Band leaders

You invoice for the whole band. Now who owes the super?

This is the question payday super broke, and almost nobody answered it before 1 July. If you are the one who books the room, sends the invoice and pays the players, the new rules land on you twice, and the second hit comes out of your own end.

The rule, in one line

Section 12(8) of the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992 makes a performer the employee of the person liable to make the payment. Not the person who booked the gig. Not the venue whose name is on the poster. The person whose bank account the money leaves.

Read that again with your own arrangement in mind, because if the venue pays you $1,200 and you pay three other musicians $300 each, you are the person liable to make three payments to three performers. The Act does not carve out an exception because you are also holding a guitar.

What that does to a $1,200 four-piece

Take a straightforward night. A pub books a four-piece for $1,200 excluding GST. Everybody is a sole trader. Everyone splits evenly at $300. Here is how it used to work, and how it works now.

The leader is not poorer overall. They have $192 in cash and $144 in super, which is $336 of value against the $300 they used to take home. But the cash dropped by $108 on a night where nothing else changed, and cash is what pays for the van.

If you want to keep your $300 in cash, you have to quote the venue $1,308 instead of $1,200, so the $108 you are about to pay out is covered. The venue's total cost then goes to $1,308 plus $156.96 of super, which is $1,464.96 for the same band on the same night. That is the conversation grassroots venues are having, and losing.

The version where the venue pays everybody

Now the same gig, structured so the venue pays each of the four musicians $300 directly. You still book it, still lead it, still run the setlist. You just stop being the one whose account the money passes through.

Compare that to the first version. The venue's cost is identical at $1,344 either way. The leader's cash goes back to $300. The leader does no super admin at all. The only party worse off is the leader's retirement, because they get $36 into their fund instead of $144.

That last row is the one to think hardest about. Under the pass-through model you are not just doing extra admin, you are personally carrying a super guarantee liability with a seven business day deadline on it. If you pay your drummer late, that is your shortfall, your interest, and your administrative uplift, payable to the ATO rather than to the drummer.

Five ways to structure it

1. Act as the band's agent, and say so

The ATO's own guidance now works this through, and it turns on one thing: whether you are acting as an agent for the group or in your own right. If you agree with the other players that you act as their agent, and you make that clear to the venue, the venue is liable to pay all of you. It owes super to each of you on your own share, and you owe none at all. You are only moving the money.

If the venue does not know the other players exist, you are contracting in your own right. Then the venue owes super on the whole fee it pays you, and you owe super again on everything you pay out. Same night, same money, two completely different answers, decided by a conversation that takes ten seconds.

Being an agent is about substance, not labels. The ATO says calling yourself one is not enough: the other players have to have actually authorised you, and the venue has to be dealing with you on that basis. Put it in the booking email.

2. Ask the venue to pay each player directly

Cleanest for you, and costs the venue nothing extra. Harder to sell, because the venue now needs fund details for four people instead of one and most bookers would rather deal with a single invoice. Worth asking anyway, and much easier to ask before the residency starts than three months in.

3. Keep invoicing for the band, and reprice

Quote the fee plus what you will pay out in super, so your cut is whole. On the example above that is $1,308 rather than $1,200. Say why in the quote, in one line, because a booker who sees an unexplained 9 per cent rise assumes you are chancing it.

4. Have the players invoice you, and treat it as what it is

If money is going to pass through you, run it properly. Get an invoice from each player, pay them on a schedule you control rather than on the night, and make sure the super leaves within seven business days of you paying them. You will need a commercial clearing house or a payroll product, because the ATO's free Small Business Superannuation Clearing House closed on 1 July 2026.

5. Look at whether the band should be an entity

A payment to a genuine partnership, company or trust is a payment to an entity rather than to a person, and section 12(8) generally does not reach it. That changes the picture completely, and not always in your favour: it also means no super for anyone in the band unless the entity chooses to pay it. The real costs of each structure are set out here, and this is the point at which an accountant stops being optional.

The itemising trick that narrows the base

In the first example the venue pays super on the full $1,200, even though $900 of it was never really your money. That is the right answer when the venue has no idea the other players exist. It is not always the right answer.

The ATO's guidance says super applies to the part of a payment that relates to the individual's own work, and it names the things that do not: rehearsal studio hire, equipment hire, freight, travel and accommodation, the use or purchase of intellectual property, and payments for engaging the services of other individuals or entities. That last one is the band fee you are passing on.

So an itemised invoice does real work here. The ATO's own example runs a $6,950 invoice made up of a $5,000 filming fee, $1,000 of equipment hire, $500 of contractor wages and $450 of travel, and concludes the payer owes super on the $5,000 only. The same logic applies to a band fee that separates your work from what you are paying out.

The record keeping this now demands

If you are the one paying the band, you need from each player: full legal name, date of birth, residential address, tax file number, and their fund's name, ABN, USI and member number. The same list a venue needs from you, which is a useful way to remember it.

Two habits make this survivable. Collect the details once per player and keep them, rather than asking on the night every time. And keep the split itself off the invoice the venue receives, because what your bass player is on is nobody's business at the pub, and a client invoice that lists four different rates invites four different conversations.

The other thing to get right is your own books. Nine hundred dollars that landed in your account on Saturday and left again on Tuesday is not your income, and it should not appear as your income at the end of the year. If your record of the night is a bank statement and a memory, it will.

Split a fee without airing it, and without losing track of it

GigFee divides a night's money equally, by percentage or by set amounts, bills the client once for the full fee, and keeps the split off the invoice they receive. It tracks who you still owe, so money that only passed through your account does not end up counted as your income.