Your HECS/HELP balance lives with the ATO, not your employer or your university. You'll find it in ATO online services — reached through your myGov account — or in the ATO app, under your loan accounts. Your payslip shows what's being withheld, never the balance.
This site can't look your balance up — nothing you type here leaves your browser. What it can do is explain the number once you have it, and project where it's heading.
Four things routinely make the figure look out of date or too high. All of them are normal.
Indexation is applied to the balance every 1 June — 2.8% in 2026. If you looked in May and again in June, the rise is that.
The STSL amounts withheld from your pay all year are not applied to the loan as they come in. They sit against your overall tax position, and your compulsory repayment is credited to the loan only when your return is assessed — typically July to October. Until then the balance ignores a year of repayments.
Payments take a few days to be received and applied. If you paid recently, give it time before concluding it went missing.
A unit you enrolled in is reported to the ATO by your provider after the census date, which can take months. A balance that seems too low for someone still studying is usually this.
The one-off 20% cut was applied to balances as at 1 June 2025, before that year's indexation, and the ATO has finished processing it. So the figure you're looking at already includes the cut — you're not still waiting for it. More on how it was applied.
A balance on its own doesn't tell you much. What most people actually want to know is when it'll be gone, and whether paying extra is worth it.
→ Project your debt-free date — enter the balance and your income, and the planner runs it forward year by year, indexing the debt and the thresholds separately, and compares paying extra against investing the same money.