The short version
Payday super is live. Since 1 July 2026, superannuation is payable every pay run and must land in each employee's fund within seven business days of payday. The quarterly cycle that let a business hold up to three months of accrued super in its working capital is gone.
That float was real money. Employment Hero's modelling puts the average shift at $124K in additional working capital for an SME with around 20 staff, and 40% of businesses surveyed expect to need a line of credit just to pay super on time. The rest of this piece is practical: what changed, where it bites, which facilities fit, and the one product that makes it worse.
What actually changed
Until June 2026, super was due 28 days after the end of each quarter. An employer running weekly payroll could hold as much as thirteen weeks of accrued super before the payment fell due. Plenty of businesses treated that float the way they treat supplier terms: free working capital, baked into the operating cycle for so long that nobody thought of it as borrowing.
From 1 July 2026, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Payday Superannuation) Act 2025 requires contributions to be received by the fund within seven business days of each payday. Received, not sent. A weekly payroll now produces 52 super events a year instead of four. Miss the window and a redesigned superannuation guarantee charge applies, adding interest and an administrative uplift on top of the shortfall. The ATO has published a lighter-touch compliance approach for the first year (PCG 2026/1), but the liability itself starts on day one.
The float is gone: a worked example
Take a business with $1.5M in annual wages, paid weekly. At the 12% guarantee rate that is $180K of super a year, about $3,460 each pay run.
Under the quarterly system, that super built up in the business's account through the quarter and then sat for up to another 28 days before it had to leave. On average the business was holding $25K to $30K of accrued super at any moment, peaking around $45K just before each quarterly deadline. Under payday super the same business holds close to nothing. Every Thursday, wages and super leave together.
Nothing got more expensive. The same dollars go to the same funds. What changed is the timing, and timing is what working capital is.
Where the pressure lands first
The 28 October BAS is the obvious one. The July–September quarter was the first run entirely under the new rules, and businesses that used to sequence GST, PAYG withholding and quarterly super out of the same cash pool will meet this BAS with the super already gone. For a lot of operators, October is the month the modelling stops being theoretical.
Then the summer. Christmas trading means holiday loadings and casual hours, all attracting super in the same week they're paid, followed by the December–January stretch where many businesses trade slowly or not at all. December was already the worst insolvency quarter on the calendar before this reform.
Industry shape matters more than size here. Weekly-payroll sectors carry 52 events a year where a monthly-payroll professional-services firm carries 12, so construction, hospitality and transport feel the change hardest. If your labour is invoiced to customers on 30 to 60 day terms while the super on that labour leaves weekly, the mismatch is now structural.
Which facilities fit a payroll-timing problem
A line of credit or overdraft is the natural shape: a revolving limit drawn on payday and repaid as customer payments arrive, with interest only on what's actually drawn. That is why 40% of surveyed businesses named it.
Invoice finance fits when the gap is really a debtor problem wearing a super costume. A labour-hire firm or subcontractor paying super weekly on wages it invoiced 45 days ago doesn't have a super problem, it has a receivables problem, and advancing against those invoices attacks the actual cause. The comparison between the two sits in our guide to working capital finance options.
A term loan is the wrong shape for recurring timing but the right one for a single reset: clearing an accumulated arrears position and restarting clean, with the ongoing cycle then funded by the structure above.
One product genuinely doesn't fit: a merchant cash advance with daily repayments layered onto a payroll-timing problem. It relieves this week by tightening every week after it. No lender says that about their own product, which is half the point of asking a broker instead of a lender.
The director angle
Unpaid super is not ordinary trade debt. The superannuation guarantee charge regime exposes directors personally through director penalty notices, and that exposure doesn't evaporate because the business intends to catch up next quarter. This is general information rather than advice, but the practical point stands: if super is being skipped to fund trading, the structure needs fixing now, while options are open. Lenders read super arrears the same way they read ATO debt, so a facility arranged before the arrears exists is cheaper and easier than one arranged after.
How to run it
Map the new cycle on an actual calendar: 52 super events, four BAS lodgements, wages, rent. The pinch weeks are obvious once they're laid out. Size the buffer against those weeks honestly, then arrange the facility while the file is clean. A business asking for a limit it doesn't yet need gets better pricing than one already behind on statutory payments, and an unused limit costs little to hold.
We arrange lines of credit, overdrafts and invoice finance across 130+ lenders, and the right pick depends on whether your pressure is timing, debtors or seasonality. If you'd like a read on which one fits your cycle, the application form takes under a minute, and most enquiries get a response within four business hours.