Pay Calculator Australia (pay-calculator.au) is a free set of Australian take-home pay and tax calculators, with plain-English guides underneath them. Every tool answers one question: given a salary, a pay frequency, a residency status, a study loan and superannuation, what lands in your account and why. All figures on the site are for the 2026-27 financial year and every rate-bearing claim names the document it came from.
What is this site?
It is a calculator site first and a publication second. The core tool works out net pay after income tax, the Medicare levy, HECS-HELP repayments and the superannuation guarantee, using the rates the ATO has published for 2026-27. Around it sit purpose-built calculators for specific situations, bonuses, redundancy, second jobs, working holiday makers, and guides that explain the rules those calculators implement.
The site exists because most pay questions are really one of two questions. Either: what will my employer withhold from this payment? Or: what do I actually owe for the year? Those are different numbers, calculated from different documents, and a great deal of confusion about bonus tax, second jobs and leave payouts comes from blurring them. The calculators and guides here keep them separate, every time.
How are the figures verified?
Every figure on the site is either computed in code from one tax engine, or quoted from a named primary document with its publication date. The engine implements the published ATO rates and thresholds, and the pages render their tables from it at request time. A number is never typed into a page by hand, because a typed number can silently rot when a rate moves.
The verification chain, in short:
- Read the primary document: an ATO tax table or withholding schedule, a Fair Work page on the National Employment Standards, or an ATO rates-and-thresholds page.
- Record the document name, its NAT number where it has one, and its published or last-updated date.
- Implement the rule in the tax engine and check the output against the worked examples in the document itself.
- Render every table and example on the site from that engine, so a single verified source feeds every page.
- Date the result. Each page states when its figures were last verified.
The full process, including how conflicts between sources are handled and what happens when a figure has not yet been published, is documented on the methodology page. The documents themselves are listed with links on the official sources page.
Why does every page say 2026-27?
Because a tax figure without a financial year is a figure that will quietly become wrong. The Australian financial year runs from 1 July to 30 June, and rates move at the boundary. On 1 July 2026 the first marginal tax rate fell from 16% to 15%, the HECS-HELP system moved to a marginal repayment structure, and the ATO published new withholding schedules. A calculator still carrying last year’s numbers looks identical and is wrong on every result.
So the site is dated everywhere. The current financial year, 2026-27, appears in headings, tables and examples, and each page carries a last-verified date. Where the ATO has not yet published a 2026-27 figure, the page says so plainly and states which prior-year figure is being used in the meantime. Guessing is not part of the process.
Who writes the content?
All pay and tax content is written and edited by Marcus Kelleher, editor, pay and tax content. Every figure is read from the ATO and Fair Work source documents, implemented in the site’s tax engine, and checked against the published rates before it goes live.
Pay Calculator Australia does not offer accounting, tax agent or advisory services. This site exists for one job: working out your numbers. Everything on it is general information, so for decisions about your own situation, speak to a registered tax agent, accountant or auditor.
Is this site affiliated with the ATO or the government?
No. Pay Calculator Australia is an independent website. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Australian Taxation Office, the Fair Work Ombudsman, or any part of the Australian Government. The site works from documents those bodies publish, and links to them, but they have no involvement in it. For official rulings on your own tax, the ATO is the authority, and its own tools are linked from the official sources page.
What happens when something is wrong?
It gets corrected on the page, with a dated note saying what changed. The editorial and corrections policy sets out how that works and how often figures are reviewed. If you spot an error, the fastest route is the contact page, which explains what to include so the report can be checked against the source document and fixed.
What this site is not
It does not prepare tax returns, give personal advice, or estimate anything the published documents do not support. It does not ask for your name, does not require an account, and does not store the salary you type into a calculator. Calculations run in your browser, as the privacy policy explains. The results are estimates built from published 2026-27 rates, and the terms of use describe the limits of that.