TPAR Due 28 August: Do You Need to Lodge One?
If your business pays contractors, there’s a deadline worth knowing about that often slips under the radar. The Taxable Payments Annual Report, or TPAR, is due 28 August 2026.
Plenty of business owners have never heard of it, right up until the year they realise they should have lodged one. Here’s who actually needs to.
What the TPAR Is For
The TPAR exists to track payments made to contractors in industries the ATO considers higher risk for under-reported income. It’s part of a broader push to reduce cash-in-hand work that slips outside the tax system.
Your business reports what you paid each contractor during the financial year. The ATO then cross-checks that against what the contractor declared on their own tax return. Gaps between the two get flagged.
Which Industries Actually Need to Lodge
This isn’t every business that hires a contractor occasionally. It applies specifically to businesses operating in certain industries.
Building and construction is the original, biggest category covering demolition, site preparation, landscaping, and project management. Cleaning services, both commercial and residential, are included. So are courier and delivery services, including food delivery and freight, road freight, IT services like software development and web design, and security, investigation, and surveillance services.
If your business sits in one of these categories and you pay contractors for that work, you’re very likely required to lodge.
The Threshold That Catches People Out
You don’t need contractor payments to be your entire business. For most of these industries, the rule is 10% or more of your business income coming from a relevant service.
Building and construction has a different threshold 50% or more of your income needs to come from contracted services for the TPAR obligation to apply.
It’s also worth knowing this isn’t optional just because contracting is a small part of what you do. A cleaning business that mostly cleans in-house, but occasionally brings in contractors for bigger jobs, can still trigger a TPAR obligation on those contractor payments.
What You Actually Need to Report
For each contractor you paid during the financial year, you need their ABN, name, and address, the total amount you paid them, and the type of service they provided.
It doesn’t matter whether the work was a small part of your operations, or whether the payment was GST-free. If the contractor falls under a relevant TPAR category, the payment needs to be included.
What to Do Before 28 August
Check whether your business actually falls into a TPAR industry. Don’t assume the threshold differs between building and construction and every other category.
Pull a report of contractor payments now, rather than scrambling in August. Most accounting software, including Xero, can generate this automatically if your supplier records are set up correctly.
Confirm you have a valid ABN for every contractor. Missing or incorrect ABN details are one of the most common reasons a TPAR comes back with errors.
Lodge electronically, not by paper. Paper TPAR lodgments are no longer accepted everything needs to go through Online services for business or your registered agent.
Don’t wait until the last week of August. This deadline lands right after the busy STP finalisation period, so it’s easy to leave too late if you’re not tracking it separately.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the TPAR deadline for 2026? 28 August 2026, the same date it falls every year.
Does my business need to lodge if contracting is only a small part of what we do? Possibly. For most industries, the threshold is 10% or more of income from a relevant service. Building and construction has a 50% threshold.
Can I still lodge a paper TPAR? No. Paper lodgments are no longer accepted TPAR must be lodged electronically.
What happens if I lodge late? Penalties can apply, and they increase the longer the report stays outstanding.
Let Us Handle Your Contractor Reporting Talk to Edulink
Tracking contractor payments, ABNs, and reporting categories is exactly the kind of detail that’s easy to overlook until the deadline arrives.
Edulink Payroll Services charges $750 per employee, per year, covering payroll, compliance, and reporting, for small and medium businesses across greater Sydney and Campbelltown.
Have more employees? Call us for a discounted rate.
📞 Call us today: 04 044 71 816
Edulink Payroll Services | Campbelltown & Greater Sydney | Call 04 044 71 816
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