You can contribute money to your super in several ways.
Employer contributions
- From July 1 2021 your employer needs to pay 10% of your salary to a nominated super fund. This is called the super guarantee
- These contributions are concessional contributions
- Concessional contributions received by your super fund are taxed at 15%
Salary-sacrifice contributions
- You may choose to have your employer pay additional pre-tax dollars into a nominated super fund via salary sacrifice
- These contributions are concessional contributions
- Concessional contributions received by your super fund are taxed at 15%
- As the salary sacrifice payments made by your employer reduce your personal income, you pay less personal tax than you otherwise would. As a result, when you salary sacrifice into your super you cannot claim a further deduction on your personal tax return because you have already received a tax benefit. For more information on salary sacrificing you should speak to your financial advisor.
Personal contributions
- You can make additional voluntary contributions to your super with your after-tax earnings
- These contributions come in two types; concessional and non-concessional
- When you make these types of contributions you need to tell us whether you want to treat the personal contribution as concessional or non-concessional
- Personal concessional contributions are taxed at 15%. However, as they are made with your after-tax earnings, you can claim these contributions as deductions to your personal income tax.
- Personal non-concessional contributions are not taxed. You cannot claim these as deductions on your personal income tax.
Caps
- The ATO has limits (or caps) on the amount you can contribute to your super each year
- There is a cap for concessional contributions and a separate cap for non-concessional contributions
Concessional contributions cap
- Concessional contributions include super guarantee contributions made by your employer, salary sacrifice super contributions and personal concessional contributions
- The concessional contributions cap is $27,500 per year
- If you have not used up your cap in previous years, you may qualify to ‘carry’ unused balances forward to the current year
- To qualify you must have a total superannuation balance of less than $500,000 on June 30 the previous financial year
- You can view the balance of your unused cap on your MyGov account by going to my.gov.au logging in and going to ATO -> Super -> Information -> Carry forward concessional contributions -> Unused concessional contributions cap
Non-concessional contributions cap
- The non-concessional contributions cap is $110,000 per year
- You may be able to ‘bring forward’ the cap from future years and make non-concessional contributions of up to three times the annual limit
- To qualify you must have a total superannuation balance of less than $1.48 million on June 30 the previous financial year and have been under 65 at any time in the financial year
For more information on the contributions and caps visit the ATO website.
https://www.ato.gov.au/Rates/Key-superannuation-rates-and-thresholds/?page=1#Contributions_caps