Australian tax · FY2025-26
HELP / HECS repayment calculator
For 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026 compulsory repayments start above $67,000 — and only the income above that is charged. This is the year the old system, which applied a rate to your whole income, was replaced.
FY2025-26Other years
Calculator
This is an estimate, not advice. It applies the published rate to what you enter; whether the method suits your circumstances, and whether your records support the figures, is a question for your tax agent.
Repayment income is not taxable income
This is the single most common reason a repayment comes in higher than expected. Repayment income is your taxable income plus:
- Reportable fringe benefits
- Total net investment loss — including a negatively geared rental
- Reportable employer super contributions (salary sacrifice)
- Exempt foreign employment income
A negatively geared rental does not reduce it. The loss comes off your taxable income and is then added straight back for this calculation, which is exactly the case where a return and a repayment notice look like they disagree.
What comes out of each pay
The rows above divide the year's compulsory repayment by 26 fortnights or 12 months. That is a useful number to budget against, and it is not what your payslip will show.
The compulsory repayment is assessed once, on your return, against your whole year's repayment income. What an employer withholds each pay is a separate estimate, worked out from that pay alone as though you earned it all year — so overtime in one fortnight, a bonus, a pay rise mid-year or a second job each push the two figures apart. The difference lands in your assessment, either as a larger bill or as a refund.
Two cases where they are reliably different. Someone who started work part-way through the year has tax withheld as though every fortnight's rate ran the whole year, and their actual repayment income is a fraction of that. And someone with two jobs has each employer withholding against its own pay, neither of them seeing the total the repayment is assessed on.
If you are checking a payslip against this page and they disagree, they are supposed to. The number that settles it is the assessment.
Salary packaging does not reduce this
It is the question that arrives every year from anyone packaging through a hospital, a charity or a public benevolent institution, and the answer is the one nobody wants: packaging lowers your taxable income and leaves your repayment income where it was.
It follows from the list above. A packaged benefit is a reportable fringe benefit, and salary sacrificed to super is a reportable employer super contribution — both come off taxable income and both are added straight back to reach repayment income. The packaging worked, on the tax. It did nothing here.
The surprise is usually the size of it: a packaged amount is grossed up before it is reported, so the figure added back is larger than the benefit received. That is the mechanism behind a repayment notice that looks impossible next to a payslip, and it is worth checking the reportable amount on the payment summary rather than the packaged one before assuming an error.
This page takes repayment income, not salary. If you are working from a payslip, add the reportable amounts back before you type a figure in.
What changed in FY2025-26
Before FY2025-26 the rate for your income band applied to your whole repayment income. Crossing a band boundary by a dollar could cost hundreds, because the higher rate re-applied to everything you earned.
From FY2025-26 it is marginal: the first $67,000 repays nothing, and only the income above it is charged. A very high income eventually settles back onto a flat share of the whole amount, so the marginal bands cannot overtake it.
Worked example
On a repayment income of $90,000 in FY2025-26, the compulsory repayment is $3,450 — 3.83% of the whole. Only $23,000 of that income is charged at all.
Preparing returns, not just your own?
BeforeMay builds the working paper behind the return — and computes this repayment from the same function this page just used, on a repayment income assembled from the client's own documents rather than typed in.
Start a case freeWhere does client data go?
Three returns free. No card.
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