Super · 2026

Payday super, explained for people who play for a living

Since 1 July, the super owed on your gigs has to land in your fund within seven business days of you being paid. The obligation itself is thirty-four years old. The deadline is new, and it is the reason your booker suddenly wants your fund's USI.

The short version

If somebody pays you to play, they almost certainly owe you superannuation on top of the fee, at 12 per cent. That has been true since 1992. What changed on 1 July 2026 is that the money now has to reach your fund within seven business days of them paying you, rather than any time before the quarter closes.

That single change turned an obligation most venues quietly ignored into one they cannot ignore, because missing it is now obvious, fast, and expensive. It is why some of them have started asking you for paperwork they never wanted before, why a few have quietly repriced your fee, and why two jazz festivals have cancelled outright.

What actually changed, and what did not

The Treasury Laws Amendment (Payday Superannuation) Act 2025 took effect for earnings paid from 1 July 2026. Three things moved:

• The deadline. Super contributions have to be received by the fund within seven business days of the payday. Not sent within seven days. Received.
• The clearing house. The ATO's free Small Business Superannuation Clearing House closed on 1 July 2026. Anyone paying super now needs a commercial clearing house, a payroll product that handles it, or a fund's own employer portal.
• The reporting. Super liability now has to be reported through Single Touch Payroll at each pay event, so the ATO can see a missed payment almost immediately instead of finding it a year later.

What did not change is the part people keep getting wrong. The rate is still 12 per cent, where it landed on 1 July 2025. The rules about whether super is owed on a performance fee are exactly what they were in June. The ATO has been blunt about this: the reform, in its words, has not changed the rules around whether superannuation is required, only the timing.

Why a rule from 1992 only started hurting this year

Section 12(8) of the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992 says that a person paid to perform or present, or to participate in the presentation of, any music, play, dance, entertainment, sport, display or promotional activity is an employee of the person liable to pay them. Same for people paid to provide services in connection with that activity, and for people paid to work on a recording or a broadcast.

It is written that way deliberately. Parliament looked at an industry full of people who invoice like businesses but work like employees, and decided they should get super anyway. Your ABN does not switch it off. Neither does calling yourself a contractor, or the venue calling you one.

So why has almost nobody been paid it? Two reasons, and they stacked.

Until 1 July 2022 there was a $450 a month earnings threshold. Below it, no super was owed. For a huge share of working musicians, every individual engagement fell under that line, so the venue owed nothing and everyone got used to owing nothing. When the threshold was abolished, the obligation switched on for every $150 support slot in the country, and hardly anybody noticed.

The second reason was the quarterly deadline. An obligation you can settle up to four months later is an obligation you can forget, and a great many venues did. Payday super removed the hiding place. The MEAA's own survey of members this year still found 59 per cent of musicians were not receiving super at all.

Who owes it

The person liable to make the payment. That is the wording, and it matters more than it looks, because it follows the money rather than the booking.

There is no minimum any more. A one-off $80 support slot attracts super. The only exemption most musicians will ever touch is for performers under 18 who are engaged to work not more than 30 hours a week, which survived into the payday super regulations even though a Senate committee recommended scrapping it.

What it looks like on a $300 pub gig

Super is calculated on the fee, excluding GST. If you are registered for GST and you invoice $330 for a Friday night, the super is 12 per cent of $300, not of $330.

Now the version a lot of venues have moved to instead, where the $300 you have always been paid is treated as covering the super. The arithmetic is a division, not a subtraction: $300 ÷ 1.12 × 0.12.

Both structures are legal. Which one you are on is a matter of what you agreed, not what the law dictates, and getting that agreed in writing before you load in is now the single most valuable admin habit you can build. There is a whole page on that argument, because it is the one most musicians are having right now.

Seven business days, and the trap inside it

The clock starts when you are paid, not when you play and not when you invoice. If the venue settles up on the night, the seven business days run from the night. If they pay on 30 day terms, the clock starts when the money moves.

If the money is late, the payer is liable for the super guarantee charge: the shortfall itself, interest compounded daily, and an administrative uplift that can run to 60 per cent of the shortfall depending on their history and whether they came forward voluntarily. The charge is paid to the ATO rather than direct to the fund. The charge itself is deductible for earnings paid from 1 July 2026, which it was not under the quarterly system, but the penalties and any interest the ATO adds after an assessment are not. That is why bookers have gone from ignoring this to panicking about it inside two months.

What it is actually worth to you

Enough to care about. The Australian Live Music Business Council puts the median musician's income at about $14,800 a year. Twelve per cent of that is roughly $1,776 a year going into a fund that was previously getting nothing, for someone whose retirement savings are otherwise whatever they remembered to put aside between tours.

Compounded across a working life, that is the difference between a super balance and a rounding error. It is worth saying plainly, because most of the coverage this year has been about the administrative pain and not much of it has been about the fact that the money is yours and you have been going without it for three decades.

It is also why the fix being asked for matters. An exemption below a threshold protects the gigs. It also means the people playing those gigs keep getting no super, which is where the argument gets genuinely hard.

What to do about it this month

1. Find your fund details and keep them somewhere you can paste from. Fund name, fund ABN, USI, and your member number. A payer cannot send money without them. Here is the full list and where to find each one.
2. Decide your position on inclusive versus on top, and say it in your quote. One line. "Fee $300 plus superannuation of $36." Ambiguity now costs you 12 per cent.
3. Consolidate your funds if you have several. Thirty venues paying $36 into four different accounts is four sets of fees eating four small balances.
4. Check your fund in a month, not tomorrow. Contributions take a few days to show. If a gig from July has still produced nothing by October, that is a conversation to have.
5. Keep your invoices. If you ever lodge an unpaid super enquiry with the ATO, the invoice is the evidence that a payment was made and when.
6. If you lead a band, work out your model before your next booking. Whether the venue pays each player or pays you to distribute changes who carries the obligation, and it can quietly cost you a hundred dollars a night.

Where this is heading

Not settled. The Newcastle Hunter Jazz Festival cancelled its 2026 event, citing 322 sole traders across 55 acts and no realistic way to get super to all of them inside the window. Inverloch Jazz Festival cancelled too. Nigel McRae at Smith's Alternative in Canberra runs around 600 paid gigs a year and has gone from roughly a thousand payments to a projected three to five thousand micro transactions, some of them for five or ten dollars. Venue operators surveyed by the ALMBC reported up to 50 hours a week of unpaid admin.

Unless something happens we're just not going to have a music industry.

Kylie Thompson, treasurer of the Australian Live Music Business Council, quoted in The Music

The ALMBC's headline ask is a $5,000 threshold for sole trader performers, below which super would not apply. Others on their list include an age exemption, calculating super on the labour component of a fee rather than the gross, and bringing back a free clearing house to replace the one that closed on the same day the new rules started.

The MEAA is pushing the other way. Its chief executive Erin Madeley has said the union is hearing reports of businesses looking for new ways to avoid the obligation altogether rather than fixing decades of non-payment. Both things are true at once: the admin burden on small venues is real, and so is the fact that most musicians have never been paid what they were owed.

Nothing has been legislated to soften it. Until something is, the rules above are the rules, and the practical answer for a working musician is to make yourself easy to pay super to and firm about how your fee is quoted.

Invoice a gig with the super shown properly

GigFee raises a tax invoice from your phone with your ABN checked, the GST worked out, and superannuation set out the way a performer's invoice should set it out, so nobody has to guess whether your fee includes it. Free to use, no account, no card.