There’s a particular kind of regret that arrives in July, and it’s not dramatic or devastating. It’s the quiet realisation that a few weeks earlier you had options you no longer have, and that the window closed not because anything went wrong, but simply because the calendar moved on while you were busy with other things. Most people don’t plan badly. They plan late, or they assume their accountant will sort everything out after the fact, which is a reasonable assumption right up until you understand what accountants can actually do once a financial year has ended. They can prepare your return accurately. They cannot change what happened.
If your financial life has any real complexity to it – significant income, investments, a business interest, a trust, or a large asset sale this year – the weeks before 30 June deserve your genuine attention. Not anxious, last-minute attention, but the kind of clear-eyed review that gives you enough time to act on what you find.
Start With a Clear Picture of Where You Actually Stand
Every worthwhile decision in this period starts from the same place, which is a consolidated understanding of your financial position for the year as a whole. The problem is that most people at higher earning levels don’t have that picture clearly assembled, because income rarely arrives from a single, simple source. There’s a salary, but then there are bonuses paid at different times, dividends that land quarterly, trust distributions that haven’t been resolved yet, and investment income that accumulates quietly in the background. Each stream gets reported differently and interacts with the others in ways that aren’t always obvious until you lay everything out together.
What you’re trying to build is a complete view of your total income across all sources, any capital gains events you’ve triggered during the year, deductions already incurred, and tax already withheld or prepaid through PAYG. The reason this matters so much is that individual items can look unremarkable in isolation while the combination pushes you somewhere unexpected. Getting that full picture now, while there’s still time to do something with it, is the most important step in the whole process.
Superannuation: The Tax Lever Most People Under-Use
Superannuation is not a passive savings account, and the people who treat it as one are quietly leaving significant money behind every single year. For anyone on a higher income, it remains one of the most effective tax planning tools available in Australia, because the gap between the 15% tax rate inside the fund and a top marginal rate of 47% is not a rounding error. It’s a material difference that compounds over time into a genuinely different financial outcome.
Concessional contributions, which include employer super and any personal contributions you claim as a deduction, are capped at $30,000 for the current year. If you haven’t fully used that cap, a top-up contribution before 30 June moves money from a high-tax environment into a low-tax one. You can read the ATO’s guidance on personal super contributions to understand exactly what qualifies.
The carry-forward rule is genuinely underused. If your total super balance sits below $500,000, you can bring forward unused concessional cap space from the prior five years and deploy it in a single year. The ATO outlines the full eligibility criteria for carry-forward concessional contributions on their website.
Non-concessional contributions are worth understanding separately, not because they reduce this year’s tax bill directly, but because moving wealth into an environment where investment earnings are taxed at 15% and potentially nothing at all in pension phase is one of the quieter, more powerful long-term strategies available.
One practical note that catches people out every year: the contribution must be received by the fund before 30 June, not just initiated or processed. Payment systems have lead times, and leaving it to the final days is an unnecessary risk given how much is at stake.
Capital Gains: Where the Real Decisions Often Sit
If you’ve sold assets during the year – shares, property, crypto, or a business interest – you have a capital gains position that deserves careful attention, because how that gain interacts with everything else in your income year is often where the most significant tax outcomes are decided.
The 50% CGT discount applies to assets held for more than 12 months before disposal, and it’s one of the more generous features of the Australian tax system. The ATO’s CGT discount guidance explains eligibility in detail. If you’re holding an asset you’re planning to sell and you’re approaching that 12-month anniversary, the timing of the transaction matters enormously.
On the other side of the ledger, if you’ve already triggered gains this year and you’re also holding assets that have fallen in value and that you were planning to exit at some point anyway, the question of whether to crystallise those losses before 30 June is worth thinking through properly. It needs to be a genuine investment decision, not a forced one, but the tax consequence of timing it before versus after the year ends can be substantial.
The broader point is that gains rarely exist in isolation. A capital gain sitting on top of a strong income year, an unexpected bonus, and a trust distribution creates a very different picture from the same gain in a quieter year, and understanding that combined effect while there’s still room to respond is what separates thoughtful planning from retrospective explanation.
The Timing of Income and Expenses
For people at higher income levels, the marginal tax rate creates leverage in both directions. Deductions claimed at the top of the bracket are worth more, and income earned at the top of the bracket is taxed more heavily, which means the timing of both isn’t an administrative detail but a genuine financial decision worth making deliberately.
Bringing forward deductible expenses before 30 June – prepaying interest on investment loans, renewing professional memberships or subscriptions, making equipment purchases that were coming anyway – can shift deductions into the current year when your marginal rate is elevated and the benefit of those deductions is at its highest. There are rules around how far ahead you can prepay and not all expenses qualify, but for those that do, the question of when to pay is worth asking rather than leaving to coincidence.
For business owners or people with some influence over when income is recognised, there may also be legitimate scope to defer certain income into the next financial year. Whether that’s appropriate depends on where your income sits relative to key thresholds and what next year is likely to look like.
Work-Related Deductions: The Area Where Money Gets Left Behind
The areas that tend to matter most for higher earners include working from home expenses, where different calculation methods produce meaningfully different outcomes. The ATO’s guidance on working from home deductions sets out the current methods and their substantiation requirements. Vehicle and travel costs, professional development, and equipment used in generating income are also worth reviewing carefully.
The common thread through all of it is documentation. If you can support the claim properly, you should be claiming it. If you can’t, the risk of proceeding isn’t worth carrying, and the more useful exercise is making sure your records are in order going forward.
Private Health Insurance and the Medicare Levy Surcharge
If your taxable income exceeds the MLS threshold, currently $97,000 for singles, and you don’t hold compliant private hospital cover, you’ll pay a surcharge of up to 1.5% on top of the standard Medicare Levy. The ATO’s Medicare Levy Surcharge page has the current thresholds and income tiers. For someone earning $300,000, that’s up to $4,500 in additional tax for a coverage gap that can often be closed for considerably less.
The cover needs to be in place before 30 June to have any effect on this financial year’s outcome, and the decision often doesn’t get made because the numbers don’t get run until it’s too late.
Trust Distributions: A Deadline With Real Consequences
If you’re involved in a discretionary or family trust, the trustee must make a valid distribution resolution before 30 June. The ATO’s guidance on trustee resolutions explains what’s required and the consequences of missing the deadline. Miss it, and the ATO’s default rules apply, which are almost never structured in a way that benefits the family group.
Beyond the mechanics, the substance of the resolution matters just as much. Who are the beneficiaries this year, what are their individual tax positions, and has anything changed since last year that should influence how income is allocated across the group? The optimal allocation can look quite different from one year to the next, and carrying forward last year’s approach as a default is one of the most common and costly assumptions in this area.
Investment Debt and the Question of Structure
Interest on money borrowed to generate investment income is generally deductible, but the conditions that support that deductibility depend on the structure being maintained clearly and consistently over time. Personal and investment borrowings that have been consolidated for convenience, refinanced without proper purpose tracing, or allowed to drift together over years can compromise the deductibility of interest that should be fully claimable.
Before year end is a sensible moment to review how investment debt is structured, whether the purpose of each borrowing is clearly documented, and whether anything has drifted in a way that would benefit from being corrected.
When Something Unusual Has Happened This Year
The standard framework matters less in years where something significant has shifted, and there’s usually something. A large bonus, a business sale, parental leave, an inheritance, changing employers mid-year. Each of these events changes the shape of your financial year in ways that generic planning doesn’t account for, and the question worth asking isn’t just what happened but how that event interacts with everything else in your position and whether there are decisions available before 30 June that could meaningfully improve the outcome.
On the Pressure of the Final Weeks
There’s something about late June that creates urgency, some of it legitimate and some of it simply the proximity of a deadline. That urgency, without a clear plan behind it, tends to produce the worst decisions of the financial year. Super contributions made without confirming the available cap, capital losses crystallised without any broader investment rationale, deductions claimed without documentation. Every one of these creates problems that outlast the year they were intended to address.
A review that concludes with deliberate action where it’s warranted, and deliberate inaction where it isn’t, is worth considerably more than a sprint of activity driven by calendar anxiety.
What Good Year-End Planning Actually Looks Like
At its best, this isn’t a tax minimisation exercise. It’s a structured moment of clarity, an opportunity to understand where you stand across your whole financial position, identify the decisions that still have real impact, and make those decisions while there’s still time for them to matter.
For some people, that process leads to meaningful action: a super contribution that captures carry-forward space, a trust distribution structured around the actual circumstances of each beneficiary, a capital loss timed to offset a gain from earlier in the year. For others, it leads to confirmation that everything is already well-considered and nothing urgent needs to happen. Both of those are genuinely good outcomes.
Related EOFY Tax Planning Guides
Book a Tax Planning Meeting Before It’s Too Late
Reading this guide is a useful starting point, but the decisions that actually change your outcome happen in a conversation with someone who knows your full financial position. A tax planning meeting before 30 June is a fundamentally different exercise from a tax return meeting in August. In June, there are still options. In August, there is only history.
If you don’t currently have a meeting scheduled with your adviser before the end of the financial year, now is the right time to book one. The closer you get to 30 June, the less time there is to act on what you find, and some of the most valuable strategies, particularly around superannuation contributions and trust distributions, have hard deadlines that don’t flex.
Book a tax planning meeting with a Prime Partners adviser.
Your Pre-30 June Checklist
Use this as a prompt for a conversation with your adviser, not a substitute for one.
Income and Position
- Consolidate all income sources for the year, including salary, bonuses, dividends, and trust distributions
- Identify any capital gains events triggered during the year and assess their combined impact
- Review PAYG withholding to identify any likely shortfall before it becomes a surprise
Superannuation
- Check your concessional contributions for the year against the $30,000 cap
- Assess whether carry-forward contributions are available and appropriate given your income this year
- If making a top-up contribution, allow sufficient processing time for funds to be received before 30 June
- Consider whether non-concessional contributions align with your longer-term wealth strategy
Capital Gains
- Review unrealised losses in your portfolio and assess whether crystallising any before 30 June makes strategic sense
- Confirm the acquisition dates of assets you’re planning to sell and whether the 12-month CGT discount threshold has been reached
- Model the combined tax impact of gains alongside your other income before transacting
Deductions and Expenses
- Review deductible expenses that could be prepaid before 30 June, including investment loan interest and professional costs
- Ensure working from home claims are supported by the correct method and records
- Confirm vehicle and travel deductions are properly substantiated
Private Health Insurance
- Assess your income against the Medicare Levy Surcharge threshold
- Confirm whether current private hospital cover is compliant, or take out cover before 30 June if not
Trust Distributions
- Confirm trustee resolutions will be documented before 30 June
- Review beneficiary income positions and ensure the distribution strategy reflects their actual circumstances this year
Investment Debt
- Review the structure of investment borrowings to confirm deductibility is clearly supportable
- Check whether personal and investment debt have been mixed in a way that needs to be addressed
Frequently Asked Questions
This article is general in nature and does not constitute financial, tax, or legal advice. Individual circumstances vary and you should speak with a qualified adviser before making decisions based on your specific position.