There is a great deal written about complying with Payday Super and almost nothing about servicing it profitably. Payroll vendors won't write it — they sell the automation. The professional bodies can't — fee-setting isn't their remit. So here it is.
Updated 3 August 2026
The cost driver is cycle frequency, and it is not evenly distributed across your book. A monthly-paid client went from 4 super events a year to 12. A weekly-paid client went from 4 to 52.
That is the number to work from, and it explains why a single flat uplift across all payroll clients fails: it overcharges the monthly ones and still loses money on the weekly ones. Before choosing a model, count cycles per client per year. The answer usually reorganises the whole question.
The second thing firms underestimate is that the expensive part is not processing — it is exception handling. Rejected contributions, stale fund details, off-cycle payments that each start their own deadline. That work was quarterly and annoying; it is now continuous.
No change to the payroll fee. The extra cycles are carried inside the existing scope.
Suits: Firms with a handful of payroll clients on monthly cycles, where the increase is genuinely marginal.
Where it breaks: Scales badly and invisibly. A weekly-paid client went from 4 super events a year to 52. Absorbed across a payroll book this is a five-figure write-off that never appears as a line item, because nobody is measuring it.
The payroll fee becomes per-cycle rather than per-period, so weekly clients pay more than monthly ones.
Suits: Most firms with a mixed payroll book. It tracks the actual cost driver, which is cycle count.
Where it breaks: Weekly-paid clients see the largest increase, and they are often the smallest businesses. Expect the hardest conversations there, and prepare for them specifically rather than sending one generic notice.
A base fee plus a headcount component, charged each cycle.
Suits: Firms whose payroll work genuinely scales with headcount — more funds, more fund-detail failures, more exceptions.
Where it breaks: Penalises growing clients at exactly the moment they feel stretched. Worth a cap or a banded rate so a client hiring ten people does not receive a punitive invoice.
A separate ongoing fee covering super compliance monitoring, reconciliation to receipt, and exception handling — distinct from processing the run.
Suits: Firms wanting to make the compliance work visible rather than bundling it into a processing fee.
Where it breaks: Only defensible if you actually do the monitoring. If it becomes a line item without a process behind it, it will not survive a client asking what they are paying for.
No mid-term change; the new cost is built into the next engagement letter.
Suits: Firms with formal annual engagements and low tolerance for mid-term variation.
Where it breaks: You carry the cost until renewal, which for some clients is eleven months away. Defensible as a choice, expensive as a default — and worth calculating before you decide it is the easy option.
Lead with the law, then the workload, then the fee.
The obligation changed on 1 July, the work multiplied as a direct result, and the fee follows from that. Firms that open with the number sound opportunistic. Firms that explain the sequence rarely get argued with.
Quantify the change in their terms, not yours.
"Your super went from four payments a year to twenty-six" lands. "Increased compliance burden" does not. Clients accept price changes they can see the arithmetic behind.
Handle weekly-paid clients separately.
They absorb the largest increase under almost every model, and they are frequently the least able to. A tailored conversation with the handful of clients facing a big rise beats a blanket notice that generates ten angry calls.
Bundle the cash-flow warning with the fee note.
Their super now leaves the business every cycle instead of quarterly. Telling them that unprompted positions the fee as part of managing a change you are on top of, rather than as a charge arriving alongside a nasty surprise.
Decide who can waive it before anyone asks.
If any partner can drop the increase to keep a client comfortable, there is no increase. Name who can approve an exception and require a reason. That alone preserves most of the revenue.
Payday Super and the AML/CTF Tranche 2 reforms both commenced on 1 July 2026, and both landed on practices as unpriced work. That is not a coincidence so much as a pattern: obligations arrive, the work attaches to the firm, and whether it becomes a service or an overhead is settled in the first few months by whoever notices.
The firms that will be comfortable in three years are not the ones with the best payroll software. They are the ones that treated a regulatory change as a service with a price attached, on the day it arrived, instead of absorbing it until someone finally measures the write-offs.
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