Australian tax · FY2025-26
Medicare levy surcharge calculator
For 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026 the surcharge starts above $101,000 for a single person and $202,000 for a family — and it is nil at any income for somebody who held private hospital cover all year.
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.
Two incomes decide it, and only one of them is charged
This is the part almost every other calculator gets wrong, and it is worth a paragraph. If you have a spouse, the rate is chosen by your combined income against the family thresholds. That rate is then applied to your own income, not to the combined figure.
So a couple on $110,000 and $150,000 are tested on $260,000 — tier 2 on the FY2025-26 family thresholds — and the one earning $110,000 pays 1.25% of $110,000, not of $260,000. Each spouse is charged on their own income at the shared rate. A calculator that multiplies the combined figure by the rate roughly doubles what a couple actually owes.
The family thresholds also rise by $1,500 for each dependent child after the first. The first child does not move them, which catches people out in the other direction.
Income for surcharge purposes is not taxable income
It is taxable income plus reportable fringe benefits, reportable employer super contributions — that is salary sacrificed to super — total net investment losses including a negatively geared rental, and exempt foreign employment income.
Two consequences worth knowing before you type a figure in. Salary sacrificing to super lowers your taxable income and does not get you under this threshold. And a negatively geared property does not either: the loss comes off taxable income and is added straight back here. The same base decides a HELP repayment.
The FY2025-26 tiers
| Tier | Single | Family | Surcharge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base tier | Up to $101,000 | Up to $202,000 | Nil |
| Tier 1 | $101,001 – $118,000 | $202,001 – $236,000 | 1% |
| Tier 2 | $118,001 – $158,000 | $236,001 – $316,000 | 1.25% |
| Tier 3 | $158,001 and above | $316,001 and above | 1.50% |
Unlike income tax, this is not marginal: one dollar over a tier boundary re-rates the whole income, so crossing a threshold by a small amount can cost hundreds. It is the one place in the return where earning a little more can leave you worse off.
What counts as cover, and what part of a year does
It has to be hospital cover from a registered Australian health insurer. An extras or ancillary policy — dental, optical, physio — does not remove the surcharge, which is the most common reason somebody who thought they were covered is charged anyway.
Cover for part of the year removes the surcharge for the days you held it, and you are charged for the rest. The figure above assumes no cover at all; if you held a policy for part of the year, treat it as the ceiling.
The break-even line is the one people actually want: the surcharge is money paid for nothing, so a hospital policy costing less than it leaves you ahead before the policy has paid for a single thing. Above it, the arithmetic stops being obvious and becomes a judgement about what the cover is worth to you.
Preparing returns, not just your own?
BeforeMay builds the working paper behind the return — and computes this surcharge from the same function this page just used, on an 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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