Editorial standards

Every rate, threshold or figure on this site traces back to a government or official regulator source — never to a secondary summary or another calculator site. We link to the source on the page it appears so you can check it yourself. 114 individual figures are registered across 22 figure families, and the bodies below are the complete set they are read off — derived from the registry itself rather than typed here, because a hand-written list of sources is wrong the day somebody adds a source.

A scheduled check runs daily against the official source pages every registered figure came from — federal, state and territory alike. It fetches each page and looks for the exact figure we publish, so a rate that has drifted fails the run loudly rather than sitting on the site unnoticed. Because these pages routinely keep last year's table below this year's, 14 figures also carry the opposite test: a newer financial year's label appearing means the figure we hold has been overtaken, whether or not the old one is still printed. On a pass, the run records the date, and that is the date the badge above and the one under a calculator show — so a stale badge is itself the signal that something needs looking at.

16 of the 114 figures cannot be checked that way at all. Some sources block scripted requests outright and some build their tables in the browser, so the figures are absent from the HTML a script receives. Those are reported as unchecked on every run for a person to open, they carry the date a person last confirmed them — the oldest is 27 July 2026 — and the badge over them shows that date rather than the sweep date. Counting them as verified would be the whole defect this process exists to avoid.

The statistical pages work differently. The bulk ABS, RBA, APRA, ATO and Consumer Data Right series are re-fetched on a schedule from each agency's own machine-readable release, and the figures on the page change only when the agency publishes a new period — monthly, quarterly or annually depending on the series. The schedule is fixed; it is the data that moves on the agency's cadence.

Behind the 92+ calculators is a shared library of maths, not one-off page logic — the same tax engine, for example, powers salary, pay rise, redundancy and dozens of other tools, so a fix in one place fixes all of them. Of the 83 engines, 78 are exercised by automated tests before any change reaches the site, which leaves 5 with none of their own. This section used to claim universal coverage, which was false for twelve engines, so the heading is now a count taken from the codebase rather than a sentence somebody wrote.

One engine is checked against an outside authority's own calculator rather than against our previous answer: the superannuation projection, pinned figure-for-figure to ASIC’s Moneysmart calculator. The rest are checked against the published rules and worked examples they implement, which is weaker evidence and worth saying plainly — a test that compares an engine to its own earlier output cannot notice that both were wrong. Where we have found a real defect — a wrong income test, a bracket applied per-child instead of per-family, a super projection that omitted the 15% contributions tax — we have fixed it and added the test that would have caught it. We would rather publish that history than pretend it does not happen.

We are writing this down before the first one exists rather than after, so it is a standard we are held to rather than a description of whatever we ended up doing. Every paid placement on this site is labelled with the single word “Advertisement” — not “sponsored”, not “partner”, and never “recommended”, which reads as editorial endorsement of something we were paid to show you. It is set in the same colour as this paragraph and sits directly above the placement, because a label you have to look for is not a label.

Three rules go with it. The disclosure names the actual provider — if we cannot name them the placement does not run, so you will never see “our partner” here. It sits at the placement itself and not only on how we make money, because a disclosure you have to go looking for on another page is not one either. And nothing paid goes inside a calculator's inputs or its results — placements sit after the answer you came for, beside the links to our other tools, never between you and the number.

Where you see a suggestion beside a calculator today it points at another of our own free tools and carries no label, because nothing about it is paid. That is also why this section can exist in advance: the layout is already built and already live, so the only thing that changes when a real advertiser signs is that a labelled, named, disclosed card replaces a link to our own work. The code will not render one that is missing any of those three.

Tax law changes, sometimes mid-year, and we are maintaining a large surface area. If a figure looks wrong, tell us at hello@ozfinancehub.com.au with the page and what you expected — we treat every report as a possible defect until we have checked the source ourselves, not as a support ticket to close. A confirmed correction changes the registered figure, the rate table the engines compute from and, where one is possible, the test that would have caught it. We do not quietly edit a number and move on. We are not going to promise a response time we have not measured, so there is no service-level claim here.

1 of the 22 figure families is only partly watched, and no page is allowed to show a verification badge over it at all. There is no commercial price feed behind the suburb pages, so several states are left out of any ranked affordability list rather than scored on unlicensed data. Several conditions of the ASIC relief our calculators rely on are not yet met, and we publish which ones. All of that is set out in full on the methodology page — it is the section that makes the rest of this one worth reading.