Every threshold table on this site takes "repayment income" as its input, and repayment income is a defined term: your taxable income, plus four things that ordinary tax arithmetic had subtracted or never counted:
The design logic is consistent: the repayment is meant to track your capacity to pay, so arrangements that reduce taxable income without reducing what you actually earn are unwound first.
| Scenario | Repayment income | 2026-27 repayment |
|---|---|---|
| Salary only | $80,000 | $1,571 |
| + $10,000 salary-sacrificed super | $90,000 | $3,071 |
| + $5,000 net investment loss (negative gearing) | $85,000 | $2,321 |
| + $15,900 salary packaged (grossed up to $30,000) | $110,000 | $6,071 |
Each row starts from the same $80,000 cash salary. Only the arrangement changes.
The packaging row deserves the double take: $15,900 of packaged benefits becomes $30,000 of reportable fringe benefits after the 1.8868 gross-up, so repayment income lands at $110,000 — and the repayment roughly 3.9× the salary-only figure. The full packaging table is here.
If you do none of these things, your repayment income equals your taxable income and you can ignore the distinction entirely.
If you sacrifice super: the strategy still works for income tax, but expect no HECS relief — and if a calculator shows your HECS falling when you increase the sacrifice, it's using the wrong income definition. That's one of the failure modes in the calculator tests.
If you negatively gear: budget your HECS on your pre-loss income. The loss will not shrink the repayment, and because your employer's withholding is based on your salary alone, a large add-back from any source tends to surface as a debit at assessment rather than through payroll.
The repayment calculator on this site has separate fields for each add-back for exactly this reason — feed it the full picture and the annual figure it returns is the one your assessment will use.
The add-backs are cumulative, and for someone doing all three common ones at once the drift from taxable income is dramatic. Stack the earlier rows together — the $80,000 salary, plus $10,000 sacrificed super, plus a $5,000 negative-gearing loss, plus the $15,900 packaged — and repayment income reaches $125,000, with a repayment of $8,320.82 — against $1,570.80 for the untouched salary. Same cash earnings, roughly 5.3× the HECS. None of that is a penalty; it's the system declining to let planning arrangements shrink the repayment base.
Worth stating the boundary precisely, because it decides whether the super row applies to you: compulsory employer super doesn't count. The add-back is reportable super contributions — amounts you chose to salary-sacrifice or claim a deduction for. The employer's standard superannuation guarantee never enters repayment income, so an ordinary employee with no arrangements has a reportable-super line of zero.
You don't have to compute any of this from scratch — each add-back arrives on a document you already get:
At lodgment, the ATO assembles repayment income from those labels automatically — the value of knowing the definition isn't doing the sum, it's predicting it, so the assessed figure doesn't arrive as a shock. If your arrangements changed this year (started packaging, began sacrificing super, bought an investment property), re-run the calculator with the add-backs filled in and compare it against what your payslips are collecting — the difference is the debit to expect, for the same structural reason as the second-job gap.
Every figure on this page is computed at build time by the same engine that powers the calculators on this site — nothing is typed in by hand, so the tables cannot drift away from the tools. The engine is checked against the ATO's published thresholds by a golden test suite that fails the build if any figure moves unexpectedly.