrative approach to the first year is set out in guidance that may be updated. You should obtain advice specific to your circumstances before acting.
