Clearing-house cut-offs and send-by dates

Every Payday Super deadline is a receipt date: the day the fund has the money and the data to allocate it. The day you press pay is not on the ATO's timeline at all. This guide is about the gap between the two — and how to turn a deadline into a send-by date you can run a practice on.

Published 7 September 2026. ATO pages quoted as last updated 10 August 2026 (QC105846) and 21 June 2026 (QC105848).

Why "sent" is not "received"

Your super guarantee contribution is on time if it is received by your employee's super fund (with all the necessary information to allocate the contribution to the employee's member account) within 7 business days after paying your employee. ATO, Payment deadlines for Payday Super (QC105846)

The ATO's own example of an on-time payment shows the gap: Ali pays the clearing house on the payday itself, 4 January 2028, and the fund receives it on 7 January — three days later (QC105848, Example 2). That is a same-day remittance with a short clearing time, and it still consumed three of the seven days. A remittance made on business day 5 with a three-day clearing time is late.

Under the old quarterly regime a clearing house's processing time was noise inside a 28-day window. Inside a 7-business-day window it is the single biggest variable you control.

What eats the seven days

• Direct-debit clearing. If the clearing house collects by direct debit, the money typically has to clear before it is forwarded. That is usually the largest component.
• The clearing house's own cut-off time and processing days. A remittance submitted after the daily cut-off is processed the next business day; a remittance submitted on a Friday afternoon may not move until Monday. Check the published cut-off for your clearing house — it is theirs to state, and they change.
• Fund-side processing. The fund has to match the SuperStream message to the payment and allocate it. A contribution the fund cannot match (wrong member number, wrong USI, missing TFN) is, for the ATO's purpose, not received.
• Weekends and every state-wide public holiday. Business days are counted nationally: a holiday in another state removes a day from your count and, separately, is usually a day the clearing house and the banks are closed for real. The holidays guide lists every one for 2026–27.
• Payroll finalisation lag. The clock starts on the day the employee is paid, not the day the super batch is prepared.

The Small Business Superannuation Clearing House is no longer an option: the ATO closed it permanently from 1 July 2026. Employers who relied on it are now on a commercial clearing house, a fund-provided service or their payroll software's built-in service, each with its own timings.

Turning a deadline into a send-by date

The method is the same for every client:

1. Compute the fund-receipt deadline from the payday — 7 business days, national holidays, 20 for a new starter's first pay.
2. Decide the client's clearing lead time in business days: how long, in practice, between "remit" and "fund confirms receipt" for that client's clearing house and payment method. Look at the last few contribution confirmations rather than the brochure.
3. Walk that many business days back from the deadline — skipping the same holidays — to get the send-by date. That is the date the practice works to. The legal deadline becomes the backstop.

Worked example

Payday Friday 25 September 2026. The fund-receipt deadline is Wednesday 7 October (Monday 5 October is a holiday in NSW, ACT, SA and QLD, so it is not a business day for anyone). With a three-business-day lead time, walking back skips 6 October, 2 October and 1 October — the send-by date is Thursday 1 October. With a four-day lead time it is Wednesday 30 September; with two, Friday 2 October.

Three business days is a common allowance and is what the free checker and the 2026–27 calendar use. It is not a rule — it is a placeholder for the one number on this page only you can know. If a client's clearing house needs five days, the calendar's send-by column is two days too late for that client.

Per-client lead times, not one practice-wide number

A practice with thirty clients probably has four or five different clearing arrangements: payroll-software super services, a fund's employer portal, a commercial clearing house on direct debit, one on BPAY. Their lead times differ by days. A single "send everything three days early" rule is right for some and late for others — which is the same failure as a single "+7 days" reminder, one layer down.

In SuperDue each client carries its own clearing buffer (0–10 business days, default 3). The board shows both dates for every run, and the 5/3/1-day alerts count down to the fund-receipt deadline so a client with a long buffer is flagged early rather than at the last minute.

Confirm receipt, not remittance

The clearing house's "processed" status tells you it has sent the money on. It does not tell you the fund has received and allocated it. Reconcile the fund's contribution confirmation (the SuperStream response) against the deadline; if none has arrived by the deadline, treat the run as at risk. A contribution that bounces for bad member data and is re-sent a week later is late, whatever the original remittance date was.

Planning information, not tax, legal or financial advice. The legal test is the date the fund receives the money with the information needed to allocate it. Confirm anything that matters with the ATO or your registered tax or BAS agent. Sources are linked in the text; ATO pages are quoted as at the date shown at the top of this guide.