Payday Super · Live Since 1 July 2026 · ATO Leniency Ends 30 June 2027

Every payday is a test now. Most businesses don't know if they're passing.

Super used to be due once a quarter. That gap was slack — whether you thought of it that way or not. It's gone now, by law. The ATO sees every payday, in near real time, whether you paid it. Right now, it's giving first-year businesses the benefit of the doubt. That doesn't last.

26
Tests a year now, not 4
7 days
To pay super after every payday, by law
9 months
Until the ATO's first-year leniency ends
The point of this page

It’s knowing before payday, not after.

Nobody can manually track 26 pay cycles a year against every other bill coming due, reliably, forever. That’s not a discipline problem. It’s a visibility problem. BusinessSolvency’s quarterly review shows whether cash is keeping up with wages, super and tax, so a slipping quarter is caught before it becomes an ATO debt with your name on it.

See below to find out why ↓

Here's the part almost nobody says out loud: Payday Super doesn't create a cash problem. It finds one, if it's already there — and it finds it in days, not months.

If your business has ever quietly leaned on the timing gap between when money came in and when an obligation fell due — even once, even without calling it that — that gap is the thing that just disappeared. What used to surface once a quarter, if at all, now surfaces on a pay run. There is nowhere left for a genuine shortfall to hide.

There are only two ways this goes wrong for you

01

You don't find out. The ATO does.

Single Touch Payroll and payday-level reporting mean the ATO now has near-real-time visibility of what you owe and what you've actually paid. A missed payment doesn't wait for your accountant to notice at BAS time. It becomes an unpaid Superannuation Guarantee Charge — interest, an administration fee, and a debt the ATO can pursue — and it is your personal debt.

02

You find out. But by then, it's too late to fix cheaply.

Small Business Restructuring — the one process that lets you fix this on your own terms, in control, before anyone else takes over — generally requires employee entitlements, including super, to be paid and up to date before a plan can even be lodged. Fall behind on payday super for long enough, and you can lock yourself out of the exact process built to save you. SBR use has already fallen 42% in a year →

What's actually at stake

This isn't paperwork risk. If you're a sole trader or in a partnership, unpaid PAYG withholding and superannuation guarantee amounts are already your personal debt, and always have been. Enforcement is running at more than three times the rate of two years ago. Payday-level reporting means the ATO can see a shortfall building far earlier than it ever could under the old quarterly system — which means it can act on it far sooner, too.

The actual fix isn't "try harder." It's knowing, every quarter, before a payday catches you out.

You can't manually track 26 pay cycles a year against every other bill coming due, on top of running the business itself. Nobody can, reliably, forever. That's not a discipline problem. It's a visibility problem — and it's exactly the gap BusinessSolvency was built to close.

Every Quarter

The Quarterly Solvency Check

After each BAS quarter, using the figures your accounting software already holds: did cash cover everything that fell due, including super and PAYG for every pay run? Not a guess. An answer.

Between Quarters · Optional

Updates When Cash Is Tight

If the business needs closer watching, enter figures manually as often as you need, then check them against the next quarterly import. The one thing to watch every pay cycle: super and PAYG paid on time.

Every Year

The Whole Year, Provable

Four quarters of genuine, reconciled monitoring — a real, standing answer to the one question that determines whether SBR is still open to you: can you pay what you owe, as and when it falls due?

This is not hypothetical

21.9% of businesses carrying more than $100,000 in ATO debt close within a year — against 0.7% overall. That gap didn't open on the day they closed. It opened months, sometimes years, earlier, at exactly the point nobody was checking closely enough to notice. Payday Super just moved that checkpoint from once a quarter to every single pay run.

Payday Super isn’t the only cushion going Interest on ATO debt stopped being tax-deductible from 1 July 2025, and from 1 July 2027 the ATO will no longer accept credit cards (delayed from 30 November 2026). See how the three changes add up →

The clock the ATO set is already running.

30 June 2027

That's when the ATO's first-year leniency ends. Not adjustable. Not negotiable. After that date, a missed payday super payment stops being a teething problem and starts being exactly what it already legally is: a debt, an interest charge, and a personal liability with your name on it.

You have months left to know, for certain, every single payday, whether you'll pass. Not guess. Know.

The lesson from Noosa Care at Home Services

Timing is everything: the cheapest point to act is the year the numbers first turn.

  1. A profitable business can turn cash-negative in a single year. Noosa made a profit in all six years, yet after taking on staff its bank account was overdrawn in four of them.
  2. The warning arrives early, in the right indicators. The bank balance, Breakeven and Cash IN versus Cash OUT all turned in the year the staff were hired, while profit and the debt ratio stayed reassuring. Tax instalments set on the previous, better year made the first year of payroll harder still.
  3. For a partnership, the consequence is personal, and shared. No company, no safe harbour, no Small Business Restructuring. The overdraft and the loan were owed by both partners personally.
  4. One decision, made in time, changes the ending. Resetting drawings to what the business earned in the hiring year kept the bank positive every year: a $169,000 difference four years later.

Read the full worked example: User Manual, Chapter 8C — Noosa Care at Home Services →
Or browse all worked examples in the BusinessSolvency User Manual →

Find out before the ATO does.

See exactly how BusinessSolvency checks your cash against what's due — every quarter, with optional updates in between — before it becomes someone else's discovery.

Request Access → Alpha stage · an owner login is required to view the live demo Not sure it’s worth acting yet? See what waiting costs →

Sourcing note

Payday Super mechanics (7-business-day payment window, 1 July 2026 start date, ATO's PCG 2026/1 first-year facilitative compliance approach ending 30 June 2027) are drawn from the Australian Taxation Office. ATO enforcement volumes, Small Business Restructuring eligibility requirements, and the 21.9%/0.7% closure-rate comparison are drawn from the Tax Ombudsman and CreditorWatch, detailed in full on The Closing Window. As of September 2026, no Australian business has been publicly reported as having closed specifically because of Payday Super — this page describes a real, dated compliance mechanism and a genuine risk window, not a claim that closures have already occurred because of it.

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