Investment Strategy Comparator

This comparator shows the trade-off, not a recommendation — the right answer depends on your numbers, tax rate and how soon you need the money. Super's tax treatment tends to produce a larger balance over long horizons, but it's the least accessible option of the three, so a larger projected figure isn't automatically the better outcome for your situation.

Money in an offset account doesn't earn a taxable return — it reduces the interest calculated on your mortgage. Saving interest at your mortgage rate is economically equivalent to earning that rate tax-free, so that's the fairest comparison to the other options.

No — it amortises on the level repayment implied by your balance, your rate and the years you have left, and that matters more than it sounds. An offset only saves interest on the part of your balance the loan actually covers, so as the loan shrinks the cap falls with it. At the defaults on this page ($400,000 over 25 years at 6.3%, $1,000 a month for 20 years) the loan is down to about $136,143 by year 20, while your contributions alone come to $240,000 — so the offset passes what is left of the loan well before the horizon and part of it earns nothing from then on. The results card names how many months that was true for, and if the loan is discharged inside your horizon it says which month.

Concessional super contributions are taxed at 15% instead of your marginal rate, which is usually a saving for anyone on more than the lowest tax bracket. But you're locking the money away until preservation age, and you're still capped by the annual concessional contributions limit.

Yes, since August 2026. It taxes the ETF's distributions each year, grossed up for franking credits at your marginal rate, and then deducts the capital gains tax on selling the whole holding at the end of your horizon. The gain is worked out one parcel at a time — every monthly contribution and every year's reinvested distribution is its own parcel with its own acquisition date — because the rules turn on that date: a parcel acquired on or after 1 July 2027 gets no CGT discount at all, and a parcel held across that date has its cost base reset to market value then, with only the earlier part of the gain discounted at 50%. Two things are left out and both mean the real tax could be higher, not lower: the cost base is not indexed for CPI (that would need a CPI forecast, and this tool does not forecast), and the 30% minimum tax on capital gains is not applied because it depends on your total income for the year.

Because reinvested distributions form part of it. The distributions are assessed as income in the year you receive them, and the units they buy have a cost base equal to what was reinvested — which is why ETF investors have to keep their reinvestment statements. Ignoring that would tax the same dollars twice: once as income and again as a capital gain. At this page's defaults the cost base comes to $355,386 against $240,000 of contributions, so leaving the reinvestments out would invent $115,386 of tax base that does not exist.

It was removed in August 2026 because it was not really a fourth strategy. It ran the same compounding as the ETF with the tax line deleted, which made it arithmetically the ETF plus all of the ETF's tax, so it came first for every possible input — set the marginal rate to zero and the two were equal to the dollar. Saving a deposit is a genuine question, but it is a savings-goal question rather than a differently-taxed investment: use the Home Deposit Calculator for how long it takes, or the Savings Goals Calculator for a target amount.

Not very, in the sense that markets never grow at a smooth constant rate — some years fall sharply and others rise sharply. The growth rate here is a simplifying assumption to make the strategies comparable, not a prediction of actual year-by-year performance.