Who we are
AU Pay Calculator is an independent Australian website — not a bank, not a payroll company, and not a lead-generation funnel dressed up as a free tool. We're a small team who spend our days thinking about the least glamorous question in personal finance: how much of my pay do I actually get to keep?
The site started with a frustration most Australians will recognise. Job ads quote gross pay. Rent, groceries, fuel and the electricity bill all come out of net pay. Somewhere between the two sits income tax, the Medicare levy, HECS/HELP repayments and superannuation — and nobody hands you a clear number. We built AU Pay Calculator so you can see what actually lands in your account, without spreadsheets, paid apps or tax jargon.
Whether you're comparing two job offers, negotiating a pay rise, working out redundancy pay, checking whether salary sacrifice is worth it, or simply wondering "how much is $80,000 after tax?" — our tools are designed to give you fast, reliable estimates grounded in official Australian tax data.
Why we built this
Salary transparency shouldn't be a luxury. Too many Australians accept job offers or agree to pay rises without knowing their real take-home pay. A $10,000 raise sounds great until you realise how much of it disappears to tax at higher marginal rates — or that crossing a HECS repayment threshold changes your fortnightly pay more than you expected.
We believe everyone deserves to understand their own pay slip. That means calculations that are honest about what they include, upfront about their limits, and free for anyone to use as often as they like. No account walls, no "enter your email to see results", no selling your salary data to recruiters.
What we offer
AU Pay Calculator provides 25+ free calculators and lookup pages, including:
- Main salary calculator — full gross-to-net breakdown with HECS, super modes, Medicare exemptions, salary sacrifice, and every pay period from hourly to annual
- Specialist tools — income tax, Medicare levy, HECS, bonus tax, superannuation, pay rise, redundancy, Division 293, novated lease, overtime, leave loading and more
- Salary after-tax pages — instant results for popular incomes from $50,000 to $1,000,000
- Hourly wage pages — take-home pay for common hourly rates like $30, $35 and $40 per hour
- Guides and articles — tax brackets, HECS thresholds, super rules and plain-English explanations of Australian pay and tax, each linked to the calculator it describes
How we keep our numbers accurate
Accuracy is the whole point of a calculator, so we treat it seriously. Every tax figure on this site is checked against official Australian Taxation Office (ATO) publications for the 2025–26 financial year, including:
- Progressive resident income tax rates (0%, 16%, 30%, 37%, 45%)
- The Stage 3 tax cuts and updated marginal rate thresholds
- Medicare levy at 2%, including low-income reduction thresholds
- HECS/HELP repayment thresholds and marginal repayment rates
- The 12% superannuation guarantee and contribution caps
- Low Income Tax Offset (LITO) parameters
When the ATO announces changes — new thresholds, new rates, new rules like payday super — we update our calculators and guides, and we note the change in our content. If you ever spot a figure that looks wrong, please tell us: we'd rather hear about a mistake from a reader than let it sit.
How our calculators work
Type in your gross pay and our calculators apply the 2025–26 tax brackets, Medicare levy, HECS/HELP repayments and superannuation rules step by step, then show you the breakdown: what goes to tax, what goes to Medicare, what your employer pays in super, and what's left for you — across annual, monthly, fortnightly, weekly and hourly views.
All calculator inputs are processed locally in your browser. Your salary figures are never sent to our servers, stored, or sold. That's a deliberate design choice, not a policy footnote — read our Privacy Policy for the full details.
What our calculators can't do
Honesty matters as much as accuracy. Our calculators are estimates, not personal tax advice. They don't know about your deductions, your private health insurance, your second job, your residency status, or the dozen other things that shape a real tax return. For anything that affects real money decisions — a salary negotiation, a redundancy payout, a tax return — check the figures with a registered tax agent or the ATO itself.
Our full Disclaimer spells this out in detail. We'd rather you double-check an important number than trust any website blindly — including this one.
How the site is funded
AU Pay Calculator is free and will stay free. Running the site — hosting, development, keeping every rate current — costs money, so we display advertising (such as Google AdSense). Ads never affect our calculations, our rates, or which tools we build. Our calculators will always be accessible without payment, registration or paywalls.
We don't sell sponsored calculator placements, we don't rank financial products, and we don't take commissions for steering you toward any particular choice. The numbers are the numbers.
Editorial standards
Every guide and article on AU Pay Calculator is written to be genuinely useful — not to chase keywords. That means:
- Official sources first. Tax figures come from the ATO and Services Australia, not from other blogs. Where we cite a figure, we link the source.
- Worked examples with real math. When we say $80,000 leaves you with a certain take-home pay, we show the calculation so you can check it.
- Updated, not abandoned. Tax content goes stale fast. We review our guides when rates change and date our updates.
- Plain English. Tax law is complicated enough without us adding jargon. If a concept needs a paragraph to explain, it gets one.
Get in touch
Found a bug? Think a rate is out of date? Want to suggest a calculator we haven't built yet? Or just want to say the site helped you negotiate a better offer — those messages genuinely make our week.
Visit our Contact page to send a message. We read everything and aim to reply within a few business days.