Salary Sacrifice Calculator

Yes from the 30% bracket up. Below it, barely. The sacrificed dollars are taxed at 15% inside your super fund instead of at your marginal rate, and the gap between those two numbers is the entire return. On $80,000 in 2026-27, sacrificing $10,000 cuts tax and Medicare by $3,200, drops take-home pay by $6,800 and puts $8,500 into the fund. You are $1,700 better off in total, with the catch that the gain is locked away until you meet a condition of release.

$10,000 sacrificed, 2026-27 resident rates, tax-free threshold claimed, no study loan. Every figure is computed by the same engine that runs the calculator below.

Read the last column as cents in the dollar and the pattern is plain. At $80,000 you keep 17c of every sacrificed dollar after the fund's $1,500 bite; at $200,000 you keep 32c. Go the other way and it collapses: at $45,000 the same $10,000 saves only $2,076 of tax, against $1,500 of contributions tax, so under 6c in the dollar survives. Sacrificing on a 15% marginal rate is close to moving money from one pocket to another and losing access to it.

The $200,000 row is arithmetic, not a recommendation, because the cap bites there first. Employer SG at 12% of $200,000 is $24,000 for 2026-27, and SG counts toward the same $32,500 concessional cap as your sacrifice, leaving $8,500 of room. Sacrifice the full $10,000 on that salary and you are over the cap. Above $250,000 of income plus concessional contributions, Division 293 tax takes another 15% and the 32c drops to 17c.

Two things salary sacrifice does not do, whatever your bracket. It does not shrink your HELP repayment, because the ATO adds reportable super contributions straight back into repayment income. And it does not give you the money back if the car dies or the roof leaks. Run your own figures below before you sign a sacrifice agreement with payroll.

You agree with your employer to take less salary and have the difference paid into super before tax ever touches it. Sacrifice $10,000 from a $100,000 salary and your taxable income drops to $90,000: tax and Medicare fall by $3,200, take-home pay falls by $6,800, and $8,500 lands in your fund after the 15% contributions tax. Giving up $6,800 of spending money to bank $8,500 is the whole pitch in one sentence. This tool sits alongside the rest of our tax calculators if you want the full pay picture.

The saving scales with your marginal rate under the 2026-27 tax brackets. The same $10,000 sacrifice saves $3,200 in the 30% bracket but $4,700 in the top bracket, because the sacrificed dollars would otherwise have been taxed at 45% plus the Medicare levy. In the 15% bracket the arithmetic barely moves: the fund pays 15% anyway, so the arrangement earns its keep from the 30% bracket up.

Above $250,000, Division 293 tax cuts the benefit roughly in half. If your income plus your concessional contributions passes $250,000, the ATO charges an extra 15% on those contributions, taking the effective rate on them to 30% for 2026-27 rather than 15%. The extra is charged on the lesser of the amount over the threshold or your taxable contributions, so it only bites in full once you are well past the threshold. At a 47% marginal rate each sacrificed dollar then nets 17c instead of 32c. The threshold has sat at $250,000 since 2017-18, and the ATO works the tax out from your tax return and the contributions your fund reports.

The two terms get used interchangeably, but packaging is the umbrella. Salary packaging means paying for anything out of pre-tax salary: super, cars, laptops, or living expenses if you work for a charity or public hospital. Salary sacrificing to super is the specific arrangement this page calculates, and it is the simplest of the lot because super has its own flat 15% contributions tax.

Packaged cars and other benefits work differently: they can attract fringe benefits tax through your employer and show up on your income statement as reportable fringe benefits. If a car is the benefit you are weighing up, the novated lease tax calculator models that pre-tax deduction instead.