What actually lands in your account

Your pay at every cycle

The same year, divided the four ways payroll usually runs it. Fortnightly is the most common in Australia, and it is the one that trips people up: twenty-six fortnights is not twelve months doubled, so a fortnightly figure times two is never your monthly pay.

Cycle figures are the year divided evenly. Real payroll carries a few cents of rounding into the final pay of the year, so the periods will not always add back to the exact annual total.

Why your payslip takes more than this

If you compare the figures above with what actually leaves your pay, your employer will usually be taking more. That is not an error in either number. This page works out the tax you owe for the year; your employer works out what to withhold each payday, and the ATO gives them a different instrument for it — the withholding schedule, a set of straight-line formulas applied to one pay at a time.

On $100,000, an employer following that schedule withholds about $22,568 across the year, against income tax and Medicare of $22,520. The difference of $48 is just the rounding of 52 weekly amounts.

This comparison is income tax and the Medicare levy only, because that is all this schedule covers. A study loan is withheld separately under its own schedule, so it sits outside both figures above.

The reason is the low income tax offset. Your $700 offset is applied when your return is assessed, not spread through the year — the schedule says plainly that its formulas work out amounts before any tax offsets. It does carry a trace of it: the scale has band edges at $37,500 and $66,667, which are LITO’s own thresholds and match no tax bracket. But the steps there are worth roughly a tenth of the offset, so most of it arrives later, as a refund.

The weekly and fortnightly tables show what that schedule produces at each level of earnings.

Withholding is TFN provided, tax-free threshold claimed, weekly, 52 even pays — the common case, and the kindest one. Someone whose hours vary, who started mid-year, or who has a second job drifts further, because every pay is withheld as though it were typical of the whole year. Figures from NAT 1004, which applies to payments made from 1 July 2026.

The 2026-27 brackets this uses

Resident rates for the year from 1 July 2026, in the ATO’s own wording, read from the same file the calculator runs on. The second bracket’s rate fell from 16c to 15c this year and is legislated to fall again to 14c from 1 July 2027.

Bands are drawn equal width so the lower brackets stay readable; the marker sits where your salary falls within its own band.

Source: ATO — Tax rates for Australian residents, verified 2026-09-02. These rates exclude the Medicare levy.

These are this year’s rates. The brackets changed in 2024-25 and again on 1 July 2026, and what changed and what it was worth sets the last four years side by side.

The Medicare levy does not start at the first dollar

The levy is 2% of taxable income, but a single resident pays none of it up to $28,011. Above that it phases in at 10c for each $1 of the excess, until the phased amount catches up with the flat rate at about $35,014. From there it is a flat 2%.

This is one of the places a pay calculator is most often quietly wrong. Charging 2% from the first dollar overstates the levy for everyone in the phase-in, and the receipt above shows the phased figure rather than the flat one. Rates are FY 2026-27 as legislated, with one exception: the Medicare levy low-income thresholds are the 2025-26 figures carried forward, because they are legislated retrospectively each Budget. They only affect results at low incomes, and we update them when the Budget lands.

Why the average rate is lower than your bracket

Australian income tax is marginal. Being “in the 30% bracket” does not mean 30% of your income goes in tax; it means the next dollar you earn is taxed at 30 cents. Everything below the bracket floor is taxed at the lower rates underneath it, and the first $18,200 is not taxed at all. That is why the average rate on the receipt above sits well below the bracket rate.

The gap matters when you are weighing a pay rise or extra hours. The relevant number is the marginal rate, because that is what applies to the extra money — and once a study loan is in the picture, the effective rate on the next dollar is higher than the bracket alone suggests. The HECS repayment calculator takes that further and works out the year your balance actually clears, and the guide to checking your balance explains why the figure in myGov is not what you owe today.

Super sits outside all of this

The super guarantee is 12% and it is paid by your employer on top of your ordinary earnings, into your fund. It is not part of your take-home pay and it is not taxed as your income. The only figure above it changes is the salary itself, and only when your contract quotes a package that already contains it.

One change to watch this year: from 1 July 2026 the maximum contribution base became an annual figure of $270,830 rather than a quarterly one, so the point where compulsory super stops growing moved. Above that salary the guarantee is capped at $32,499.60 for the year.

Where these numbers come from

Every rate on this page is read from a dated data file that cites its source, and every engine is pinned by automated tests to the ATO’s own published figures — including its worked examples for study loan repayments. If a rate drifts from the official schedule, the site fails to build rather than quietly serve a stale number. The methodology page sets out exactly what is modelled and what is not.