Payday Super Is Live: The SCHADS Provider's Guide

Under the Treasury Laws Amendment (Payday Superannuation) Act 2025, from 1 July 2026:

• SG contributions must be received by the employee's super fund within 7 business days of 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.
• Super is calculated on qualifying earnings (QE) — a new statutory earnings base that brings together ordinary time earnings, commissions, salary-sacrificed amounts and other payments previously counted for SG.
• The SG rate stays 12%. Payday super changes timing and enforcement, not the percentage.
• The ATO Small Business Super Clearing House closed permanently on 30 June 2026. Providers who used it need a SuperStream-enabled replacement that's already connected and tested.
• A redesigned super guarantee charge applies automatically to late contributions — more on why that matters below, because it's the part with teeth.

One transition concession: a new employee's first contribution has a longer window — up to 20 business days — recognising fund-choice and onboarding lag. Everything after that first payment runs on the standard clock.

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 enforceable 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 it did much damage. Now it's wrong within 7 business days of the first affected payday — and again every payday after that.

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 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 generally out — genuine overtime paid at overtime rates (over 38 hours/week, over 10 hours/day, work beyond a broken shift's 12-hour span) has historically sat outside OTE. 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 ($1.01/km from 1 July 2026) compensates for car costs, not labour.
• Work-related allowances generally in — allowances paid for skills or conditions of work (such as first aid) are earnings, not reimbursements. For sector-specific allowances like sleepover ($62.87) and broken shift ($21.81/$28.87), confirm the treatment configured in your system against current ATO guidance rather than assuming — this is the single question we hear most, and the cost of guessing wrong now 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.

This is the structural change hiding behind the timing change. The redesigned SG charge applies automatically when contributions don't reach the fund in time, and it has three components:

1. The shortfall — the unpaid super itself, now calculated on qualifying earnings;
2. Notional earnings — interest accruing daily from the missed deadline until the shortfall is paid, at the general interest charge rate; and
3. An administrative uplift of up to 60% of the shortfall plus notional earnings — reducible for good compliance history, and reduced further by timely voluntary disclosure.

Now connect that to SCHADS compliance. Underpaying wages under SCHADS almost always means underpaying super too: a missed broken shift allowance, an unpaid minimum engagement top-up, an afternoon loading paid on part of a shift — each is wage underpayment and (where the category is superable) an SG shortfall on that pay run. Under quarterly super those errors aggregated quietly. Under payday super, every affected pay run is its own late-contribution event, accruing daily interest, with a potential 60% uplift on top. The cost of a systematic timesheet error is no longer just back-pay — it's back-pay plus a per-pay-run penalty engine. The flip side is genuinely useful: self-identified, promptly corrected shortfalls with voluntary disclosure attract materially less uplift. Finding your own errors fast has never been worth more.

If you're reading this in July 2026, the deadline has passed — the question is whether your first pay runs are actually landing. Check now:

• ☐ Contribution settlement — confirm your first July pay run's super was received by funds within 7 business days, not just debited. Ask your clearing house for its actual processing time and subtract it from your window.
• ☐ Rate tables — QE is being calculated on the new 1 July 2026 rates (+4.75%), not June's. A stale rate table understates wages and super simultaneously.
• ☐ Category mapping audit — every pay category's superable flag reviewed and documented, with the sleepover/overtime edge cases decided deliberately.
• ☐ 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 starter onboarding — fund details collected at onboarding so first contributions make the 20-business-day window.
• ☐ 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 now leaves shortfalls compounding daily. Validation needs to run at pay time (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 five 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% (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 payday super means any misconfiguration in either now penalises weekly. A payroll system that was correct in May 2026 and untouched since is now wrong three different ways.

CrossVault validates 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 prices any gap it finds, at pay time. Under payday super that has a second payoff: wage errors caught before the pay run never become SG shortfalls, and wage errors caught at the next pay run instead of the next audit keep the notional-earnings clock short and the voluntary-disclosure discount available. The cheapest super penalty is the one whose underlying wage error never shipped.