With the end of the financial year a fortnight away, our recent webinar set out twenty practical actions individuals can take before 30 June. James Carey walked through them in five blocks, covering superannuation, rental property, work deductions, investments and capital gains, and a handful of quick wins to finish. What follows is the substance of that session, organised so you can work out which of these apply to you.
A note before we start. Everything below describes how the rules work, not what you personally should do. Anything involving your super or your structures deserves a conversation with your financial planner first, and we are always happy to recommend planners and brokers we trust.
Why this particular 30 June carries more weight
Two deadlines and one warning sit behind this year. The unused concessional super caps from the 2020-21 year expire permanently on 30 June 2026, so anyone carrying those forward has a genuine use-it-or-lose-it moment. This is also the last year before the contribution caps index up, with the concessional cap moving from $30,000 to $32,500 and the non-concessional cap from $120,000 to $130,000 on 1 July. Sitting over all of it are the Budget reforms to capital gains and negative gearing, most of which begin on 1 July 2027. You have roughly twelve months to think those through, but the thinking is worth starting now.
Superannuation, where the biggest dollars sit
Super remains the most effective investment structure in the tax system, and the Budget changes to trusts only sharpen that. Contributions are taxed at 15 per cent, or 30 per cent for higher earners, against a marginal rate that can reach 47 per cent outside the fund.
If you want to top up your concessional contributions to the $30,000 cap for 2025-26, the money has to reach the fund by 30 June, not simply leave your account. The large funds slow down in the final week as everyone rushes, so treat about 23 June as your real deadline. Salary sacrifice only works on income still to come, so a personal deductible contribution is the way to catch up the gap late in the year.
The catch-up contribution rules let anyone with a total super balance under $500,000 carry forward unused caps for five years. The 2020-21 amount is the one about to disappear. Stacked together, the prior-year caps can allow up to roughly $167,500 of deductible contributions in a single year, which tends to suit people coming back from a career break or those facing a one-off income spike from a bonus or an asset sale. You can see your available caps in your myGov account, or we can pull a screenshot from the portal for you.
One trap sits underneath all of this. If you make a personal contribution and intend to claim the deduction, you must lodge a notice of intent with your fund and have it acknowledged before you lodge your return, and before you start any pension, rollover or withdrawal. Contribute, lodge the notice, wait for the acknowledgement, then touch the account. Do it in that order and the deduction holds. Roll the money out first and you lose it.
A few further points worth knowing. Division 293 applies an extra 15 per cent to contributions once your income plus contributions passes $250,000, and a large catch-up year can quietly tip you over, so check before you contribute. On the non-concessional side, the caps rise on 1 July, which opens a timing question: you could contribute $120,000 before 30 June without triggering the bring-forward, then trigger the higher $390,000 from July, moving around $510,000 into super inside thirteen months. There are also two pieces of close to free money that often go unnoticed, the spouse contribution offset of up to $540 where your spouse earns under $40,000, with the full benefit when their income is $37,000 or below, and the government co-contribution of up to $500, both modest in dollars but near-certain in outcome.
Rental property, the structural decision year
For property, the headline is the negative gearing change. Properties held before Budget night keep their negatively geared status. The shift applies to new purchases from 1 July 2027, and it splits along the type of property. For established residential properties, losses are quarantined and can only be offset against other residential property income and residential property capital gains, not against your salary or other income. For new builds, the losses are not quarantined and full negative gearing continues.
In the meantime, several actions still apply. You can prepay twelve months of interest on an investment loan and claim it this year, which suits anyone whose income is about to drop. The prepayment has to be genuine under the loan terms, arranged with the bank rather than parked in an account. If you hold a rental property without a depreciation schedule, ordering one is usually worth it, and where you have never had one prepared we can often amend a couple of prior years and recover the missed deductions. Beyond that, sweep every deductible cost through the agent so it lands in the annual statement, and consider whether an interest-only restructure with an offset positions you better for the rules ahead.
Work deductions, where substantiation is the whole game
The working-from-home rules have tightened. The fixed rate is 70 cents per hour, but the ATO now wants a contemporaneous record of the actual hours you worked from home rather than an estimate. Working from home sits on the ATO’s annual watch-list, so the record effectively is the claim.
On cars, a twelve-week logbook stays valid for five years and is well worth keeping if you drive a lot for work. If you drive only a little, you can claim up to 5,000 kilometres at 88 cents, though you still need to show how you reached the figure. Self-education is deductible only where the course relates to your current role, not a future one. Across all of it, keep your receipts, because recent tribunal decisions have been less forgiving of reconstructed records than the ATO once was.
Investments and capital gains
For capital gains, the contract date sets the year, not the settlement date, so a sale instructed on 30 June falls into this year even if the money arrives in July. Where you hold both gains and losses, matching them to smooth your tax position is sensible, but be careful not to sell and then buy back substantially the same asset, which is a wash sale and attracts the anti-avoidance rules. Sequencing also matters, since losses apply before the 50 per cent discount. From 1 July 2027, indexation is proposed to replace that discount, which for some clients makes the timing of a large gain one of the bigger decisions they will face.
The small things that add up
Income protection premiums held outside super are deductible and can be prepaid twelve months ahead. Donations of $2 or more count in the year you pay them, as long as they are made to organisations with Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status. Professional memberships, subscriptions and fees all need to be paid before 30 June to land in this year’s return. None of these is large on its own, but together they are worth the half hour it takes to gather them.
And the real twentieth action
Treat tax as a 365-day exercise rather than a June scramble. The strongest end-of-year result usually traces back to a planning conversation in April or early May, while there is still room to make decisions and put them in place. If you would like to book that review, or talk through any of the items above, we are here for it. If you missed our webinar and would like to watch the full recording click here. If a face-to-face conversation suits you better, you can meet with our accountants in North Sydney or our Orange NSW accounting team.