Payday Super has been live two months. What it is telling buyers

From 1 July 2026, superannuation has to reach an employee's fund within seven business days of each payday. Before that, you had twenty eight days from the end of the quarter.

The rate did not move. The amount you owe did not move. Only the timing did.

That sounds administrative. For a lot of businesses it was not, and two months in the effects are showing up in places that matter to anyone thinking about selling.

What the quarterly cycle actually was

If you paid super quarterly, then at any given moment you were holding somewhere between zero and three months of superannuation that belonged to your employees and had not yet been paid.

For a business with a $1 million payroll, twelve per cent is $120,000 a year, so roughly $30,000 sitting in your account at the end of a quarter. For a business with a $4 million payroll it is $120,000.

Nobody set out to use that as working capital. It just sat there, and then the business grew into the space it created.

Insolvency practitioners have been consistent about what happens next. Payday Super does not create failures. It brings them forward, because a business that could only meet its obligations by holding somebody else's money for ninety days was already in difficulty. The reform removed the cushion and made the difficulty visible.

Why this matters if you are selling

Three things change for a seller, and none of them is about compliance.

Your working capital position is now legible. Before July, a buyer looking at your bank balance saw a number that included an unpaid super liability they had to work out separately. Now the payment happens with the pay run, so what is left is what is actually yours. That is a cleaner picture and, for some businesses, a smaller one.

Late payment is easier to see. Super guarantee charge, clearing house records and the timing between a pay run and a contribution all leave a trail. Late super is one of the oldest signals of financial stress there is, and it is the sort of thing a buyer's accountant looks for early because it is cheap to check and it tells them a lot.

Your last two months look different from your last two years. If you are going to market now with FY26 figures, the working capital in those figures was measured under the old regime. A buyer looking at your current bank position may reasonably ask why it does not match. The answer is straightforward, but you should be the one giving it.

What a buyer actually does

Nobody sits down and asks whether you have adjusted to Payday Super. What they do is more ordinary and harder to talk your way around.

They ask for twelve months of bank statements and twelve months of payroll reports. They line up the pay runs against the super payments. If a pay run went out on a Thursday and the super went out eleven days later, that shows. If it went out three weeks later, that shows too.

Then they ask what your average bank balance has been. If it fell by roughly a month of super in July and has not recovered, they will draw a conclusion about how much slack the business was carrying.

That conclusion is not fatal. It is a working capital adjustment, and working capital adjustments are normal in every deal. But an unexplained one that the buyer discovers is worth less to you than an explained one that you raised.

If you are behind

Deal with it before you go to market. Not because a buyer will forgive it, but because the shape of the problem changes entirely depending on when it surfaces.

A seller who says, in the first meeting, that cash flow tightened in July, that super was late in August, that it has been caught up and here is the evidence, is a seller who has a handled problem. A seller whose buyer discovers the same facts in week six of due diligence has a credibility problem, and credibility problems are what actually kill deals.

The Australian Taxation Office has been taking a firmer line generally, with more use of director penalty notices and garnishee arrangements against businesses that fall behind. Unpaid super sits at the front of that queue because directors are personally exposed for it. That is a separate reason not to leave it.

The honest version

If Payday Super caused your business real difficulty, that is information. It is not a compliance story, it is a working capital story, and working capital is one of the things a buyer buys.

The businesses that barely noticed are the ones that were not relying on the float. The ones that noticed a great deal have learned something about themselves that a buyer would have worked out eventually.

Better to know now, while there is time to do something about it, than in the middle of a sale.