About AusTax Tools
AusTax Tools is an independent publisher of free Australian tax calculators and plain-English tax explainers. There is no sign-up, no paywall, and no paid tier — the aim is to give you an honest answer to a common Australian tax question and let you leave.
Who runs this site
AusTax Tools is an independent publication: Australian tax, pay, and retirement calculators built from official sources.
What stands behind the numbers is process: every rate and threshold is taken from the official source — the ATO or the legislation that set it — locked in by an automated test suite, and dated on the page it appears on. When something is wrong, it goes on the corrections page and gets fixed at the source.
The site is funded by advertising served through Google AdSense. We take no affiliate commissions, sponsorships, or payments in exchange for coverage, and no advertiser sees or influences a calculator, an article, or a result before it is published.
Where the numbers come from
Every rate, threshold, cap, bracket, and offset used in a calculation is taken from the body that set it, or from the legislation or budget measure that changed it:
- the Australian Taxation Office for income tax, CGT, GST, super, FBT, and HELP;
- each state and territory revenue office for stamp duty, land tax, and payroll tax;
- Services Australia and the Department of Social Services for Centrelink payment rates;
- Australian legislation (for example ITAA 1997 sections) where the rule is statutory.
Secondary sources — news reports, accounting-firm summaries, competing calculators — are used for cross-checking only, never as the basis for a figure. Pages that carry a substantive number name the official documents behind it in a footer, so the claim can be checked rather than taken on trust. See Methodology & Sources for the full source list and update cadence.
How rates are versioned
Australian tax rules are not stored here as a single set of numbers that gets edited each 1 July. They are stored per financial year, in one central configuration, and read from there by every calculator, reference page, and article that mentions them — so a rate change lands in one place rather than being chased through prose.
Superseded years are kept rather than overwritten. Where a calculator offers a tax-year selector it computes an earlier year with that year's own rules, and a page written about a particular year stays pinned to that year after the year turns over, because someone amending an earlier return needs that year's answer.
How the calculations are checked
The calculation logic is written separately from the interface specifically so it can be tested, and it is — several hundred automated test files run on every change before anything is published. The tests concentrate on where tax code actually breaks:
- boundary cases — the exact income at which a bracket, threshold, or phase-out starts, and the dollar either side of a cap;
- regression cases — a confirmed error becomes a test asserting the right answer before it becomes a fix, so the same defect cannot come back unnoticed;
- historical years — prior financial years are asserted as well as the current one;
- a rollover smoke test that fails the build when a new financial year has been applied to some parts of the site but not all of them.
Substantive pages show when they were last reviewed. That date is derived from the page's own revision history rather than typed by hand, so it cannot be inflated by a site-wide rebuild.
What we publish
- Interactive calculators for income tax, CGT, GST, super, payroll tax, and property taxes.
- Scenario pages that compare common tax decisions side by side.
- Tax insights articles that explain rules, thresholds, and timing decisions.
- Reference datasets you can download or embed — see Tax Data Assets.
What this site is not
- Not a registered tax agent, accountant, or financial adviser. No practising certificate is held, no professional body membership is claimed, and using a calculator creates no engagement of any kind.
- Not a source of personal tax advice. Everything here is general information about how a published rule works, applied to figures you enter. For advice on your own circumstances, speak with a registered tax agent.
- Not affiliated with the ATO, any state revenue office, or Services Australia. They are sources; none of them endorses, reviews, or is connected to this site.
Your data
Calculations run in your browser. The figures you type into a calculator stay on your device — this is a static site with no backend that could receive them. We use Google Analytics for anonymous, aggregate usage and Google AdSense for advertising, both covered by our Privacy Policy.
Corrections
If a figure here disagrees with the ATO, a state revenue office, or Services Australia, we want to know. Email [email protected] with the page URL, the inputs you used, and the official source that says otherwise. What happens after that is set out on our Corrections page.
Part of the TaxTools Network
AusTax Tools is part of the TaxTools Network — independent tax calculators and tools built from official government sources for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The network sites do not share content or rebadge each other's calculators: each one implements its own country's rules on its own country's tax calendar, because a calculator that generalises across jurisdictions is wrong in all of them. What they share is the published standard they are built to and the methodology they follow.