Missed the 30 June write-off deadline? What FY2026-27 actually gives your business

The last chattel mortgage I watched settle before the deadline hit the financier's queue at 4:40pm on Tuesday 30 June, lodged by a broker who had been refreshing the portal since lunch. That was the final week of June across every equipment desk in the country: NAB, CBA and Macquarie ran settlement queues days deep, dealers wrote contracts with one eye on the clock, and the banners said this was your last chance at the tax event of the year. It was not. The $20,000 instant asset write-off became permanent on 1 July, and most of what happened in June was pricing theatre wrapped around a deadline that no longer exists.

A quick recap on why the scramble existed at all. For a decade the write-off ran on one-year extensions: $20,000 this year, reverting to $1,000 next year unless the budget saved it again. That reversion risk is what made every June a stampede. The May 2026 Budget ended it, making the $20,000 per-asset threshold permanent from 1 July 2026 for businesses with aggregated turnover under $10 million. The enabling bill is still working through Parliament, but no party is going to vote against tradies' tool deductions, and every extension before it has passed. An asset under $20,000 bought this month gets exactly the same immediate deduction as one bought in June. It lands in a different year's return, and that is the entire difference.

What missing 30 June actually cost you

Put a dollar figure on it, because the number is smaller than the EOFY marketing implied. A 30 June purchase put the deduction in your FY2025-26 return and the GST credit in the April-to-June BAS, lodged in late July. A July purchase puts the deduction in FY2026-27, claimable from mid-2027, and the GST credit in the September-quarter BAS, lodged in late October. Everything the stampede was chasing is timing.

• Deduction timing: an $18,500 asset deducted at the 25 per cent company rate is worth $4,625 in tax. Receiving that a year earlier is worth roughly $440 to a business whose money costs 9.5 per cent.
• GST timing: the $1,850 credit on the same asset arrives about three months later on a July purchase. At the same funding cost, call it $44.
• Total: about $480 of timing value on a typical sub-$20,000 asset. Anyone who paid within $480 of full retail in the June rush came out behind, and plenty did.

July's own maths: plate clearance and a full year of use

Here is what the June buyer never hears: July is quietly one of the better buying months of the year. Dealers who over-ordered for the EOFY push are holding stock the importer wants gone, and floor-plan interest on every unsold unit keeps ticking at a 4.35 per cent cash rate. The first fortnight of July is when June's leftover stock gets discounted without banners. Plate clearance on previous-model-year and demo units runs deeper again: demos routinely price 15 to 25 per cent under new, with the same statutory warranty and four thousand gentle kilometres.

The depreciation clock is also kinder to July buyers than the folklore says. For assets over $20,000, the small business pool gives you a 15 per cent deduction in the first year no matter when in the year you buy. A ute delivered on 28 June earned the same first-year percentage as one delivered on 3 July, having produced income for two days. Buy in July and the identical first-year claim covers twelve months of the asset actually earning. The tax system has stopped caring which side of midnight you signed. Price and cash flow are the only live variables, which is how it always should have worked.

Balloon resets did not stop at midnight on 30 June

The other EOFY story rolls straight into the new financial year: the wave of 30 to 40 per cent balloons on chattel mortgages written in 2022 and 2023 keeps falling due right through FY2026-27, and each one reprices off a 4.35 per cent cash rate instead of the near-zero market it was signed in. Commercial asset finance on a used vehicle runs roughly 8.5 to 10.5 per cent today, and on a typical $24,500 residual that is about $1,100 more interest over two years than the original-era rate. The playbook we published in June has not changed: start shopping the residual 60 to 90 days before it falls due, get a genuine market value on the asset so you know whether you are in negative equity, and never let a dealer fold a shortfall into a new facility while you are distracted by the trade-in figure. What has changed is the pressure. Without a threshold deadline, there is no reason to let a balloon decision and an upgrade decision happen on the same afternoon.

The honest bit: when waiting for EOFY 2027 actually is better

Permanence cuts both ways. If the deduction will always be there, there are real situations where the right move is to wait, and a broker who says buy now regardless is selling, not advising.

• Your FY2026-27 profit is genuinely uncertain. A deduction against income you never earn is a loss carried forward, not cash in the bank. If the pipeline looks soft, waiting until autumn 2027, when you know your position, buys the deduction in a year where it works.
• The purchase is a want, not a need. The write-off returns 25 cents in the dollar for a company, up to 47 for a sole trader at the top marginal rate. Spending $18,000 to get $4,500 back on gear you did not need leaves you $13,500 poorer in any month of any year.
• The model cycle is against you. New-generation utes and vans tend to land early in the calendar year. A run-out bought in July at 8 per cent off can still be worse value than the new platform in February if you keep vehicles for seven years.
• You would be financing marginal gear at the top of the rate cycle. The cash rate sat at 4.35 per cent through the June hold, and equipment money costs 8 to 11 per cent. Five years of repayments on an asset that adds no revenue is how an EOFY purchase becomes next June's balloon problem.

The counter-case is just as blunt. If the asset makes money now, a second van that takes the jobs you are currently refusing, an oven that adds forty covers a week, then waiting eleven months for tax neatness costs real revenue every week you wait. Permanence means tax no longer forces the date in either direction. The asset's earning power should.

What you should actually do: two worked plans

The tradie replacing a $75,000 ute

1. Check the payload rating before the price. A $75,000 drive-away lands just under the FY2026-27 car depreciation limit of $69,883 once GST comes out, but add a tray, canopy and tow kit to the same invoice and a sub-one-tonne dual cab crosses it, which caps depreciation and limits the GST credit to $6,353. A ute designed to carry one tonne or more is not a car under these rules, so no cap applies and the full GST credit of about $6,818 is claimable. Five minutes with your accountant on the exact variant is worth real money.
2. Forget the instant write-off on this purchase; it is a sub-$20,000 measure. The ute goes into the small business pool: 15 per cent in year one, 30 per cent of the balance each year after. On roughly $68,200 ex GST, that is a $10,230 first-year deduction, worth about $2,560 at the company rate.
3. Structure it as a chattel mortgage so the GST credit lands in your September-quarter BAS in one hit. Major bank equipment desks are writing new-asset chattel mortgages around 7.9 to 8.7 per cent for clean files with two years of ABN history; non-bank financiers run 9.5 to 11 per cent. Over five years with no balloon, $68,000 at 8.5 per cent is about $1,395 a month.
4. If you take a balloon, size it to the ute's realistic five-year value, not to the repayment you want to see. A 30 per cent balloon cuts the repayment to about $1,120 a month but leaves $20,400 due in 2031 at whatever rates exist then. June's balloon-reset wave is what that looks like when it goes wrong.
5. Walk in with finance pre-approved and negotiate the drive-away price as a cash buyer. Ask specifically for previous-plate and demo stock; July is the month the June leftovers get cheap.

The cafe fitting out

1. Get the fit-out quote itemised per asset before you sign. A single $90,000 fit-out contract line depreciates slowly and finances badly. Itemised, the $16,500 espresso machine, the $4,800 underbench dishwasher, two $3,900 fridges and the $2,800 POS are each under $20,000, so each is immediately deductible in FY2026-27. That is roughly $32,000 of the project written off in year one instead of trickling through a pool.
2. Know what the write-off cannot touch. Joinery, plumbing, electrical and the shopfront are capital works, deductible at 2.5 per cent a year over 40 years regardless of what the shopfitter's invoice says. Nobody can sell you a $90,000 year-one deduction; the equipment slice is the deductible slice.
3. Finance the two slices separately. Equipment carries a secured equipment loan or chattel mortgage around 8 to 9.5 per cent because the lender can take the machine back. A wall cannot be repossessed, so building works price as unsecured business lending at 11 to 14 per cent. The less of the project you push into the unsecured bucket, the cheaper the whole fit-out.
4. Time the spend to trading, not to tax. If you open in September, the write-off lands in the same FY2026-27 return whether the machine arrives in July or August. Buy when the build schedule needs it, not when a finance rep is chasing quarter-end.

The one-line summary for both: the deadline is dead, the deduction is not. Price the asset like a cash buyer in a buyer's month, put the finance out to more than one lender before the first quote settles in as the number, and let the purchase date be set by when the gear starts earning rather than by a countdown clock. The businesses that got the June rush right were the ones that needed the gear anyway. The ones that got it wrong bought a tax story at full retail, and July is when their gear goes on special.

Disclosure: Your Finance Guide partners with Australian Lending and Investment Centre (ALG) ACL 505575 for broker matching. ALG receives commissions from lenders on settled equipment and business finance. Worked figures are indicative, rounded, and depend on your entity type, turnover and credit profile, and the tax treatment of any purchase is a question for your accountant, not a showroom. Rate ranges are from lender rate cards as at early July 2026.