PAYG withholding calculator

The tables below are published as text rather than a PDF, so you can read them on a phone and copy a figure out of them.

Scales 1 and 2. These figures are for someone who gave their employer a tax file number, with or without the tax-free threshold, with no offsets claimed and no Medicare levy variation. The schedule defines six scales; the other four are listed at the end of this page.

Weekly

With the tax-free threshold claimed, nothing is withheld until weekly earnings reach $365. Without it, withholding starts at $4 a week.

Fortnightly

A fortnightly figure is always exactly twice the weekly figure for half the pay. The schedule halves the fortnightly pay, discards the cents, works out the weekly amount, rounds it to the dollar, and only then doubles it — so the rounding happens in the middle, not at the end, and every fortnightly amount is an even number of dollars.

Monthly

Monthly pay is converted to a weekly figure by multiplying by three and dividing by thirteen, with one oddity the schedule spells out: an amount ending in exactly 33 cents has a cent added first. The weekly result is rounded and then multiplied back by thirteen over three.

This is not what you owe

Withholding is an estimate made one pay at a time, on the assumption that every pay in the year looks like this one. Your actual liability is worked out once, on the whole year, when your return is assessed, and on steady pay the withholding comes out ahead at every income where anything is withheld. Below $66,667 that is mostly the $700 low income tax offset, which is applied at assessment rather than through your pay; at every income it is also the $1,000 standard deduction, which the schedule does not include either.

To see where your own year is heading, the YTD income calculator scales the tax on your payslip so far against the year’s bill.

The rates underneath all of this are the income tax brackets, which changed on 1 July 2026 and are what these coefficients were rebuilt around. The pay calculator works out the annual liability, and the section on it comparing the two shows the size of the gap at each salary. If you are looking for the study loan component instead, that is withheld separately and the STSL line explains why it may not appear on your payslip at all.

How these figures are produced

Every number above is computed from the coefficients in NAT 1004, the Commissioner’s statement of formulas, using the schedule’s own equation: the withholding is a × x − b, where x is the whole dollars of weekly earnings plus 99 cents, and the result is rounded straight to the nearest dollar with no preliminary rounding to cents.

The transcription is checked against the ATO’s own worked examples — two from the schedule and one from each of the weekly, fortnightly and monthly tax tables, in both columns — by tests that fail the build if any of those results changes, or if withholding ever falls as pay rises. Every figure in the tables and the calculator is computed from the coefficients; none is typed in.

Source: Schedule 1 — Statement of formulas for calculating amounts to be withheld (NAT 1004, QC107116), published 2026-06-17, applying to payments made from 1 July 2026. Made by the Commissioner of Taxation under sections 15-25 and 15-30 of Schedule 1 to the Taxation Administration Act 1953.