aupaycalculator
Editorial policy

The rules we hold ourselves to.

This site publishes numbers people make financial decisions with. These are the standards it follows for sourcing figures from primary ATO and Fair Work material, verifying them automatically, and correcting them in public when they are wrong — and the things it will not publish under any circumstances.

Last updated 15 August 2026

Sourcing

  1. Primary sources only. Every rate, threshold and entitlement comes from the Australian Taxation Office or the Fair Work Ombudsman. Secondary commentary is never the basis for a published figure.
  2. Every figure is dated and attributed. Each carries the financial year it belongs to, a link to its source, and the date it was last checked. The full list is on the methodology page.
  3. No invented data. We do not publish estimated tax rates, invented statistics, fabricated survey results, made-up testimonials or reviews. If we don't have a sourced figure, we say so rather than filling the gap.
  4. Derived figures are labelled as derived. Where we compute something from published inputs — for example the salary at which an NES-minimum redundancy first becomes taxable — the derivation is shown so you can check it.

Verification

  • Every headline figure published on a page is pinned by an automated test. If the underlying data changes and a page's number no longer matches, the build fails.
  • Boundary cases are tested explicitly at every bracket and threshold — just below, exactly at, and just above.
  • A monotonicity test asserts that earning one more dollar can never reduce take-home pay anywhere between $0 and $400,000.
  • Figures are re-checked against their primary source at each 1 July rollover, and whenever a federal budget changes a threshold.
Stated limitation: ato.gov.au blocks automated access, so figures cannot be re-verified programmatically. Each is checked by hand against the linked source. This is a real weakness in the process and we would rather name it than imply a rigour we don't have.

Structured data

We only mark up what is visible on the page. Specifically:

  • A page declares WebApplication only if it actually contains a working calculator. Pages that explain rather than calculate do not.
  • FAQPage markup only ever contains questions and answers that appear in full on the page.
  • We publish no Person, author or reviewer markup until a real, named person with real credentials appears on the site. No placeholder identities.
  • We publish no Review, AggregateRating or star ratings. There are none to report and we will not invent them.

What we will not do

  • Give financial advice. Everything here is general information. We don't recommend products, funds, super strategies or courses of action.
  • Publish a page for every keyword variation. One question gets one page. Where two pages would answer the same question, they get merged or one is removed from the index.
  • Claim a capability we don't have. A page titled "calculator" contains a calculator that does what the title says. Where we can't compute something rigorously — award rates, penalty rates, PAYG withholding schedules — we say so and point to the body that can.
  • Promise search or AI visibility. Nothing here guarantees a ranking or a citation, and we make no such claim to anyone.

Corrections

Errors are fixed as soon as they are confirmed, and logged publicly with the date, what was wrong and what changed. We don't quietly edit a number and move on. See corrections.

Commercial relationships

As at 15 August 2026 the site carries no advertising, no affiliate links and no sponsored content, and no figure on the site is influenced by any commercial relationship. If that ever changes, this section will state the arrangement and every affected page will carry a visible disclosure — published before the change goes live, not after. The site is maintained by Silvano Para.

Independence of the numbers

Calculation results are produced by the published formulas from the published data. There is no path by which a commercial consideration could change a calculated figure, and the source code that produces them is the same code described on the methodology page.