End of financial year is always the most demanding stretch in the payroll calendar. EOFY 2026 carries an extra weight: while you're finalising the year just gone, a structural change to superannuation lands on 1 July 2026. Getting both right at once is the challenge — and the teams that prepare now will have a far calmer July than those treating it as business as usual.
Job oneFinish FY2026 cleanly
The fundamentals haven't changed, but they still have to be done with discipline. The Superannuation Guarantee rate is 12% for 2025/26, having stepped up on 1 July 2025. Your Single Touch Payroll Phase 2 finalisation declaration is due by 14 July 2026 — the point at which you're telling the ATO that every employee's year-to-date figures are complete and correct.
Two timing points catch teams out every year. Employer super contributions for the 2025/26 year are due by 28 July 2026; but to claim the deduction in this financial year, the contribution must be received by the fund before 30 June. And STP Phase 2's disaggregated reporting — separating overtime, bonuses, leave and allowances, with correct cessation reasons on terminations — means reconciliation is more granular than it used to be. A clean finalisation depends on validating those components, not just the totals.
Job twoThen the bigger shift: Payday Super
From 1 July 2026, Payday Super changes the rhythm of superannuation entirely. Instead of paying SG quarterly, employers must pay it on every payday — and the contribution must reach the employee's fund within seven business days of the pay date. Super is also calculated on a new basis, "qualifying earnings," which brings ordinary time earnings together with other qualifying payments.
This is not a tweak. It changes cashflow timing, the cadence of every pay run, your super configuration and calculation rules, and the reliability of your clearing-house integration. Late contributions under the new regime carry real consequences through the SG charge, so the margin for process error narrows considerably.
Payday Super turns superannuation from a quarterly task into a per-pay discipline. The systems and habits that coped quarterly won't automatically cope every payday.
What it means in your payroll environment
For organisations running SAP payroll — Employee Central Payroll or SAP HCM — Payday Super touches configuration, integration and operations together. Super calculation moves to the qualifying-earnings basis. Payment files to your clearing house have to align with the seven-business-day window on every cycle. Reconciliation that was a quarterly exercise becomes a per-pay control. And exception handling — new starters, terminations, corrections, off-cycle runs — needs to be watertight, because each one now has a tight statutory clock attached.
How to prepareA readiness checklist
You don't need to solve everything at once, but you should move on these now rather than in late June.
Audit super config & data
Confirm how SG is calculated today and where qualifying earnings will differ. Clean up pay component mappings before they drive incorrect contributions every payday.
Test the calculation
Run parallel scenarios on the qualifying-earnings basis across your real pay components and edge cases — overtime, allowances, bonuses, terminations — before go-live.
Check timing end to end
Validate the clearing-house integration and your per-pay payment process against the seven-business-day rule, including off-cycle and correction runs.
Alongside those, tighten per-pay reconciliation so variances are caught within the cycle, not at quarter-end, and brief finance and HR stakeholders on the cashflow and process implications early. Payday Super is as much an operating-rhythm change as a system change, and adoption is where the risk really sits.
Done properly, EOFY 2026 becomes the moment you put payroll on a stronger footing for the years ahead — compliance-led, well-controlled, and ready for a per-payday world — rather than a scramble you repeat every July.