How long until your HECS is actually gone

The grid

Pick your balance down the side and your repayment income across the top. Each cell is the number of financial years until the debt clears, starting in 2026-27.

Modelled with income held flat in today's dollars, debt indexed at 2.8% a year and the repayment thresholds indexed at 2.8% a year. No voluntary payments.

Years to clear, by balance, on a repayment income of $85,000.

What indexation costs you on the way

The years are only half the story. The longer it takes, the more indexation you pay — and that is money on top of what you borrowed.

The pattern is worth sitting with: the same debt costs several times more in indexation on a modest income than on a high one, purely because it is outstanding for longer. On $85,000 a $30,000 debt takes 14 years and picks up about $6,757 of indexation.

The stall zone

Look at the left-hand columns of both tables and you can see a region where the arithmetic turns against you. Just above the repayment threshold, the compulsory repayment is small — 15 cents on a thin slice of income — while indexation is charged on the whole balance.

At $75,000 the annual repayment is $820.80. On a $50,000 debt, that year's indexation at 2.8% is about $1,400. The debt goes up, not down, and it keeps going up until either the balance falls or the income rises enough to overtake it.

This is not a flaw in the modelling; it is what the rules produce, and it is the single most useful thing in the grid. If your combination sits in that zone, two levers change the picture and nothing else really does: earn more, or make voluntary payments before 1 June so there is less balance to index. Waiting does not help, because the gap compounds.

Conversely, at the right-hand side of the grid the debt clears so quickly that indexation barely gets a chance to apply — which is why the total indexation figures fall away sharply as income rises.

What the model assumes, and what that means for your number

Every projection is a set of assumptions, so here are ours in full:

• Income held flat in today's dollars. Your pay rises at the same 2.8% the thresholds do, so your position relative to the bands never changes. No promotions, no real pay rises — those would shorten the payoff.
• Debt indexed at 2.8% a year — the rate applied on 1 June 2026. Indexation is set annually as the lower of CPI and WPI, so future years will differ.
• Thresholds indexed at 2.8% a year. In reality they follow average weekly earnings, which is a different series and moves at a different pace.
• No voluntary payments, and repayments credited at assessment, after the 1 June indexation — the order the ATO actually uses.

Which way do the assumptions bias the result? Towards pessimism, deliberately. A career with normal progression moves you up through the bands in real terms and will clear the same debt materially faster than the grid suggests. Treat these as "if nothing changes" figures, not forecasts.

One modelling choice is worth flagging because it is easy to get wrong and it changes everything. If you hold income flat in nominal dollars while indexing the thresholds — which is what happens if you forget to grow the income — you are quietly modelling a real pay cut every single year. Do that and most of this grid turns into "never clears", which is an artefact of the assumption rather than a fact about HECS. Here income and thresholds move together, so your position in the bands is stable.

The assumption that can bias the other way is the indexation rate. If inflation runs above 2.8%, payoff times lengthen, and they lengthen most in the stall zone described above.

Why this model is different

Most payoff calculators hold the repayment thresholds constant, which quietly makes your debt-free date look years too early: in reality the thresholds move up each year with average weekly earnings, so a flat income slowly falls back through the bands and repays less.

This model indexes two things separately — the debt (CPI/WPI, 2.8% for 2026) and the thresholds (average weekly earnings) — and applies them in the order the ATO actually does: voluntary payments, then indexation on 1 June, then the compulsory repayment when your return is assessed.

If your income is likely to grow, or you want to add voluntary payments, the payoff planner takes both as inputs and shows the year-by-year table.

How these numbers were produced

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.

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