Australian income tax calculator

Taxable income is not your salary

It is everything assessable — salary, interest, dividends, rent, a net capital gain — less the deductions you can claim. So the number to type in is usually lower than what an employer paid you, and on a year with a deductible loss it can be a lot lower.

If what you want is the figure that lands in your account each pay rather than the year’s tax, the take-home pay calculator divides this by your pay period and shows the super beside it.

Two things people expect to see in it and should not. Salary sacrificed to super never reaches taxable income at all. Neither does a reportable fringe benefit. Both are added straight back for the Medicare levy surcharge and for a HELP repayment, which is the single most common reason those two come in higher than a reading of this page suggests.

The FY2022-23 resident scale

Each rate applies only to the slice of income inside its own band — crossing into a higher band never re-rates what you earned below it. The Medicare levy sits on top of the whole table and is not in it.

The Medicare levy, and the one this page does not show

The Medicare levy is 2% of taxable income, with a low-income threshold below which it is nil and a shade-in band above that where it climbs at 10c in the dollar until the full 2% takes over. The figure above is a single person’s with no dependants: the family thresholds can only ever reduce it, so what you are reading is the ceiling.

The Medicare levy surcharge is a different thing and is not included. It applies to someone without private hospital cover whose income for surcharge purposes is above a tier — and that income is not taxable income either, because it adds back reportable fringe benefits, reportable employer super and net investment losses.

The low income tax offset reduces tax and cannot create a refund on its own: offsets come off the total and the result stops at zero, so a low income lands on the levy rather than on a payment out.

Worked example

On a taxable income of $90,000 in FY2022-23: income tax of $19,717, a Medicare levy of $1,800 — $21,517 in total, or 23.9% of the whole. The next dollar earned is taxed at 33%, plus the levy.