The New Super Guarantee Charge: What Late Super Actually Costs Now

Two months into Payday Super, the pattern is clear. Almost nobody is paying more super. The rate is still 12%, the people you pay it for have not changed, and for most employers the earnings base is the same as in June. The employers in trouble sent the money on time and watched it land late, counted business days off the wrong calendar, or were still relying on the Small Business Superannuation Clearing House, which closed on 1 July 2026.

We wrote about getting ready for Payday Super before it started. This is about the other end: what happens when a contribution is late. The super guarantee charge was rebuilt at the same time as the deadline, and most of what people believe about it, including the "25% penalty", is out of date.

Prefer to listen? We covered this in Payday Super: Two Months In, and What's Actually Biting, episode 57 of the Aevum Accounting Podcast.

Received is the word that matters

Your contribution is on time if it is received by the employee's fund, with enough information to allocate it, within seven business days after payday. Not sent. Received. A clearing house, a payroll provider and a bank all sit inside your seven days. If the money leaves you on day two and arrives on day nine, you are late.

Funds now have three business days to allocate or return a contribution, down from twenty, so a payment with a wrong member number bounces within days, and a bounced payment was never received. Going the other way, contributions sent through the New Payments Platform can reach the fund the same day. Ask your provider whether yours does.

Business days are counted nationally

A business day is any day other than a Saturday, a Sunday, or a public holiday for the whole of any Australian state or territory. A territory-wide holiday in the Northern Territory is not a business day for a Perth employer either, and the ATO's own worked example adds a day for Picnic Day. A holiday covering only part of a state, such as Royal Hobart Show Day, still counts.

It works in your favour, but only if you count it. Most payroll software does. A deadline counted by hand off the WA calendar will be a day out several times a year.

What the charge is now made of

If a contribution lands late, you no longer lodge a super guarantee statement. The ATO works out the charge from your Single Touch Payroll reporting and what the fund says it received, then sends a notice of assessment. It has three main parts.

The shortfall. Then notional earnings, replacing the old flat 10% a year: interest at the general interest charge rate, 11.43% for July to September 2026, compounding daily from the day after the seven business days end. The old interest ran from the start of the quarter, so a shortfall fixed within weeks can cost less than before, and one left for a year costs more.

Then the administrative uplift, which starts at 60% of the shortfall plus notional earnings. It drops 20 percentage points if you have had no ATO-initiated assessment in the previous two years, and up to 40 more for a voluntary disclosure before assessment, scaled by speed: 40 points within 30 days of the payday, 35 within 60, 30 within 120, 15 after that. A clean employer who discloses within 30 days pays no uplift. One who waits to be found pays the full 60%.

And for the first time, every component of the charge is tax deductible. General interest charge on an unpaid assessment and the late payment penalty stay non-deductible, and so does a charge for any quarter before 1 July 2026.

The penalty most people misread

The line doing the rounds is that late super now attracts a 25% or 50% penalty. Not in the way people hear it. The penalty applies only to an assessed charge you still have not paid 28 days after the ATO sends a notice to pay, and that notice only goes out after you have ignored the assessment for 28 days. It is 25% of what remains unpaid, or 50% if you incurred one of these penalties in the previous 24 months. The old maximum was 200% of the charge.

So the real cost of being late is the charge itself. The penalty is for ignoring the ATO, not for a contribution that landed on day nine.

Where you get more than seven days

A new employee, or a new fund. The first contribution to a particular fund for an employee has 20 business days, because that is when you are waiting on fund details. The second is back to seven.

Out-of-cycle payments. A bonus, back pay, an allowance or a commission paid outside your normal pay pattern does not start its own clock. Its super is due with the contribution for the next regular payday. In the ATO's example, a $1,000 Christmas bonus paid on 7 December ahead of a 10 December payday is due, with the ordinary contribution, on 21 December.

Exceptional circumstances. Where the ATO formally determines that a natural disaster or a widespread IT outage has affected a class of employers, contributions are due 20 business days after the payday or after the determination, whichever is later. It is a determination the ATO makes, not something you claim.

What the ATO has said about year one

Before the regime started, the ATO published Practical Compliance Guideline 2026/1 covering paydays to 30 June 2027. An employer is low risk if it tried to pay the right amount on time, some contributions were received late or could not be allocated, it fixed the problem as soon as reasonably practicable, and nothing stayed unpaid. For those employers the ATO will not apply compliance resources; its stated focus is employers not making the switch to more frequent contributions, or not paying super at all.

That is a statement about where the ATO looks, not a change to the law. The charge still arises on a late payday, but a good-faith employer who fixes a bounced contribution promptly is not the target.

Four things to check this week

The receipt date, not the send date. Pull one recent pay run and find out when the fund received the money. If nobody can tell you, that is the finding.

Your clearing house. If you used the SBSCH, confirm what replaced it and that it works.

Commissions and the cap. Commissions for work done entirely outside ordinary hours are now in the base. The maximum contribution base is also annual now, $270,830 for 2026-27, which matters for anyone earning above roughly $250,000.

Member data. Wrong member numbers and mismatched names are the quiet cause of late contributions, and you now hear about them within days.

If you are not sure whether your contributions are landing inside the seven days, book a consultation with our team and we will check a real pay cycle with you, or read about how our bookkeeping team in Perth runs payroll and super for small employers.

The information in this article is general in nature and does not take into account your personal circumstances. It does not constitute specific tax or financial advice. Everyone's situation is different, so we recommend speaking with a qualified professional at Aevum Accounting before acting on anything you have read here.