Australian money questions, answered with real numbers

Most Australian money questions have a real, knowable answer. How does my super compare to other people my age? What actually lands in my bank account after tax? Is my fund quietly costing me tens of thousands over a career? Would buying beat renting where I live?

The information needed to answer those questions is public — but it's scattered across regulator spreadsheets, legislation and PDS documents, and most of the sites that repackage it are trying to sell you a product. This site does the reading and the arithmetic, shows the workings, and sells nothing.

Each calculator is built the same way: a plain-English answer first, then an optional deep dive with the full schedule, the assumptions, and charts for anyone who wants to see exactly how the number was reached.

There are no estimated or “typical” figures anywhere in the data. Every rate, threshold, benchmark and statistic is taken from a primary source and stored with its origin and vintage. The main ones are:

• Australian Taxation Office — income tax brackets, Medicare levy and surcharge, HELP/HECS repayment rates and super thresholds for 2026-27, plus ATO Taxation Statistics 2023-24 for income and super balance distributions.
• APRA — every MySuper product's ten-year net return and fees, taken directly from the Comprehensive Product Performance Package.
• Australian Bureau of Statistics — household net worth (ABS Survey of Income and Housing 2019-20), the Consumer Price Index, and dwelling values by state.
• Services Australia — Age Pension rates and the income and assets tests, Child Care Subsidy, Family Tax Benefit and Parental Leave Pay.
• ASFA — the Retirement Standard budgets used as the “comfortable retirement” benchmark (ASFA Retirement Standard, March 2026 quarter).

The full list, with links and publication dates, is on the data sources page.

All the maths lives in one shared calculation engine rather than being written separately per page, so the same salary produces the same tax figure whichever tool you use. Where a calculation depends on an assumption that isn't a published fact — an investment return, a rate of capital growth, an inflation rate — that assumption is stated on the page and you can change it.

We try hard to be honest about the limits of a model. Where a fund is an age-based lifecycle product, we show the range across age groups rather than inventing a single number. Where a product is too new to have a ten-year record, we say so instead of showing a zero. Where a figure is a genuine estimate — lenders mortgage insurance, for instance, which insurers price commercially and don't publish — it's labelled as an estimate.

Australian tax and super settings change on 1 July each year, and the regulators publish on their own cycles — APRA's fund performance data lands around August, ASFA's retirement budgets quarterly, the ABS CPI monthly. Every dataset is stored with its vintage, and figures are re-checked against the source when a new release comes out. Each page shows the vintage of the data it uses so you can judge how current it is.

The site doesn't sell financial products, take commissions or referral fees from super funds or lenders, and no fund can pay to rank higher — the tables are ordered by the numbers. Running costs are covered by advertising.

This is general information, not financial advice. Nothing here takes your personal circumstances into account, and no one here is a licensed financial adviser. The calculators are a starting point for a better conversation — with a licensed adviser, your accountant, your super fund, or Services Australia — not a substitute for one. Figures are estimates and you should confirm anything important with the relevant authority before acting.

Past investment performance is not a reliable indicator of future returns. See our terms and privacy policy for the full detail.

If you spot a figure that looks wrong, we want to hear about it — accuracy is the entire point of the site, and a mistake in a tax threshold or a fund's return is worth fixing immediately. Tell us what page and what number, and we'll check it against the source and correct it.

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