Superannuation Guarantee Ruling

The Tax Office has issued a ruling in which the Commissioner states his view regarding the treatment of payments made to employees for the purposes of the superannuation guarantee (SG).

The ruling has been modified from the draft ruling previously released to include several important changes. These changes include:

• Christmas bonuses are now considered to be ordinary time earnings (OTE) and to be included when determining the minimum SG payable for an employee; and
• regular overtime payments made outside an employee’s ordinary hours of work will generally not be included in OTE and, therefore, not included in calculating the required level of SG for the employee.

The ruling does not discuss whether parental leave and ancillary leave (eg jury duty leave) are taken into account when calculating the minimum SG for an employee.