Super Guarantee Rate: What You’re Owed in 2026

The super guarantee (SG) rate is 12% of your ordinary time earnings for the 2025–26 and 2026–27 financial years. That’s the top of a legislated climb that started at 9.5% back in 2021 and rose in annual steps until it hit 12% on 1 July 2025 — and it’s stayed there since, with no further increase currently written into law.

For anyone on a $75,000 salary, that 12% translates to a minimum of $9,000 a year going into super, paid by the employer on top of wages, not deducted from them. Because SG contributions sit outside your assessable income, they don’t move you between the Australian Tax Brackets 2026–27 the way an equivalent pay rise would — a useful distinction if you’re mapping out your full take-home position for the year. What’s changed more recently isn’t the rate itself but the timing: since 1 July 2026, employers have had to get that money into a fund within seven business days of each payday, rather than once a quarter. That single change — known as Payday Super — is arguably the bigger story for 2026, and it’s one a lot of older guides on this topic haven’t caught up with yet.

This article covers the current rate, how to work out what you’re owed, where the rate has come from, what Payday Super actually requires, who’s eligible, and what happens when an employer gets it wrong.

It’s also a distinct obligation from Payroll Tax — a separate, state-based tax on total wages bills that catches out some employers who assume compliance with one automatically covers the other.

What Is the Super Guarantee Rate?

The super guarantee is the minimum percentage of an employee’s ordinary time earnings that an employer must contribute to a complying super fund, set out under the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992 and enforced by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). It is compulsory — not a bonus, and not something an employer can substitute with higher wages instead.

Ordinary time earnings (OTE) is the base most SG calculations run on. It generally includes ordinary hours worked, over-award payments, commissions, shift loading, and most allowances, but typically excludes overtime paid for hours beyond an employee’s ordinary hours. This distinction matters because two employees on the same gross annual pay can be owed different SG amounts if their pay structure includes different amounts of overtime.

It’s worth separating SG from voluntary contributions. The 12% is a floor, not a ceiling — many employees add to it through salary sacrifice or personal concessional contributions, subject to the separate concessional contributions cap ($32,500 for 2026–27). The SG rate answers, “what must my employer pay”; the contributions cap answers “how much can go in before extra tax applies.”

How Much Super Are You Owed? A Worked Example

Take an employee earning $85,000 a year in OTE, paid fortnightly. At 12%, their employer owes $10,200 in super for the year, or roughly $392 per fortnightly pay cycle before rounding. The same logic holds whatever pay cycle a business runs on: employers working out PAYG withholding from the Weekly Tax Table, Fortnightly Tax Table, or Monthly Tax Table still apply the same 12% SG rate to that period’s OTE, quite separately from the withholding calculation itself. Under Payday Super, that amount now needs to reach their fund within seven business days of the pay date it relates to — not bundled up and paid weeks or months later.

There is one cap worth knowing if you’re a higher earner: the maximum super contribution base. For 2026–27 it’s $270,830 a year. Once an employee’s OTE for the financial year passes that figure, the employer isn’t required to pay SG on the amount above it. The base is recalculated each year using the formula: concessional contributions cap × 100 ÷ SG rate, rounded down to the nearest $10 — which is exactly how $270,830 is derived from the $32,500 cap and the 12% rate. In practice, this only affects a small slice of high-income employees; most people will never earn enough in a year for it to matter.

Super Guarantee Rate History: How We Got to 12%

The rate sat at 9.5% for seven straight financial years — an unusually long freeze — before a legislated schedule of annual increases resumed. Here’s the full run:

Financial Year	SG Rate
2014–15 to 2020–21	9.5%
2021–22	10.0%
2022–23	10.5%
2023–24	11.0%
2024–25	11.5%
2025–26	12.0%
2026–27	12.0%

Twelve per cent was always the intended endpoint of this schedule, locked in by amendments passed in 2021. As of September 2026, no further increase is legislated — but it’s worth remembering that the rate has been amended by parliament before and could be again if a future government chooses to act. Anyone relying on this figure for long-term retirement projections should treat 12% as the current settings, not a permanent guarantee.

Payday Super: What Changed on 1 July 2026

Before 1 July 2026, employers only had to pay SG quarterly, with a due date 28 days after each quarter ended. That gave employers up to three months of runway between earning an entitlement and it actually landing in a fund — and it’s a large part of why unpaid super became such a persistent problem for casual and lower-income workers, who were often the least likely to notice or chase up a missed payment.

Payday Super replaced that with a much tighter rule: super contributions must reach the employee’s fund within seven business days of “payday” — the day wages are actually paid, referred to as the qualifying earnings day. A business day excludes weekends and any public holiday observed state-wide, even in a jurisdiction the employer isn’t based in. Reporting through Single Touch Payroll (STP) now effectively runs in parallel with the super payment itself, which is what makes near-real-time enforcement possible on the ATO’s side.

For employees, the practical upshot is that super should show up in a fund statement within days of a payslip, not months later. For employers and payroll teams, it means the old habit of batching contributions once a quarter is no longer just inefficient — it’s a compliance risk that can trigger a penalty automatically.

Who’s Entitled to the Super Guarantee?

Eligibility is broader than most people assume. A few points that generate a disproportionate number of search queries on their own:

• Full-time, part-time, and casual employees are all eligible on the same basis — employment type doesn’t change the entitlement.
• The old $450-a-month earnings threshold, which used to exempt very low earners, was removed from 1 July 2022. There’s no minimum monthly pay below which SG stops applying for adult employees.
• Employees under 18 are the exception: they need to work more than 30 hours in a week to qualify, and those hours can’t be averaged across a longer pay period.
• Independent contractors paid principally for their labour — rather than for a result, materials, or plant and equipment — are treated as employees for SG purposes, even where they hold an ABN and invoice for their work.
• Company directors and family members genuinely working in a business are covered on the same terms as any other employee.

What Happens If Your Employer Doesn’t Pay?

When an employer misses a super payment, they don’t just owe the outstanding amount — they become liable for the super guarantee charge (SGC), and critically, the SGC is not tax-deductible. That non-deductibility is deliberate: it’s designed to make late payment more expensive than paying on time, not merely inconvenient.

Under the framework that now applies from 1 July 2026, an SGC assessment for a missed or late payment is built from several parts: the outstanding SG shortfall itself; notional earnings, calculated by compounding the ATO’s general interest charge rate daily from the eighth business day after payday until the shortfall is fixed; an administrative uplift amount, broadly 60% of the shortfall and notional earnings combined; and, where relevant, a choice loading of 25% (capped at $1,200 per notice period) if the employer failed to meet fund-choice obligations. Assessments are now generated payday by payday rather than quarter by quarter, which means a pattern of small late payments can be identified and penalised far sooner than under the old system.

If you suspect your own super hasn’t been paid, the ATO’s online tools (accessible through myGov) let you check what’s been reported against you and lodge an unpaid super enquiry directly — you don’t need to wait for an employer to self-report a shortfall

Common Mistakes and Misunderstandings

A few misunderstandings come up often enough to call out directly. Some employers still calculate SG on gross wages rather than OTE, which usually overstates or understates the true entitlement depending on how overtime is structured — and discrepancies like this are increasingly cross-checked against Single Touch Payroll data, making underpaid or miscalculated SG one of the more common ATO Tax Return Audit Red Flags for small business employers. Some assume apprentices, casuals, or short-term staff fall outside SG entirely — they don’t, unless the under-18 hours test applies. On the employee side, a common assumption is that 12% represents the maximum super someone can receive in a year; it’s actually just the compulsory floor, with salary sacrifice sitting on top of it. And with Payday Super now in force, any payroll process still running on a quarterly rhythm is carrying real exposure to automatic SGC assessments, even if the total amount eventually paid is correct.

What to Do If You Think You’re Missing Super

Start with your most recent super fund statement and compare the contributions listed against 12% of your OTE for the same period — most funds show contribution dates, which makes it easy to check against the seven-business-day rule. If something looks short or late, raise it with your employer or payroll contact first; genuine payroll errors are common and are often corrected quickly once flagged. If that doesn’t resolve it, the ATO’s unpaid super reporting tool is the next step, and it’s worth keeping payslips and fund statements as records throughout.

Final Takeaway

Twelve per cent is the number to know for 2026, but the timing rules around it matter just as much this year. If you’re an employee, the useful habit is checking your fund statement against your payslip rather than assuming the percentage is being applied correctly somewhere in the background. If you run payroll for a business, the more urgent question isn’t the rate — it’s whether your systems are actually built for a seven-business-day payment cycle, because that’s where most SGC exposure will come from in the year ahead.