Doctors get hit harder by Australia’s superannuation rules than almost any other profession. High income triggers extra taxes that most people never encounter. A long training pipeline means the compounding years are spent earning a registrar’s salary. And if you work for SA Health, you are in a scheme that behaves so differently from an ordinary industry fund that most general advice you read online is simply wrong for you.
Three things changed on 1 July 2026 that matter to Adelaide doctors: the contribution caps went up, Division 296 started running, and Payday Super began for anyone who employs staff. This is what the 2026-27 landscape actually looks like.
The numbers for 2026-27
Indexation lifted several figures this year:
- Concessional (before-tax) contributions cap: $32,500, up from $30,000. This covers employer contributions, salary sacrifice and personal deductible contributions.
- Non-concessional (after-tax) cap: $130,000, up from $120,000.
- General transfer balance cap: $2.1 million, up from $2 million.
- Superannuation guarantee: 12%, and it stays at 12% — the legislated increases have finished.
- CGT cap amount: $1,935,000, up from $1,865,000. This is the separate lifetime cap for contributions made from the sale of a business using the small business CGT concessions — relevant when a practice is sold.
The bring-forward rules for after-tax contributions are tested against your total superannuation balance at 30 June 2026:
- Under $1.84 million — you can bring forward three years, so up to $390,000.
- $1.84 million to under $1.97 million — two years, up to $260,000.
- $1.97 million to under $2.1 million — the standard $130,000 only.
- $2.1 million or more — your after-tax cap is nil.
For a specialist who has been contributing steadily for twenty years, that last line arrives sooner than expected. Once the balance crosses $2.1 million, the after-tax door closes entirely.
Division 293: the doctors’ tax
Division 293 is the one our medical clients ask about most, usually after receiving an assessment they were not expecting.
If your income for the year plus your concessional super contributions exceeds $250,000, an extra 15% applies to the contributions above that line. In an ordinary taxed fund that means the tax on those contributions doubles from 15% to 30%. If your super is in Triple S, which charges no contributions tax on the way in, Division 293 is a 15% impost rather than a doubling — a distinction we come back to below.
Two features catch people out.
First, “income” is broader than taxable income. It uses the Medicare levy surcharge base, so it picks up reportable fringe benefits, net financial investment losses, net rental property losses and certain other amounts. A doctor with a negatively geared investment property can find the property reduces taxable income but not Division 293 income.
Second, the $250,000 threshold has applied unchanged since 2017-18. Every year, more Adelaide registrars and staff specialists cross it purely through wage growth. If you were under it two years ago, do not assume you still are.
The tax is assessed separately by the ATO once it has both your return and your fund’s contribution data. You can pay it personally or elect to release the money from super — you have 60 days from the assessment date to make that election, and the ATO then issues a release authority to your fund. The due date on the notice does not move because you elected to release, which is a common and expensive misunderstanding. Note also that most defined benefit funds cannot release amounts; members of the older, closed South Australian schemes generally have the liability deferred to a debt account instead, payable when a benefit is drawn.
If you work for SA Health, your super is not like everyone else’s
This is the section that matters most for hospital doctors in Adelaide, and it is the one that generic online advice gets wrong.
Most SA public sector employees, including SA Health staff, are in Triple S. The ATO lists Triple S as a constitutionally protected fund — an untaxed scheme that pays no tax on the contributions or earnings it receives, because the Commonwealth cannot tax state government assets.
Four consequences follow, and they pull in different directions.
1. There is no 15% contributions tax on the way in
In an ordinary taxed fund, $1,000 of salary sacrifice arrives as $850. In Triple S it arrives as $1,000. That is a real and substantial advantage, and it is the reason salary sacrifice into Triple S is usually the first strategy we look at for a hospital doctor.
2. The 15% is charged on the way out instead
The tax is deferred, not forgiven, and it arrives in one of two ways.
If you roll the benefit into a taxed fund — an SMSF, a retail or industry fund, or Super SA’s own Flexible Rollover Product — the receiving fund is liable for 15% on the untaxed element at that point. Your age is not relevant to that charge.
If you take the benefit as a lump sum, the rate depends on your age and on the untaxed plan cap, which is $1,935,000 for 2026-27. From age 60 the untaxed element is taxed at 15% up to that cap, and at 45% above it. The Medicare levy applies on top, so the effective rates are closer to 17% and 47%.
A note of caution here: Super SA’s own website describes this as a Super SA “lifetime cap”. It is not a Super SA rule — it is the ATO’s untaxed plan cap, indexed federally, and the figure on some Super SA pages is out of date. Check the current number rather than the one on the fact sheet.
3. Your concessional cap works differently — until it doesn’t
This is the most useful and least understood feature. The ATO’s position is direct: “On their own, concessional contributions to a CPF cannot result in you exceeding your concessional contributions cap.” The cap “is only exceeded if your combined concessional contributions to a CPF and another type of fund that isn’t an unfunded defined benefit fund exceed the cap.”
So a doctor whose only super is Triple S can salary sacrifice well beyond $32,500 without an excess concessional contributions assessment. That is a genuinely useful position — but it is not a free run, for two reasons.
The first is the untaxed plan cap above. Every dollar you sacrifice into Triple S builds the untaxed element, and once that element exceeds $1,935,000 on withdrawal the rate on the excess is 45% plus the Medicare levy. Sacrificing hard for twenty years without modelling the exit is how a doctor arrives at retirement with money taxed at 47% instead of 17%. The strategy and the cap have to be planned together.
The second is that the cap protection stops working the moment you have contributions going anywhere else. A staff specialist with a public appointment and a private practice paying into an SMSF or a retail fund has contributions in both systems, and the combined total is tested against the cap. This is exactly the profile of a lot of our Adelaide clients, and it needs to be modelled rather than assumed.
4. Division 293 still applies to you in full
There is a Division 293 concession for constitutionally protected funds, and this is where we see the most damaging misunderstanding. It is limited to state higher level office holders — judges, senior statutory officers and the like. The ATO’s wording is that for those people, “generally all contributions made to a CPF, other than salary packaged contributions, are excluded from the Division 293 super contribution amount… but are included when determining whether the threshold was exceeded.”
A staff specialist or consultant employed by SA Health is not a state higher level office holder. Division 293 applies to your employer contributions and your salary sacrifice in the ordinary way.
Which produces an uncomfortable interaction: because Triple S lets you sacrifice above the usual cap, and because Division 293 counts what you sacrifice, the strategy that saves you the most income tax also increases your Division 293 exposure. It is still usually worth doing. But “usually” is doing work in that sentence, and the answer depends on your marginal rate, how close you are to $250,000, and how long until you draw the benefit.
One further point. Since November 2022, Fund Selection has let most SA public sector employees direct their employer contributions to a fund of their choice. Before you use it, understand what you are giving up — the untaxed treatment is a significant benefit and it does not follow you out. Note too that an existing salary sacrifice arrangement automatically follows your selection to the new fund unless you cancel it, which has surprised people.
Carry-forward contributions: the window that closes behind you
If your total superannuation balance was under $500,000 at 30 June 2026, you can use unused concessional cap from the previous five years on top of this year’s $32,500.
In 2026-27 that means the unused amounts from 2021-22 through to 2025-26. Anything unused from 2020-21 expired on 30 June 2026 and is gone. The amounts are used oldest first.
The $500,000 test is an on-off switch, not a sliding scale. That makes this a strategy with a natural expiry date for most doctors:
- Registrars and early-career doctors usually satisfy the balance test but have limited cash to use it. The unused cap is accumulating quietly in the background.
- Doctors in their first few consultant years are often in the sweet spot — balance still under $500,000, income now substantial, and five years of unused cap available. This is frequently the single largest deduction available to them.
- Established specialists have usually failed the test years ago.
If you sold a property, received a large back-payment, or had an unusually high income year, this is the first thing to check. It is also worth checking in the year before your balance is likely to cross $500,000.
Division 296 is now law, and 2026-27 is the first year measured
The extra tax on large superannuation balances received Royal Assent on 13 March 2026 and applies from 1 July 2026. So the year you are in now is the first measured year, even though assessments will not begin issuing until the later half of the 2027-28 year.
In outline: an additional 15% applies to the proportion of earnings attributable to a total superannuation balance above $3 million, taking the effective rate on that slice to about 30%. A further 10% applies above $10 million, taking that slice to about 40%. The thresholds are indexed — the $3 million threshold in $150,000 increments and the $10 million threshold in $500,000 increments.
Importantly, the taxation of unrealised gains was dropped from the final design. Treasury’s position is that the higher rates apply only to future realised earnings. The ATO’s law companion ruling explaining the mechanics is still being drafted and the supporting regulations have been out for consultation, so the fine detail is not settled.
Two points matter for doctors in particular. Defined benefit and certain other interests are measured differently — on the movement in the value of the interest — and the tax on those interests is automatically deferred until an end benefit becomes payable, then due within 21 days, with interest accruing in the meantime unless it is paid voluntarily. And in our experience the doctors’ balances that reach $3 million are most often self managed funds holding the practice premises. We have written about this in more detail in our guide to Division 296 and Adelaide SMSF members.
If you own the practice: Payday Super started on 1 July 2026
This is the change most likely to cause an actual problem this year, and a lot of practice owners have not adjusted for it.
Superannuation must now be received by the employee’s fund within 7 business days of paying them. Not sent — received. Clearing house lag is the practice’s problem, not the fund’s. The old quarterly deadlines are gone.
Some specifics worth knowing:
- The obligation is measured against “qualifying earnings”, which includes ordinary hours, certain paid leave, allowances, bonuses, all commissions, and salary sacrificed amounts that would otherwise have qualified.
- New employees and new funds get 20 business days for the first contribution.
- If you are late, the new superannuation guarantee charge is the shortfall, plus notional earnings at the general interest charge rate compounded daily from 8 business days after payday, plus an administrative uplift starting at 60% that can be reduced — including by up to 40 percentage points for voluntary disclosure — plus a choice loading of 25% where choice-of-fund rules were breached, capped at $1,200 per notice period.
- The ATO now assesses the charge itself. Employers no longer lodge superannuation guarantee statements.
- Unlike the old regime, the charge is now tax deductible. Interest on late payment of the charge is not.
- The ATO has published a first-year compliance approach in PCG 2026/1, which is worth reading if you have already slipped. Some of the supporting guidance is still in draft, so expect refinement.
One trap specific to practices paying specialists well: the maximum contribution base is now an annual figure of $270,830, not a quarterly one. A great deal of commentary published this year still quotes the old quarterly $62,500. If your payroll settings still work on a quarterly cap, they are wrong.
Contractor doctors and the superannuation guarantee
Practices that engage doctors as contractors should not assume superannuation is not payable. Superannuation guarantee is owed to an individual contractor where the contract is mainly for their labour, the payment is for their personal labour and skills rather than a result, and the work cannot be delegated. Engaging a company, trust or partnership rather than an individual will often take the arrangement outside that rule — but it is not the reliable shield it is sometimes assumed to be, and interposing an entity purely to avoid the obligation is precisely the kind of arrangement the ATO is now examining.
In June 2026 the ATO issued a draft ruling on work arranged through intermediaries, dealing with who the employer is in three-way arrangements. It contains no medical examples, but when finalised it is proposed to apply both before and after its date of issue, so it is worth watching. And because of Payday Super, any superannuation guarantee exposure on a contracted doctor is now a seven-day exposure rather than a quarterly one.
This sits alongside the payroll tax position for medical practices, which we cover separately in our article on payroll tax and medical practices.
What to do this year
- Check whether you are over the Division 293 threshold on the broader income definition, not just your taxable income.
- If you are in Triple S, get advice before rolling money out or using Fund Selection. The untaxed treatment is worth real money and the exit tax is not obvious from your member statement.
- If your balance is near $500,000, check your unused concessional cap now. The strategy disappears once you cross the line, and the oldest year drops off every 30 June.
- If you have both a public appointment and private income, model the combined concessional position — the Triple S cap protection stops working once contributions go to a second fund.
- If you employ staff, test your payroll against the 7-business-day rule and fix the maximum contribution base if it is still set quarterly.
- If a practice sale is on the horizon, the $1,935,000 CGT cap sits outside the ordinary contribution caps and is one of the most valuable concessions available to a retiring doctor. It needs to be planned for, not discovered at settlement.
Talk to us
We work with doctors, dentists and specialists across Adelaide — hospital-employed, in private practice, and everything in between. Superannuation for a doctor is rarely a single decision; it is the interaction between a public scheme, a private income, a practice structure and a retirement date.
You can read more on our accountants for medical professionals page, or about our SMSF services in Adelaide. You may also find our guides to going into private practice in Adelaide and tax mistakes Adelaide doctors make useful.
Get in touch with our Adelaide team to review your position before 30 June.
This article is general information only and was prepared in September 2026. It is general advice and does not take account of your objectives, financial situation or needs, and it is not a recommendation to acquire, dispose of or alter any superannuation or financial product. Superannuation rules are complex and the right course of action depends on your individual circumstances. You should consider obtaining personal advice, and read the relevant product disclosure statement, before making any decision. Figures quoted are for the 2026-27 income year and are subject to indexation and change.
