STP Finalisation Is Due Today. Here's the EOFY Twist Payday Super Just Added
STP Finalisation Is Due Today. Here's the EOFY Twist Payday Super Just Added
Every other year, finalising STP is a formality once the last pay run is done. This year, you're closing last year's books under the old super rules while already running this year's payroll under brand new ones.
If you report through Single Touch Payroll, today is the day your finalisation declaration for the 2025–26 financial year is due. On any normal year that's a checklist item. This year it lands in the same week Payday Super went live — which means most finance teams are finalising last year's numbers under the old quarterly super system while their current payroll is already running under a completely different set of rules. Worth pausing on both before you hit submit.
What's Actually Due Today
A finalisation declaration tells the ATO that your reported STP data for the year is complete and correct for each employee. Once you make it, your employees' income statements flip from "year-to-date" to "tax ready" in myGov, and you're no longer required to issue payment summaries. For arm's length employees, that declaration is due by 14 July each year, full stop — there's no automatic extension. If you genuinely can't get there in time, you need to apply for a deferral before the deadline, not after it. Closely held payees — family members, directors and shareholders of family businesses — have until 30 September, but if you've also got arm's length staff, their declaration still needs to land today.
|
14 July
Deadline for your STP finalisation declaration for arm's length employees — closely held payees run to 30 September instead.
|
28 July
The last super guarantee payment still due under the old quarterly rules — for wages paid before 1 July, even as Payday Super runs alongside it for every pay cycle since.
|
Why This Isn't a Routine Finalisation
The year you're finalising today — 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026 — sat entirely under the old super system. Payday Super only applies to payments made on or after 1 July 2026, which means it has no bearing on the data you're locking in this week. But that's exactly what makes this EOFY unusual: you're not just closing out an old year, you're doing it in the middle of running your first few pay cycles under an entirely new super regime. Two different sets of rules, two different mental models, both live in your business in the same fortnight.
That has a practical consequence that's easy to miss. The super guarantee for wages paid in April, May and June — the final quarter of the year you're finalising — is still governed by the old quarterly rule, with payment due by the usual 28 July date. Meanwhile, super for any pay run dated 1 July 2026 or later already has to reach the fund within 7 business days under Payday Super. If your payroll or finance team is mentally in "new regime" mode for everything happening in July, it's worth an explicit check that the transition quarter's super is still being tracked against the old deadline, not accidentally folded into the new one.
The ATO has acknowledged this is a genuine first-year adjustment period. Its Practical Compliance Guideline for Payday Super sets out that, provided employers are paying super on a payday basis and correcting errors as soon as they're identified, isolated teething problems won't be the focus of compliance action in this first year. That's a reasonable concession — but it applies to your new payroll cycles going forward, not to what you're finalising today. The 2025–26 finalisation still needs to be accurate on its own terms.
The Reconciliation Checklist for This Week
Before you submit today's declaration, a few checks are worth the ten minutes they take. Confirm every pay run through 30 June 2026 has actually been processed and reported — including back-pay, leave payouts and termination payments for anyone who left during the year, and anyone paid irregularly enough that they might have slipped off the radar. Reconcile gross wages and PAYG withholding reported via STP against your general ledger and your activity statement labels (W1 and W2); a mismatch here is the most common reason finalisations need correcting later. Reconcile employer super for the full FY25–26 year against what was actually paid into funds, remembering the April–June quarter still runs on the old 28 July deadline. And if you provided fringe benefits during the FBT year to 31 March 2026, make sure the reportable fringe benefits amount is included — it's tied to a different year-end than your STP data, which is exactly the kind of detail that gets missed under time pressure.
If you find an error after you've already finalised, you're not stuck — you can lodge a correction, and the ATO's ordinary approach is cooperative where the error is self-identified rather than large, deliberate or repeated. You've also got up to five years to amend finalised STP data if something surfaces well after the fact. That's useful to know, but it's not a reason to rush today's declaration — a correction is more work for you and a confusing update to an employee's income statement, sometimes after they've already lodged their return.
Building the Overlap Into Your Close, Not Fighting It
The organisations handling this transition most smoothly aren't the ones treating STP finalisation and Payday Super as two unrelated projects running in parallel. They're the ones who've built a single reconciliation view that shows both the tail of the old year and the front of the new one side by side — so a payment that should have landed under the 28 July quarterly rule doesn't get mistaken for one that needed to clear in 7 business days, and vice versa. We've been building exactly this kind of transition-aware reconciliation view into our own client reporting over the past few weeks — not ready to go into the mechanics here, but the short version is that the two regimes need to be reconciled against each other explicitly this year, not just each reconciled against itself in isolation.
Closing out FY25–26 while standing up Payday Super at the same time?
PFL provides senior-level outsourced finance, management reporting, and AI automation for Australian NFP, NDIS, and SME organisations — including EOFY reconciliation and payroll transition support built into your regular reporting cycle, not just a July fire drill.
Talk to PFL →
Comments
Post a Comment