What changed on 1 July 2026: every money rule that moved for FY2026-27

The 2026-27 financial year is two days old and the 1 July listicles are already circulating, most of them recycled from the same three press releases. Here is the version with dollar figures attached: every rule that actually moved, who it hits, and the handful with deadlines you can miss. Three of these change decisions you should make this quarter. The rest change your payslip whether you notice or not.

The direction of almost everything is mildly in your favour this year: a small tax cut, a solid award wage rise, a higher HECS repayment floor, bigger super caps and looser first-home scheme limits. The catch sits near the end of this piece, because a chunk of that generosity lands in the middle of an inflation fight the RBA has not finished.

Your pay: a tax cut and a wage rise land together

The legislated cut to the bottom tax rate took effect on Wednesday: the 16 per cent rate on income between $18,201 and $45,000 dropped to 15 per cent, worth up to $268 a year for anyone earning $45,000 or more, with another step down to 14 per cent already legislated for 1 July 2027. It flows through PAYG withholding automatically, so your first July pay run should be a few dollars fatter without you doing anything. On top of that, the Fair Work Commission lifted award wages by 4.75 per cent and the national minimum wage by 6 per cent from the first full pay period starting on or after 1 July. The minimum wage is now $26.44 an hour, or $1,004.90 a week: about $52,250 a year full time, up roughly $2,960. A worker on a $75,000 award rate picks up about $3,560. Paid parental leave also stretched from 24 to 26 weeks for children born or adopted from 1 July, paid at that new minimum wage rate with super on top. And the May Budget's $1,000 no-receipt work deduction applies from this financial year, although you will not see it until you lodge the 2026-27 return.

The angle nobody puts in the press release: pay rises move borrowing power. Lenders assess your gross income against a stressed rate, and with CBA, Westpac, NAB and ANZ writing new owner-occupier variable loans between roughly 5.90 and 6.10 per cent (Macquarie and ING between about 5.74 and 5.99), the assessment rate with APRA's 3 per cent buffer sits above 9 per cent. At those settings, an extra $3,500 of gross income adds in the order of $15,000 to $20,000 of borrowing capacity for a single applicant. If a lender knocked you back on serviceability in autumn, the tax cut, the award rise and the HECS change below together justify a re-run of the numbers.

Super: the caps finally move, and payday super arrives

First, the thing that did not change: the superannuation guarantee stays at 12 per cent. The final step of the legislated climb happened on 1 July 2025 and no further increase is scheduled, whatever a chain email tells you. What did move is the caps. The concessional contributions cap indexed from $30,000 to $32,500, its first move since July 2024. The non-concessional cap followed from $120,000 to $130,000, the bring-forward maximum went to $390,000, and the general transfer balance cap lifted from $2 million to $2.1 million.

The extra $2,500 of concessional space is worth real money if you can use it. On the 37 per cent bracket plus Medicare levy, salary sacrificing that extra $2,500 saves about $600 in tax versus taking it as salary, every year. The mistake we see constantly is leaving it to June: set the salary sacrifice against the $32,500 cap in July and let twelve pay runs do the work rather than scrambling for a lump sum next winter. The other structural change is payday super. From 1 July, employers must pay super with every pay run instead of quarterly. For employees this is straight upside: contributions land months earlier, compound from the pay cycle you earned them, and unpaid super becomes visible within weeks instead of at quarter end.

HECS-HELP: a higher floor and about $380 back

The repayment system moved to a marginal basis last year as part of the 2025 reform package; 1 July brought its first indexation. The nil threshold rose from $67,000 to $69,528. You now repay 15 cents in each dollar of income between $69,528 and $129,717, and 17 cents above that, with total repayments capped at 10 per cent of repayment income. A graduate on $85,000 repays about $2,321 this year against $2,700 last year: roughly $379 back, or about $32 a month in the pay packet.

Two second-order effects worth knowing. Lenders count your compulsory HELP repayment as a fixed commitment when they assess a loan, so a smaller compulsory repayment nudges borrowing capacity up. And the honest catch: your balance was indexed by 2.8 per cent on 1 June before the threshold moved, and repaying more slowly means more years of indexation on a bigger base. The threshold rise is cash-flow relief, not debt relief. The 20 per cent balance cut was a one-off in 2025 and it is not coming back for a second lap.

The EV FBT exemption now has a use-by date

Two changes matter for novated leases. The small one: the luxury car tax fuel-efficient threshold indexed from $91,387 to $91,661 for 2026-27, a princely $274 of extra headroom. The big one was announced on 5 May and starts biting next year: the full FBT exemption for battery-electric vehicles only applies to new arrangements entered before 31 March 2027. From 1 April 2027, only EVs at $75,000 or less keep the full exemption; anything between $75,000 and the LCT threshold drops to a 25 per cent FBT discount, and from April 2029 everything moves to the 25 per cent discount. Existing leases are grandfathered for their full term.

The dollars are not small. A $65,000 battery-electric on a novated lease saves a typical professional between $4,800 and $7,400 a year versus a car loan under the full exemption. On an $82,000 EV the benefit at stake is in the order of $6,000 a year, and a lease on that same car signed after 31 March 2027 keeps only a quarter of the FBT relief. Delivery lead times through the big packaging providers still run 8 to 16 weeks on popular models, so "I will sort it out next year" is exactly how you miss the window. If a novated EV was ever on your list, the order needs to go in during 2026.

First home buyers: the ACT abolished stamp duty, Help to Buy loosened

The biggest state-level move in years: from 1 July, no first home buyer in the ACT pays stamp duty. No income test, no price cap, and the exemption extends to anyone who has not owned property in the past five years, plus pensioners and eligible NDIS participants. On a $1 million Canberra house that is roughly $30,000 that stays in your deposit. Expect some of it to leak into prices over time, sellers read budget papers too, but a buyer who settles this year keeps the cash either way. Elsewhere:

• Help to Buy: income caps rose from $100,000 to $103,000 for singles and from $160,000 to $165,000 for couples and single parents, with a fresh 10,000 places for 2026-27. Property price caps are unchanged. The Commonwealth still takes an equity share of up to 30 per cent on existing homes and 40 per cent on new builds, and it still shares your upside when you sell.
• WA: expanded first-home thresholds carry into the new year. No duty on homes to $600,000, a concessional rate to $800,000, and nothing on vacant land to $450,000.
• Tasmania: the First Home Owner Grant was cut from $30,000 to $20,000 for new builds from 1 July. If you were counting on the higher figure, your deposit maths just moved.
• First Home Guarantee: unchanged, which is the story. Uncapped places, no income test, 5 per cent deposit with no LMI. It remains the default first move for most buyers holding less than a 20 per cent deposit.

Medicare levy surcharge: new lines, same trap

The surcharge tiers indexed for 2026-27. The 1 per cent surcharge now starts at $105,000 for singles and $210,000 for families, the 1.25 per cent tier at $123,000 and $246,000, and the 1.5 per cent tier at $164,000 and $328,000, with private health rebate tiers moving in step. A single on $110,000 with no hospital cover pays a $1,100 surcharge; the cheapest basic hospital policy costs about the same, so buying junk cover purely to dodge the surcharge is roughly a wash at Tier 1 and only clearly wins from Tier 2 up. One trap worth naming: the income that counts is income for surcharge purposes, which adds reportable fringe benefits and salary-sacrificed super back on top of taxable income. The salary sacrifice we recommended two sections ago does not help you duck under these thresholds.

Small business: the write-off cliff is gone, payday super bites instead

The $20,000 instant asset write-off is now permanent for businesses turning over under $10 million, locked in by the May Budget, so this is the first new financial year without the annual will-they-extend-it pantomime. The threshold applies per asset, and the June panic-buy is officially obsolete: buy the gear when the business needs it, not when a deadline says so.

The sting for employers is payday super. The quarterly super float, often tens of thousands of dollars of working capital for a business with a dozen staff, is gone; the guarantee now goes out with every pay run. An employer with a $500,000 wage bill moves from parking about $15,000 a quarter to paying roughly $2,300 a fortnight. If cash flow is tight, that is a July conversation with your accountant and possibly your lender, not a discovery you make at the first missed remittance.

The honest trade-offs

A 4.75 per cent award rise landing while the RBA sits at 4.35 per cent after three hikes this year is not a free lunch. The board has said repeatedly that it is watching services inflation, and wages are the biggest input. The Q2 CPI print on 30 July sets up the August meeting; a hot number plus a legislated wage rise hands the hawks their argument. It would be a sour outcome if the average household won $268 in tax and $3,000 in wages, then handed back several hundred dollars a month through one more rate rise on the mortgage. Budget on the assumption that rates stay high through 2026 and treat cut talk as noise until the RBA says it out loud.

Similar honesty on housing and super. The ACT exemption is genuinely generous, but universal buyer subsidies have a long record of showing up in prices within a couple of years. Help to Buy is a real serviceability tool with a real cost: the Commonwealth owns part of your capital gain. And the higher super caps only help households with spare cash flow; if the mortgage is eating 40 per cent of your income at current rates, the correct amount of extra salary sacrifice is probably zero.

What you should actually do this month

1. Check your first full July payslip. The 15 per cent bottom rate and the award rise should both be in it. If you are award-covered and your hourly rate has not moved 4.75 per cent, ask payroll in writing.
2. Set your salary sacrifice against the $32,500 cap now, not in June. Twelve pay runs beat one panicked lump sum, and remember reportable super still counts toward the Medicare levy surcharge income test.
3. If an EV novated lease is on your list, get the order in during 2026. A new arrangement in place before 31 March 2027 locks the full FBT exemption for the whole lease term.
4. Re-run your borrowing power on your new income and new HECS repayment, especially if you were declined earlier this year. The combination moves the answer more than most people expect.
5. Buying a first home in the ACT or WA: get the revised duty position in writing from your conveyancer before you set your offer ceiling, and check the new Help to Buy caps if your income sat just over the old ones.
6. Small business: map payday super against your pay cycle this month, and stop timing asset purchases around June. The write-off is permanent; your cash-flow planning should be too.

Most of this list is indexation on autopilot. The three items that reward action are the super cap (start in July), the EV window (order this year) and the borrowing power re-run (income up, HECS repayment down, scheme caps wider). Do those three and you have extracted more from 1 July than most households will manage all year.

Disclosure: Your Finance Guide partners with Australian Lending and Investment Centre (ALG) ACL 505575 for broker matching, and ALG receives commissions from lenders on settled loans. We do not set tax thresholds, award rates or scheme caps; the figures above are from the ATO, the Fair Work Commission, Housing Australia and state revenue offices, and the dollar examples are indicative, not advice for your situation.