Payday super has started: the seven business day rule and what missing it costs

Superannuation for a payday on or after 1 July 2026 has to be received by the employee's fund within 7 business days of that payday. Not sent within seven days. Received, with enough information for the fund to allocate it to the member's account. That is the whole rule, and there is no discretion in it. Payday super has been running a fortnight, the first deadlines have already fallen, and most of what has gone wrong turned on that one word.

Seven business days, counted from payday

The ATO's guidance on payment deadlines for payday super sets it out plainly: a contribution is on time if it is received by the employee's super fund, with all the necessary information to allocate the contribution to the employee's member account, within 7 business days after you pay the employee. The day you pay is the qualifying earnings day, or QE day.

Three words carry the whole obligation.

• Received. The date that counts is the date the fund has the money, not the date you approved the payment. If a clearing house sits between you and the fund, its processing time is inside your seven days.
• Allocate. A payment the fund cannot match to a member account has not been received for this purpose. Money without matching data does not stop the clock.
• Business. A business day is any day other than a Saturday, a Sunday, or a public holiday that applies across the whole of an Australian state or territory. A state-wide holiday counts even if you are not in that state, so Picnic Day in the Northern Territory pushes a Robina employer's deadline out by a day. A holiday covering only part of a state — the ATO's example is Royal Hobart Show Day — is still a business day.

Payday is day zero. The ATO's first-year compliance guidance puts it bluntly: the timeframe "does not change if there is an error or delay processing the contribution".

Work it through on a real date. You pay staff on Friday 10 July 2026. The seven business days run Monday 13 through Tuesday 21 July, so the contribution must be in the fund's hands by Tuesday 21 July 2026. That is eleven calendar days to cover a seven business day rule.

Qualifying earnings replaced ordinary time earnings

The rate did not move. Super guarantee is still 12 per cent. What changed is what you apply it to.

From 1 July 2026, qualifying earnings is the base for both the contribution and the super guarantee charge, where the two were previously calculated on different bases. Qualifying earnings takes ordinary time earnings and adds:

• all commissions paid to an employee
• salary sacrificed amounts that would have been qualifying earnings had they been paid as wages
• earnings paid to workers under the expanded definition of employee, including contractors engaged mainly for their labour.

For most employers the dollar figure does not move. The exception is commission. Commission earned solely for work performed entirely outside ordinary hours was never ordinary time earnings. It is qualifying earnings. If you pay after-hours commission to a sales team, your super bill went up on 1 July.

Qualifying earnings does not pick up overtime, or employer-funded paid parental leave. Where an award or enterprise agreement requires super on those anyway, you still pay it, but report it as superannuation liability rather than qualifying earnings.

That split is the other operational change. Each payday you now report year-to-date qualifying earnings and year-to-date super liability for every employee through Single Touch Payroll, and reports missing either will be rejected from 1 July 2027. Whoever runs your payroll and bookkeeping should have confirmed with your software provider that both fields populate.

The super guarantee charge is now priced per payday

There is no super guarantee statement to lodge any more. If you fall short, the ATO calculates the charge from your reporting and issues a notice of assessment, per QE day rather than per quarter.

The charge has four components:

• the total of your individual final super guarantee shortfalls, being the unpaid super still outstanding when the assessment is made
• individual notional earnings, being interest on the shortfall at the general interest charge rate, compounded daily
• an administrative uplift, initially 60 per cent of the shortfalls plus notional earnings combined
• choice loading of 25 per cent of the contributions for any QE day where you did not follow the choice of fund rules, capped at $1,200 per notice period.

The uplift moves in percentage points, and it can be brought to nothing. If the ATO has not issued you an ATO-initiated charge assessment in the two years to the QE day, 20 percentage points come off, and anything before 1 July 2026 is ignored for that test. A voluntary disclosure lodged before assessment takes off up to 40 points more, scaled by how quickly you lodge. Within 30 days, a first-time employer's uplift is zero.

One change runs in the employer's favour. The charge is deductible for QE days from 1 July 2026 onwards, across all four components. The old quarterly charge never was. Late payment penalties and general interest charge on an unpaid assessment remain non-deductible.

The trap is how contributions are applied. By law, an eligible contribution is allocated to the earliest QE day for which the minimum has not been paid in full, and you can no longer elect otherwise. Miss one payday and the next contribution is consumed by it, which makes the following payday short, and so on until you pay the gap.

What a missed payday costs

Take a Robina business with four employees. It pays $18,000 of qualifying earnings on Friday 10 July 2026. Super guarantee is 12 per cent of that, or $2,160, due in the funds by Tuesday 21 July 2026.

The payment does not go. Nobody notices, and the ATO assesses on 30 September 2026.

• Individual final super guarantee shortfalls: $2,160
• Notional earnings, being 70 days from 22 July to 29 September at the general interest charge daily rate the ATO set for the July to September 2026 quarter, 0.03131507 per cent, compounded: $47.86
• Subtotal: $2,207.86
• Administrative uplift at 60 per cent, reduced by 20 percentage points because this is the first ATO-initiated assessment since 1 July 2026, so 40 per cent of $2,207.86: $883.15

Total charge: $3,091.01 on $2,160 of super. The $931 difference is the price of the miss, and it is deductible, which softens it without making it cheap. A voluntary disclosure lodged within 30 days of the QE day would have taken the uplift to nil and the charge to $2,207.86. A different failure prices differently: had the same $2,160 gone out on time but into your default fund instead of an employee's nominated fund, there is no shortfall and no notional earnings, but a choice loading of $540.

The clearing house closed with the old rules

The Small Business Superannuation Clearing House closed on 1 July 2026 as part of the payday super reform. Access to it ended on 30 June 2026.

If it was your payment method, the ATO's guidance on working out and paying super points to three replacements: the super function inside your existing payroll software; an employer payment service offered by a super fund; or a commercial clearing house or payroll provider.

The number that matters is its disbursement time. A provider that takes three business days to reach the fund leaves you four, not seven. Test yours on a real payment.

Three ways this goes wrong in the first quarter

The fund rejects the contribution

This is the most common failure, and it is survivable if someone is watching. The ATO's own example has an employer pay on the QE day, omit information the fund needed, and have the payment rejected four days later. She corrected it and resubmitted the next day; the fund received it inside the original seven business days, and the contribution was on time.

The clock did not restart. It never does. What saved that outcome was the rejection being seen the day it arrived. A rejection sitting unread in a payroll inbox for a week is an unpaid contribution.

The first-year compliance approach recognises this: an employer who paid the right amount on time, had it rejected, and fixed the problem as soon as reasonably practicable so that no super remains unpaid for that payday sits in the low-risk zone and is not reviewed. That protection depends on someone opening the error queue.

A new employee has not nominated a fund

Give them a standard choice form. If they do not choose, you can request their stapled fund details from the ATO through online services from the moment they accept the offer of employment, not from their start date. If the ATO advises there is no stapled fund and no choice has been made, you pay your default fund.

If the stapled fund the ATO gives you will not accept the contribution, because the account has closed or it is a defined benefit fund, request an alternate stapled fund. There is a protection worth knowing here: if you attempted to pay the stapled fund the ATO identified, that fund would not accept the contribution, and you then contributed to another fund for the employee's benefit, no choice loading applies.

You have 20 business days rather than 7 for that first contribution, and for the first contribution to a new fund for an existing employee. Where your software supports it, a member verification request before the first payment to a fund confirms the details match an active account while there is still time to fix them.

Payroll timing

The super run now has to move with the pay run. A weekly payroll has 52 deadlines a year where it had four. That is a scheduling problem before it is an accounting one, and it usually surfaces around leave: the week the person who processes super is away is the week the deadline is missed.

The cash flow effect is a timing shift rather than a new cost. Super leaves the account within days of wages instead of up to several months later. Across a full year the total is unchanged, but the working capital tied up in the change is real, and worth putting through your forecasting and budgeting before it bites.

Two weeks in, the employers finding this straightforward are the ones who tested a payment before 1 July and know who reads the error messages. If neither is true of yours yet, that is the part to fix this month, and it is what our business advisory work is for.