FunanceYour tax return is history. This year is the one you can still change.
Lodgment closes 31 October. Before you file the 2025-26 return, here is what the numbers actually tell you, and why the 2026-27 year that is already two months old deserves more of your attention.
If you lodge your own return, you have until 31 October. Most people treat that as an administrative chore: gather the payment summary, click through the prefill, agree with whatever the ATO already knows, done.
That is a reasonable way to handle it. But it means the one moment each year when a household actually looks at a whole financial year gets spent on data entry rather than on what the data is telling you.
So here are two separate jobs, and it is worth being clear about which is which.
The return you are lodging is already closed
The 2025-26 year ended on 30 June. Nothing you do in August changes it. Deductions had to be incurred before that date, contributions had to hit the fund before that date, and the income is the income.
What the return is still good for is information. Three things worth reading off it before you file and forget.
Which bracket you actually landed in
Most people can name their salary and not their marginal rate. For 2026-27 the brackets are:
| Taxable income | Marginal rate |
|---|---|
| Up to $18,200 | Nil |
| $18,201 to $45,000 | 15% |
| $45,001 to $135,000 | 30% |
| $135,001 to $190,000 | 37% |
| Above $190,000 | 45% |
The number that matters is not the average rate you paid. It is the rate on the next dollar, because that is the rate every decision from here is priced against: overtime, a second job, salary sacrifice, whether an investment is better held in your name or your partner's.
Whether the Medicare shade-in band caught you
The Medicare levy is 2%, but it does not switch on at the full rate. Below $28,011 there is no levy. Between $28,011 and $35,014 you are in a shade-in band where the levy applies at 10 cents in the dollar on the amount above the lower threshold, until it reaches the flat 2%.
Inside that band your effective marginal rate is roughly ten points higher than the bracket table suggests. If you are a part-time earner, a returning parent, or someone whose hours moved during the year, that band is worth knowing about, because it never appears on a payslip.
Whether you left the low income tax offset behind
LITO is worth up to $700. It starts tapering at $37,500 at 5 cents in the dollar, tapers again from $45,000 at 1.5 cents, and is gone entirely by about $66,667.
Like the Medicare band, a taper is a hidden marginal rate. Between $37,500 and $45,000 you are losing 5 cents of offset for every extra dollar, on top of the bracket rate. Nobody budgets for that, because it is never shown as a line item.
HECS is where people get the biggest surprise
Two things about HELP repayments consistently catch people out.
It is calculated on repayment income, not taxable income. Repayment income adds back things like reportable fringe benefits and reportable super contributions. Salary sacrificing into super can therefore lower your taxable income while leaving your HECS repayment untouched.
The system is marginal now, not a cliff. Under the older rules, crossing a threshold applied a percentage to your entire income, so a single dollar could cost thousands. Since 2025-26 it works in tiers:
| Repayment income | Compulsory repayment |
|---|---|
| Up to $69,528 | Nil |
| $69,529 to $129,717 | 15% of the amount above $69,528 |
| $129,718 to $186,050 | $9,028 plus 17% of the amount above $129,717 |
| Above $186,050 | 10% of total repayment income |
That is a much better system, and worth understanding, because the old advice of "do not let your income tick over the threshold" is now simply wrong. Earning one dollar more above $69,528 costs you fifteen cents, not a five-figure bill.
Now the half that is actually still open
Here is the part most tax-time content skips. While you are lodging for a year that closed on 30 June, you are already two months into 2026-27, and every lever in that year is still fully available.
Ten months of runway is worth considerably more than a deduction you forgot to claim.
Salary sacrifice, priced against your real marginal rate
Concessional super contributions are taxed at 15% going into the fund. If your marginal rate is 30%, 37% or 45%, that gap is the entire argument. The annual concessional cap is $30,000, and it includes your employer's Super Guarantee, which is now 12% of ordinary earnings.
So the real question is not "should I salary sacrifice". It is "how much room is left under the cap once my employer's 12% is counted, and is my marginal rate far enough above 15% to make using it worthwhile". Both halves are arithmetic, and both depend on getting the bracket right first.
Carry-forward, which almost nobody checks
If your total super balance is under $500,000, unused concessional cap from the previous five years can generally be carried forward and used in a single year.
This matters most in exactly the years people are not thinking about super: a redundancy payout, a capital gain, a large bonus, or a return to full-time work after a break. Those are the years a big concessional contribution does the most work, and the years the standard annual cap is least useful on its own.
Ten months of a plan beats ten minutes of a return
Deductions are worth claiming. But a deduction returns your marginal rate on the amount spent, once. Getting your contribution rate, your debt payoff order and your repayment structure right applies every fortnight for the rest of the year, and then compounds.
What Funance does with this
All of the above is built into the tax engine rather than described in an article. Enter your gross salary and Funance applies the 2026-27 brackets, the LITO taper, the Medicare levy including the shade-in band, and HELP repayments on the marginal tiers, calculated per partner rather than as one household number.
From there the Advice tab flags the specific things worth acting on: unused concessional cap, whether salary sacrifice beats your bracket, and whether your repayment income is behaving differently to your taxable income.
Overview, Budget and Debts are free, and the Australian tax estimator runs on the free plan.
The honest caveat
Everything here is general information built from the published ATO rules and applied to numbers you enter yourself. It is not tax advice, it does not know your circumstances, and it cannot see the things that make an individual return unusual.
If your year included a capital gain, a business, a trust, an investment property, crypto or a redundancy, get a registered tax agent involved. Lodging through an agent also generally extends your deadline past 31 October, provided you are on their books before that date.
For everyone else: lodge the old year, then spend the better ten minutes on the one that is still running.