Payday Super Checklist for Employers

What Payday Super Requires

From 1 July 2026, employers must pay superannuation guarantee contributions for eligible employees on the same schedule as wages, rather than the current quarterly cycle that allows up to 28 days after each quarter ends. Under the new rules, super guarantee contributions must generally be received by, and able to be allocated by, an employee's super fund within 7 business days after payday, with a longer window applying in specific circumstances such as new employees. The change is set out by the Australian Taxation Office's Payday Super guidance and connects directly to Single Touch Payroll, since qualifying earnings and the resulting super liability are reported through STP-enabled software each pay run.

For a business paying weekly or fortnightly, this is the difference between four super payment events a year and fifty-two or twenty-six. That doesn't necessarily mean more total administrative work, since most payroll platforms automate the calculation, but it does mean far less time to catch a configuration error before it compounds across every subsequent pay cycle.

Qualifying Earnings and the 12% Rate

Under Payday Super, the ATO uses the term qualifying earnings to describe the payments super guarantee is calculated on. Qualifying earnings include ordinary time earnings, all commissions, and amounts already treated as salary or wages for super guarantee purposes, including salary sacrificed super. The super guarantee rate applied to qualifying earnings is 12%, the rate that has applied since 1 July 2025. Getting the qualifying earnings definition mapped correctly against each pay item in your payroll system matters more under Payday Super than it did under the quarterly system, because a mapping error is no longer caught and corrected once a quarter, it's repeated every single payday until someone finds it.

The New Superannuation Guarantee Charge

The Superannuation Guarantee Charge, or SGC, is being redesigned alongside Payday Super. If a contribution isn't received by an employee's fund within the required window after payday, the SGC applies. It remains non-deductible, and the redesigned version adds an administrative uplift amount on top of the unpaid super and interest, intended to reflect the cost of enforcement and to encourage employers to self-correct early rather than wait to be caught. Penalties of 25% or 50% of the unpaid charge can also apply depending on an employer's compliance history, though the ATO has indicated the charge can be reduced where an employer has a clean compliance record and lodges a voluntary disclosure statement. The practical effect is that a missed payment under Payday Super is more expensive, and discovered faster, than a missed quarterly payment ever was.

The Employer Readiness Checklist

Why the Clearing House Question Can't Wait

Of every item on this checklist, the clearing house question is the one with the hardest deadline. The ATO has confirmed the Small Business Superannuation Clearing House, a free service many small employers currently rely on, will not accept payments made on or after 1 July 2026. Employers using it need to set up an alternative, whether that's a clearing house built into their payroll platform or a separate commercial clearing house, and then test it against a live pay run before the cutover, not after. Leaving this until the final weeks before 1 July 2026 risks a gap where wages can be paid but super cannot, which is exactly the scenario the new Superannuation Guarantee Charge is designed to catch quickly.

Notes for NDIS, Medical and Allied Health Employers

The Payday Super rules themselves don't differ by industry, but the practical readiness work often does for the sectors we work in. NDIS providers running large casual workforces under the SCHADS Award tend to have more pay items to check against the qualifying earnings definition, including allowances and penalty rates that can be easy to miss in a mapping review. Medical practices frequently have closely held employees, such as practice principals paid irregularly rather than on a standard cycle, who carry specific timing treatment under Payday Super and are worth confirming individually rather than assuming the default payroll setup covers them correctly. Allied health clinics running a mix of employed and contracted practitioners should also check that contractor arrangements are genuinely outside the superannuation guarantee rules, given the expanded reach of super guarantee obligations toward some contracting arrangements in recent years, rather than assuming a contract label settles the question.

Record Keeping Under Payday Super

The record keeping obligation doesn't change in kind under Payday Super, only in volume. Employers are required to keep records of superannuation contribution payments for at least five years. Under quarterly super, that meant four payment records a year per employee. Under Payday Super, it means one record per employee per pay cycle, which for a weekly payroll is fifty-two records instead of four. Confirming your payroll system retains and can retrieve these records, rather than only the current period's data, is worth checking now rather than discovering a gap during a future review.

Getting Payroll Ready Before the Deadline

The employers who move through 1 July 2026 without disruption are the ones who treat this as a project with a deadline, not a software update that happens automatically. That means starting the clearing house conversation now, auditing qualifying earnings mapping before the last quarter, and testing a full pay cycle well ahead of go-live rather than during it. If you already run this checklist through Xero specifically, our companion article on Xero Payday Super setup walks through the platform-specific steps in more detail.