The ATO Now Pre-Fills Contractor Income, and Says Lodge After 28 August

What actually changed

Businesses in certain industries have reported their contractor payments to the ATO for years through the taxable payments annual report, known as the TPAR. What is new for Tax Time 2026 is where that data goes. Until now it sat on the ATO side as a compliance tool. From this year it flows the other way as well, into the pre-filled income section of the contractor own return.

ATO Assistant Commissioner Tony Goding framed it as extending to contractors what employees and investors have had for years: “Pre-fill has transformed the experience for employees and investors over many years, and we are now expanding those benefits for contractors.” The same statement is blunt about the second purpose. The data “helps us identify when income has been left out of a tax return, whether that is an honest mistake or a deliberate attempt to under-report earnings”.

For an employee, the equivalent machinery is Single Touch Payroll feeding the income statement. See how Single Touch Payroll reporting works for that side, and the PAYG payment summary and income statement for what an employee sees in myGov. Contractors now have a partial version of the same thing.

Whose income gets pre-filled

Only payments inside the taxable payments reporting system. That is five service categories, and if your work sits outside them, nothing changes for you this year.

A business that provides one of these services alongside unrelated work only has to lodge a TPAR if the relevant service is 10% or more of its business income for the year. Building and construction is carved out of that test. This matters to you as a contractor because it decides whether the business paying you reports the payment at all, and therefore whether it shows up in your pre-fill.

If you are working out what your contracting income actually costs you in tax, the contractor pay calculator converts a day rate to take-home, and the sole trader tax calculator works the annual position including the Medicare levy.

Why the ATO says wait

The advice is specific: lodge after 28 August. The reason is mechanical rather than cautionary. A TPAR is due by 28 August each year, so the reports that generate your pre-fill are still being lodged through August. Lodge on 10 August and your pre-fill is built from whatever fraction of businesses has reported by then.

In the ATO wording, “waiting until after 28 August gives you the best opportunity to access complete pre-fill information and reduces the likelihood of needing to amend your return later”. An amendment is the cost of lodging early here, not a penalty.

What pre-fill will not show

This is the part worth reading twice, because a pre-filled field looks authoritative and is not. The ATO states plainly that pre-fill “is not a complete record of all business income”. Three common gaps:

• Platform work. Paid through an app or marketplace rather than by a TPRS business, and no TPAR captures it.
• Private clients. Invoice a household directly and there is no reporting business in the chain.
• Cash. The ATO line is that leaving income out of your return “does not make it invisible”, and it puts the shadow economy cost at around $25 billion in tax a year.

The ATO estimates more than $1 billion in TPAR payments could be omitted or under-reported this year. That figure is about payments the ATO already holds data on, which is the uncomfortable part: those are the omissions that are easiest to detect.

Changing a pre-filled figure

You are allowed to. Contractors can update pre-filled information where it does not reflect their circumstances. The condition attached is the one to note: “if you change a pre-filled amount, you will need to provide a reason and should have documentation to substantiate it”.

Practically, that makes reconciliation a pre-lodgment job rather than a post-lodgment one. Check the pre-filled totals against your invoices and bank records before you accept them, and keep whatever shows why a figure differs.

The cash basis mismatch

A predictable source of differences, and the ATO flagged it in its notes to journalists rather than in the main release. TPAR payments are reported on a cash basis: the paying business reports what it actually paid you during the year. If you account on an accruals basis, your income for the same period is what you invoiced, not what cleared.

An invoice issued on 25 June 2026 and paid on 8 July 2026 sits in 2025-26 for you and in 2026-27 for the payer. Neither record is wrong. Expect timing differences at both ends of the year and document them rather than adjusting the figure and hoping.

If you already lodged

Roughly six weeks of Tax Time 2026 have already run, so some contractors have lodged before any of this data existed. The remedy is a self-amendment. The ATO states that contractors who have already lodged and identify omitted income can self-amend to correct the return.

Worth doing rather than waiting. The whole point of the new pre-fill feed is that the ATO is matching this data at scale, and a correction you make yourself is a materially better position than one prompted by a data-matching letter. If the amendment changes what you owe, the PAYG instalment calculator shows how a revised income figure feeds the instalments you will be asked to pay next year.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

ATO pages fetched 16 August 2026. Every figure and quoted phrase on this page traces to one of them.

• New ATO pre-fill data makes tax time easier for contractors (QC107875, 5 August 2026). The $21 billion and 700,000 figures, the lodge-after-28-August advice, the substantiation rule, the cash basis note and the shadow economy estimates.
• Taxable payments annual report (TPAR) (QC32057). The 28 August lodgment date, and that contractors include subcontractors, consultants and independent contractors operating as sole traders, companies, partnerships or trusts.
• Work out if you need to lodge a TPAR (QC55378). The five taxable payments reporting system service categories and the 10% of business income test.

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