Super fees: what Australians actually pay

Super fees are difficult to compare in the wild. One fund quotes a weekly dollar amount, another a percentage of your balance, and a third folds most of the cost into the investment option so it never appears as a line item. The MySuper regime cuts through that. Every default product must report the same measure on the same basis: the total fees and costs charged on a $50,000 account balance. APRA collects it and publishes it for all 52 products at once.

Every figure on this page comes from APRA's Comprehensive Product Performance Package, as at 30 June 2025. None of it is a commercial survey estimate.

What the fee figure actually includes

APRA's "total fees and costs" is an all-in measure of what it costs to hold the product for a year. It has three components.

• Administration fees and costs. Running the fund: member servicing, the registry, trustee operating expenses and regulatory levies. In practice this is usually a fixed dollar amount each year plus a small percentage of the balance.
• Investment fees and costs. Paying the investment managers, asset consultants and custodians — including costs incurred inside the underlying investment vehicles rather than deducted directly from your account.
• Transaction costs. The cost of buying and selling assets: brokerage, settlement costs and the buy-sell spreads on underlying funds.

Two things sit outside the measure. Insurance premiums — death, total and permanent disability, and income protection cover — are not fees, and are excluded. Advice fees deducted from an account are also excluded. Your annual statement includes both, so the total on a statement is normally larger than APRA's figure. That is a difference in definition, not an error in either number.

The $50,000 balance is a convention rather than a description of anyone's account. Fixing the balance is what makes the comparison work: a product with a high flat administration fee and a product with a high percentage charge are forced onto the same footing. It also means the published figure is not a quote for your own balance — scaling it up or down is an approximation, and it drifts furthest from reality on very small and very large accounts.

The spread across all 52 products

On a $50,000 balance, the 52 MySuper products charge between $245 and $625 a year. That is a spread of $380 annually for the same regulated product type on the same balance.

The distribution is not evenly spread. Most products cluster in a fairly narrow band either side of the median, with a thin tail at each end.

One further wrinkle: 24 of the 52 products are age-based lifecycle products, which move members between investment stages as they get older. The fee is reported per stage, and the stages do not all charge the same. The widest internal gap is at TelstraSuper, where the reported fee ranges from $345 to $455 depending on which cohort a member sits in. A single headline number for a lifecycle product always conceals some variation. The fund comparison tool shows each stage separately.

Turning a dollar figure into a rate

Dividing the annual fee by the $50,000 balance converts it into a rate: 0.49% at the low end, 0.81% at the median and 1.25% at the high end. Expressed that way the whole industry fits inside a single percentage point of spread, which is why the differences look small at first glance. Applied to a balance of $200,000, those same rates work out at $980, $1,620 and $2,500 a year respectively.

The caveat from earlier applies to that scaling. Because real fee schedules mix a fixed dollar administration charge with percentage-based costs, a flat rate slightly overstates the cost above $50,000 and understates it below. The super fund fees calculator applies the same scaling to your own balance, with the same limitation.

The arithmetic of a percentage over decades

A fee reduces the balance every year, and the reduced balance then earns a return on a smaller base. That is why a fraction of a per cent behaves differently over thirty years than it does over one. The arithmetic below sets that out.

Stated assumptions. The example starts with a $50,000 balance, adds no further contributions, and applies a 5% real (after-inflation) return each year — the modelling default used across this site, not a forecast and not a figure published by APRA. The fee is modelled as a constant drag on that return, so the balance grows at the return less the fee rate. Real returns vary year to year, real fee schedules change, and past investment performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. The table isolates one variable so the mechanism is visible; it is not a projection of anyone's account.

Read the last column across and the pattern is clear. Over ten years, the difference between the cheapest and dearest published rates on this balance is $5,471. Over thirty years it is $36,931, on a balance that started at $50,000. The annual cash difference between those two rates on $50,000 is only $380 in the first year; over thirty years the compounding does the rest of the work.

The same arithmetic applies to the gap between the median and either extreme. The difference between the median rate and the lowest is $16,507 over thirty years on these assumptions; between the median and the highest, $20,424.

Fees are one input, and they overlap with returns

A fee figure on its own does not describe a product. APRA publishes a ten-year net investment return alongside the fee, and that return is already net of investment fees and tax. It is not net of administration fees. This has two consequences worth being precise about.

First, a low fee and a high return cannot simply be added together as though they were separate gains — the investment-fee component is counted once in the return and again in the total fee figure. Second, a product with a high total fee can still have reported a high net return, because the investment costs that produced it were already deducted before the return was struck. The median ten-year net investment return across the products with a full decade of history is 7.68% a year, against a median fee of $405. The two measures do not line up neatly at the extremes: the product with the highest fee reported a ten-year net return of 8.32%, above that median, while the product with the lowest fee has not been running long enough to report a ten-year figure at all.

Fees also say nothing about the other things that differ between products: the asset allocation and therefore the risk of the default option, the insurance built into it, and the services attached to the account. Which of those matters, and how much, depends on individual circumstances. A licensed financial adviser, or your fund directly, can advise on your own situation; this page reports what the published data says and stops there.

Where the published figure stops

APRA's dataset covers MySuper products — the default options that hold the bulk of Australian accumulation accounts. It does not cover choice investment options inside those same funds, self-managed funds, or defined benefit arrangements, all of which have their own fee structures and are not comparable on this basis.

The authoritative figure for any particular account is the one on that fund's product disclosure statement and annual statement, which show the fee schedule as it applies to the actual balance, including insurance premiums and any advice fees. APRA's number is the comparable one; the statement is the accurate one. Both are published, and they answer different questions.

The full fee table for all 52 products, sorted cheapest to dearest, is in the fees tool, and the returns alongside them in the fund comparison.