Payday Super Is Live: The SCHADS Provider's Guide

Under the Treasury Laws Amendment (Payday Superannuation) Act 2025 and the Superannuation Guarantee Charge Amendment Act 2025, for paydays from 1 July 2026:

• SG contributions must be received by the employee's super fund within 7 business days after payday — with the information needed to allocate them. "Paid from your account" doesn't count; received and allocatable does. Clearing-house processing time now sits inside your deadline, and weekends and public holidays in any state or territory don't count as business days. A rejected contribution that is fixed and received within the 7 business days is still on time.
• The old quarterly deadlines no longer apply to paydays from 1 July 2026. Paydays before that date stayed on the quarterly rules — the June 2026 quarter was due on 28 July 2026.
• Super is calculated on qualifying earnings (QE) — a statutory earnings base made up of ordinary time earnings, all commissions, salary-sacrificed amounts that would otherwise be QE, and some payments to workers under the extended definition. For most award employers it sits close to OTE.
• The SG rate stays 12%. Payday super changes timing and enforcement, not the percentage.
• Super funds now have 3 business days to allocate or return a contribution (it was 20), so a rejected payment comes back fast and the clock is still running when it does.
• The ATO Small Business Superannuation Clearing House closed to new users on 1 October 2025 and closed permanently from 1 July 2026. Employers need an alternative method of payment — payroll-integrated super payments, a commercial clearing house, or paying funds directly via SuperStream — that is already connected and tested.
• A redesigned super guarantee charge is assessed by the ATO for each late or missed contribution (per payday, or "QE day"), and there is no employer SG statement for paydays from 1 July 2026. More on that below.
• Single Touch Payroll now reports QE and super liability as year-to-date amounts from 1 July 2026. The ATO still accepts OTE until 30 June 2027.

Some contributions get a longer window — 20 business days — for the first contribution for a new employee, the first contribution to a new fund for an existing employee, and a rehired or recommenced worker. That is a permanent rule, not a transition concession. Everything after that first payment runs on the standard clock. Exceptional-circumstances determinations (a natural disaster or major IT outage, for example) can also extend the deadline.

A corporate employer with salaried staff on monthly pays now has 12 super deadlines a year and a stable QE figure each time. A typical SCHADS provider has neither:

• Weekly or fortnightly pays are the sector norm — that's 52 (or 26) hard deadlines a year, each one assessed individually.
• QE moves every single pay run. Casual-heavy rosters, weekend penalties, shift loadings, broken shifts and sleepovers mean no two pay runs produce the same super liability. Forecasting the cash outflow requires forecasting the roster.
• Every pay category needs a correct superable/not-superable mapping. SCHADS payroll typically carries a dozen-plus categories — ordinary hours, Saturday/Sunday/public-holiday rates, afternoon and night loadings, overtime at multiple rates, broken shift allowances, sleepover allowances, vehicle kilometres, first aid, on-call. Each maps to QE or it doesn't. Under quarterly super, a wrong mapping had a quarter to be noticed before the first deadline fell. Now the first affected payday's deadline arrives within 7 business days, and every payday after that adds another.

For most providers, QE will land close to what you already treated as ordinary time earnings — but "close" is exactly where the errors live. The ATO's "what payments are qualifying earnings" page is the guidance to work from: the ATO withdrew the old OTE ruling (SGR 2009/2) from 1 July 2026, and its replacement, draft LCR 2026/D1, is not final. The principles:

• Payments for ordinary hours are in — base rates, casual loading, Saturday/Sunday/public-holiday rates for ordinary hours, and afternoon/night shift loadings (which under clause 29.3 apply to whole shifts of ordinary hours).
• Overtime is out only where ordinary hours are clearly identified. If your payroll doesn't clearly separate ordinary hours from overtime hours, the ATO treats all hours as QE. Genuine overtime paid at overtime rates (over 38 hours/week, over 10 hours/day, work beyond a broken shift's 12-hour span) is the standard case. But SCHADS makes the boundary slippery: sleepover disturbance work is paid at overtime rates even when it isn't classic overtime, and the 1 June 2026 sleepover determination re-drew where ordinary hours end around sleepovers. These edge cases need a deliberate decision, not a default.
• Expense reimbursements are out — the vehicle allowance ($1.05/km, a temporary rate from the first full pay period on or after 1 September 2026 to 28 February 2027; $1.01 otherwise) compensates for car costs, not labour, and the per-kilometre travel example in the ATO's draft LCR 2026/D1 (Example 14) treats that kind of payment as a reimbursement.
• Task allowances are in — first aid, higher duties and allowances for adverse conditions are QE. So are expense-type allowances paid whether or not the expense is incurred, or with no relationship to its actual cost; only an allowance expected to be fully spent on the expense is out. On-call and call-back payments outside ordinary hours are out.
• The SCHADS sleepover and broken shift allowances are unresolved. The ATO's published guidance doesn't mention the sleepover allowance ($62.87, clause 25.7) or the broken shift allowance ($21.81/$28.87, clause 20.12), so anyone who tells you flatly that they do, or don't, attract super is overstating it. One side of the argument: they are flat payments with no relationship to an actual cost. The other: the only ATO document on sleepover super we have found, a 2019 edited private advice (EV 1051484058601), concluded the sleepover allowance is not OTE — but it binds nobody except that taxpayer, rests on the withdrawn SGR 2009/2, and predates the 1 June 2026 award variation. Confirm the treatment with the ATO or your adviser and write the reasoning down; our companion post goes through whether sleepover and broken shift allowances attract super. This is the single question we hear most, and the cost of guessing wrong repeats every pay run.

The test worth applying to every category: would you be comfortable showing this mapping to an auditor with the reasoning written down? If the answer is "it's whatever the software defaulted to", that's the review list.

The super guarantee charge is what the ATO assesses when a contribution isn't received by the fund on time, or is for too little. It is assessed per QE day, and it has four components:

1. The shortfall — 12% of qualifying earnings, less the contributions actually made;
2. Notional earnings — interest on the shortfall at the general interest charge rate, compounding daily;
3. An administrative uplift — it starts at 60% of the shortfall plus notional earnings, falls by 20 percentage points if you haven't had an ATO-initiated assessment in the prior 2 years, and is reduced further by voluntary disclosure, so the range runs from 0% to 60%; and
4. A choice loading — 25%, capped at $1,200 per notice period, where the employer didn't follow the choice-of-fund rules.

If the charge is still unpaid after a Notice to Pay, a late payment penalty applies — 25%, or 50% for a repeat within 24 months. The SG charge itself is tax deductible for QE days from 1 July 2026; the general interest charge and the late payment penalty are not.

For the first year (QE days from 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027) the ATO has said how it will treat mistakes, in Practical Compliance Guideline PCG 2026/1. It looks at behaviour: are you trying to pay each payday, and are you fixing problems quickly?

• Low risk — you tried to pay the right amount on time, the fund received it late or without enough information to allocate it, you fixed it as soon as reasonably practicable, and nothing is left unpaid. The ATO expects no further review.
• Medium risk — you didn't meet the low-risk criteria but fixed any unpaid super within 28 days after the end of the quarter in which the QE was paid. For QE paid in July to September 2026, that is 28 October 2026.
• High risk — anything still unpaid after that. This is where compliance resources are likely to be applied.

The ATO's advice is to pay outstanding amounts to the fund rather than wait for a notice of assessment, and paying before an assessment is issued reduces the charge.

It is tempting to read payday super as turning every underpaid pay run into a late-super event. It doesn't. Super is owed on qualifying earnings that have been paid; wages you haven't paid yet owe no super until they are. The ATO's first-year guidance says so directly: where payroll reconciliation finds an employee wasn't paid an allowance that is qualifying earnings, pay it in the next pay period, and the super is due 7 business days after it is paid (unless it is an out-of-cycle payment). The ATO's response: "There is no unpaid super guarantee as long as the amount is received by the employee's fund within 7 business days after the allowance is paid. We will not take any compliance action."

For a SCHADS provider correcting an underpayment, that works out as:

• When the super is due depends on how the back pay goes out. Paid inside a regular pay run, it is ordinary qualifying earnings for that payday, so its super is due within the usual 7 business days. Paid separately, outside the regular pay cycle, it is an out-of-cycle payment, and its super is due on the same deadline as your next regular payday's contribution (the ATO's example: a back payment made on 29 August, next regular payday 3 September, super due 14 September).
• Only the QE part carries super. Back-paid ordinary-hours pay, casual loading and penalty rates for ordinary hours are in; back-paid overtime is out where ordinary hours are clearly identified. Allowances follow the same mapping questions as current pay, including the unresolved sleepover and broken shift treatment above.
• Super goes to the fund, not the worker. When you work out what an affected employee is owed, show the super as a separate employer cost paid to their fund — it isn't part of the back pay owed to them.
• Late-super exposure arises only if that super isn't then received on time. Miss the deadline on the back-pay super and it is an ordinary late contribution under the rules above.

The late-super exposure that does run under the SG charge, pay run after pay run, is a set-up error: QE that was paid but not treated as super-bearing. If a penalty or allowance pay item that counts as QE is ticked "exempt from super" in payroll, every pay run in which it is paid creates a shortfall of 12% of that amount. The ATO's first-year scenarios cover it: an employee paid an allowance that was misclassified and left out of their QE amount is rated low risk, the response is to pay the unpaid super to the fund and update STP (or pay the charge if an assessment has been issued), and the ATO focuses on whether you corrected it and how quickly.

That is the real way payroll set-up errors surface faster under payday super. A wrong mapping used to be able to run for a quarter before the first deadline fell. Now the first deadline arrives within 7 business days, every payday adds another, and STP reports QE and super liability year to date with each pay event, so the mapping error is baked into the figures you lodge. The flip side is the ATO's own year-one approach: errors found and fixed promptly, with voluntary disclosure where it makes sense, sit in the low-risk zone and reduce the charge.

Payday super has been live since 1 July 2026, so you have several pay runs on the new rules behind you. If you haven't audited your set-up yet, do it now — the ATO's year-one approach rewards employers who fix errors quickly, and for QE paid in July to September 2026 the medium-risk window closes on 28 October 2026. Check:

• ☐ Contribution settlement — confirm recent pay runs' super was received by funds within 7 business days, not just debited. Ask your clearing provider for its actual processing time and subtract it from your window, and chase any rejection straight away: funds have 3 business days to allocate or return a contribution.
• ☐ Rate tables — the 4.75% increase applies from the first full pay period starting on or after 1 July 2026. Confirm each pay cycle moved to the new 1 July 2026 rates at the right pay period. A stale rate table understates wages and super simultaneously.
• ☐ Category mapping audit — every pay category's superable flag reviewed and documented. Look first for any item paid for ordinary hours (penalties, loadings, flat allowances) marked "exempt from super", and decide the sleepover and broken shift treatment deliberately.
• ☐ Ordinary hours identified — payroll clearly separates ordinary hours from overtime hours, so overtime stays out of QE. If it can't, all hours count.
• ☐ Back-pay procedure — the super on any back pay's QE part is scheduled for the right deadline (that payday's 7 business days if paid in a regular pay run, or the next regular payday's deadline if paid separately), and shown separately from what the employee is owed.
• ☐ Approval workflow — payroll approval, finance release and clearing-house submission running in parallel, not sequentially; a bottleneck that was invisible quarterly now burns your 7 days.
• ☐ New starters, new funds and rehires — fund details collected at onboarding so first contributions make the 20-business-day window, which also covers the first contribution to a new fund and rehired workers.
• ☐ STP reporting — your payroll software is reporting QE and super liability as year-to-date amounts (OTE is accepted until 30 June 2027).
• ☐ Cash flow — super is now a per-pay-cycle outflow on NDIS margins; it needs to be in the weekly cash forecast, not the quarterly one.
• ☐ Error detection cadence — wage-compliance checking that ran quarterly or annually finds underpayments long after the paydays they belong to. Validation needs to run at pay time so back pay, and the super on it, goes out in the next cycle (see our SCHADS audit preparation checklist for the full self-audit method).

Payday super didn't arrive alone. SCHADS providers absorbed three rule changes in about four weeks:

• 1 June 2026 — the sleepover determination (PR798459): shift loadings split across pre/post-sleepover portions, new rest-break and 12-hour overtime rules — our full guide;
• 1 July 2026 — the Annual Wage Review: all award minimums up 4.75%, applying from the first full pay period starting on or after 1 July 2026 (current rate tables and calculator);
• 1 July 2026 — payday super, on qualifying earnings, with the new SG charge.

These interact: the sleepover changes moved the ordinary-hours/overtime boundary, which feeds the QE calculation; the rate rise changed every dollar figure QE is computed on; and under payday super a wrongly mapped pay item produces a shortfall on every pay run it touches. A payroll system that was configured in May 2026 and untouched since needs checking against all three.

CrossVault doesn't calculate or check super; your payroll system and the ATO guidance govern that. What CrossVault's timesheet check does is validate every timesheet against the SCHADS rules — minimum payments, broken shifts, sleepovers, stream-specific overtime, whole-shift loadings, all on the current 1 July 2026 rates — and price the gaps it finds. Those gaps are the underpaid entitlements: missed broken shift allowances, minimum engagement top-ups, overtime, sleepovers and loadings. When they are back-paid, the back pay carries super on its qualifying earnings part, due 7 business days after the payday it goes out on, or by your next regular payday's deadline if it is paid separately. Finding them at the pay run rather than at the next audit means the correction, and the super that follows it, goes out in the same cycle.