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How Payday Super affects you

From 1 July 2026, all employers are required to pay your super within seven days of your salary.
Mother and daughter picking oranges

What’s changing?

Up until now, a lot of businesses, especially smaller or start-up businesses, paid their super contributions on a quarterly basis. With the new Payday Super legislation, they are now legally required to pay your super at the same time you get paid your wages.

This replaces the current quarterly payment model and is designed to:

  1. Help boost retirement savings through more frequent contributions and compound interest.

  2. Reduce superannuation underpayments, which currently affects millions of workers.

  3. Improve transparency and compliance across Australia’s employment field.

Important to note
Your Super Guarantee (SG) rate won’t change. It’s staying the same at 12%. However, more frequent contributions mean your money is invested sooner, giving it more time to grow and potentially increasing your balance over the long term.

Why it matters

Each year, over $5 billion in superannuation goes unpaid, disproportionately affecting young workers, women, migrants, and those in casual or insecure employment.

By aligning super payments with your pay day, the legislation ensures everyone gets their entitlements sooner and more reliably.

For example:

  • A 25-year-old worker could see an extra $6,000 in retirement savings through compounding.

  • Recovering unpaid super for a 35-year-old could improve their retirement balance by over $30,000*

Young man with pink hair on his phone

What you should do

Log in to your account and check your latest super payments. Staying on top of it means you’re likely to spot if a payment slips through the cracks. You can track your balance as the new legislations roll out and see the difference the changes make to you.

It’s also a good idea to check every payslip to make sure that the super calculated (at the current SG rate of 12%) is listed. Plus, the payment is actually being processed in line with your pay cycle.

Transitions to systems and pay cycles can be tricky. But your payroll team should be able to talk you through the steps they’re taking to make sure they’re compliant with the new changes.

It’s important that your employer follows Australian workplace legislation and laws. If your super doesn’t get paid with your regular wages after 1 July 2026, it’s important you take action.

You can lodge an Unpaid Super Report with the ATO if your employer fails to resolve the issue.

Use the ATO Unpaid Super online tool to trigger an investigation into your employer's compliance.

It’s a good idea to make sure all your super is in one place. The ATO regularly updates their unclaimed super database, where you can search for any old or missing super you may have forgotten about from past jobs. Bringing your super together into one account can help reduce fees and costs related to having multiple accounts, and makes tracking your new super payment cycle much easier.[C1]

*This example is for illustrative purposes only. It relies on various assumptions. If actual circumstances differ from these assumptions, actual results will be different. Introducing payday super | Treasury Ministers

[C1] Before consolidating, consider if this is right for you, including the loss of any insurance cover from your other funds, the impact on your investments, and potential tax implications and read the PDS and TMD at aware.com.au/pds. You may wish to speak with a qualified financial planner before making this decision.