I edit the pay and tax content at pay-calculator.au, and I build the calculators that sit underneath it.
My job is narrow and I like it that way. I read the primary documents, the ATO's withholding schedules and tax tables, Fair Work's National Employment Standards, the ABS earnings releases, and turn them into something an ordinary employee can actually use. Then I make the calculator implement that document step by step, rather than approximating it.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Take a bonus. Most calculators apply an averaging method to every bonus they see. But the ATO's Schedule 5 only applies when the payment covers more than one pay period. If your bonus relates to a single pay period, it is simply added to your normal earnings and taxed with the regular table. Getting that wrong changes the answer, and the answer is the only reason anyone came.
The thing I find people most consistently get wrong is the difference between what is withheld from a payment and what they actually owe. Withholding is an estimate your employer makes on payday. Your real tax is worked out at the end of the year. Most of the anger about bonus tax, second jobs, and leave payouts comes from that gap, and most of it resolves at tax time. It is worth understanding before you conclude you have been robbed.
Everything here is dated to a financial year, currently 2026-27, and cites the document it came from. When the ATO moves a threshold I update the engine, which updates every table on the site at once. When I get something wrong I correct it on the page and say what changed.
I am not a registered tax agent and nothing here is personal advice. It is general information about how Australian pay and tax work. If your situation is genuinely complicated, a registered tax agent is worth the money and I would rather you saw one.
How I verify every figure
The same five steps apply to every number on the site, whether it is a tax bracket, a withholding amount or a leave entitlement.
- Read the primary document. Not a summary of it. The ATO tax tables and withholding schedules (Schedule 5, NAT 3348; Schedule 7, NAT 3351; Schedule 11), the ATO rates-and-thresholds pages, the Fair Work National Employment Standards, and ABS earnings releases.
- Record the provenance. Document title, NAT number where one exists, publication or last-updated date, and the date I accessed it. That record is what the Sources section on each page is built from.
- Implement the rule in the tax engine, step by step. The calculators follow the published method rather than approximating it, and I check the output against the worked examples the ATO prints in its own schedules.
- Render figures from the engine, never by hand. Tables and examples on the site are computed from one engine at request time, so a verified rate feeds every page that uses it. A number typed into a page is a number that can silently go stale.
- Date it, and flag what is not yet published. Each page carries a last-verified date. Where the ATO has not yet released a 2026-27 figure, the page says so and names the prior-year figure being used in the meantime.
What I write about
The busiest pages are the take-home pay calculator and the bonus tax calculator, both running on the engine described in the methodology.
Everything on the site sits inside a small set of topics, and I would rather cover them properly than cover more:
- Australian income tax
- PAYG withholding
- Take-home pay calculation
- Superannuation guarantee
- Medicare levy and Medicare levy surcharge
- HECS-HELP repayment
- Salary sacrifice and salary packaging
- National Employment Standards
- Redundancy and termination payments
- Annual leave and leave loading
- Award rates and penalty rates
- Tax residency and working holiday maker tax
Corrections
When I get something wrong, the fix goes on the page itself with a dated note saying what changed and when. The full process, including the review cadence at the start of each financial year, is set out in the editorial and corrections policy. If you have found an error, the contact page explains what to include so I can check it against the source document.
Scope and limitations
I am not a registered tax agent, I hold no financial services licence, and nothing on this site is personal tax or financial advice. It is general information about how Australian pay and tax work, built from published documents and dated to the 2026-27 financial year. The calculators estimate withholding and year-end positions from published rates; they do not know your deductions, your private health cover, your family situation or anything else the ATO would. If your situation involves multiple income sources with foreign residency, a trust, or a redundancy interacting with an ETP cap, that is beyond a calculator, and a registered tax agent is worth the money.