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For most of super's history, employers had up to three months to hand your contributions over to your fund. That gap meant money that was legally yours could sit unpaid for weeks, sometimes only turning up when a job ended or a fund went looking for it. Payday super closes that gap. From this month, contributions need to land in your account within days of each pay run, not once a quarter.

The nice part is that this speeds up compounding. Money that used to wait on the sidelines for up to 90 days is now invested almost straight away, and over a full career, that extra time in the market can add up to a meaningfully bigger balance. It also makes it much easier to spot underpayment: a missed or late contribution now shows up on your statement within days, rather than getting buried in a quarterly reconciliation months later.

There's one more change worth knowing about this financial year. A new tax now applies to very large balances, aimed at accounts sitting above $3 million, and the annual concessional contribution cap has been lifted too, giving members a bit more room to top up before 30 June each year.

It's still worth a quick check of your own situation. Take a look at your next few payslips against your super account and confirm your employer's payroll system has actually made the switch, since some employers were still catching up on the new timing requirements when the rule came into force. If you're not sure what your employer is actually required to pay you in the first place, our plain-English guide to the Super Guarantee covers exactly that.

Super Consumers Australia ran a mystery-shopper style audit of 20 major super fund call centres, making roughly 1,000 test calls covering everyday requests like joining a fund, asking about financial hardship access, or getting help on behalf of a family member who speaks another language at home. The average satisfaction score across the industry landed just under 50%, and the group's chief executive pointed to some genuinely troubling examples of testers being met with a lack of empathy while going through difficult circumstances.

AustralianSuper, the country's largest fund by membership, stood out for failing to answer the large majority of test calls outright. The Super Members Council, which represents several major funds, pushed back a little on the methodology, noting the testers weren't verified members so calls never got past identity checks. Even so, they said they're on board with the idea of mandatory standards.

It's worth knowing the government actually committed to introducing mandatory customer service standards for the super industry back in early 2025, but the detailed rules still haven't been released. On top of that, the corporate regulator's most recent review of how funds handle death benefit claims found only a small amount of improvement industry-wide, with some trustees yet to fix basic processing gaps.

If you've had a rough experience with your own fund, the advice from the consumer group is simple. Complain directly to your fund first, escalate to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority if that goes nowhere, and treat a pattern of poor service as a fair reason to compare and think about switching.

Right now, a worker under 18 is only legally entitled to compulsory super if they clock more than 30 hours a week with a single employer. That's a bar most casual teenage jobs simply don't clear, whether it's a Saturday retail shift or a few hours after school. Some large retailers, including Bunnings, Aldi, JB Hi-Fi and Priceline, already choose to pay super to under-18 staff regardless of hours worked. Others, including Coles, Woolworths, McDonald's, Kmart and Target, aren't required to under the current law.

Labor's national platform has now been updated to call for super to accrue on every dollar a young person earns, no matter how they're engaged or how many hours they work. It's worth knowing this would still need separate legislation to actually take effect, since the conference vote sets policy direction rather than changing the law itself. The Treasurer has called it an important issue, though he's stopped short of committing to a timeline.

The numbers behind this are worth sitting with for a moment. Analysis from the Super Members Council estimates the 30-hour rule costs under-18 workers around $405 million in missed contributions every year, spread across roughly half a million teenagers. Modelling from Rest Super suggests a typical 15-year-old could end up around $3,400 better off by age 18, and about $18,100 better off by retirement, if the rule were scrapped. Most of that gain simply comes down to giving the money extra years to compound.

If you're a young worker, or you've got one in your family, it's worth checking directly with the employer about whether super is being paid on those junior shifts, since the current legal minimum still comes down to hours worked rather than age alone. If super is a completely new topic, our Super 101 guide is a good place to start.

The Shield Master Fund and the First Guardian Master Fund were both investment schemes that a number of Australians ended up invested in through their super, often without fully realising how unusual those investments were. Shield was run by Keystone Asset Management, and First Guardian was run by Falcon Capital. Both funds collapsed and went into liquidation, First Guardian in 2025 and Shield shortly after, leaving thousands of members facing significant losses.

Between the two schemes, around 11,000 people had roughly $1.1 billion tied up, much of it rolled over directly from their superannuation. First Guardian alone had accepted money from about 6,000 Australians and had invested it in an unusually wide mix of ventures, including property developments and a struggling restaurant group. ASIC has alleged that a substantial amount of investor money, over $270 million, was moved into offshore companies linked to the person controlling the fund, shortly after he was told a regulatory investigation was underway.

What makes this worth understanding, even if you had nothing to do with either fund, is how people ended up in them in the first place. Many members were not deliberately chasing risky investments. They were contacted out of the blue by lead generators, then referred to a financial adviser who recommended rolling their existing super into a different fund, or setting up a self managed super fund, specifically to access Shield or First Guardian. Common warning signs in these cases included unsolicited calls, promises of returns that sounded close to guaranteed, and pressure to make the switch quickly.

The regulator, ASIC, is continuing to investigate both collapses and has taken legal action against at least one trustee over alleged failures of oversight. A dedicated support site, run by Super Consumers Australia with ASIC funding, now helps affected investors understand their options, including lodging a complaint with the Australian Financial Complaints Authority. Recovery for those affected is expected to be partial at best, with some estimates suggesting full distributions may not be finalised until 2027 or later.

The broader lesson here is less about these two funds specifically and more about the structure they sat outside of. A standard, well established super fund, whether industry or retail, is required to spread your money across thousands of underlying investments and is subject to ongoing prudential regulation. Niche, single manager investment schemes like Shield and First Guardian generally don't carry those same protections. If you've never been contacted about switching your super into an investment you'd never heard of, this story is a reminder that staying with a large, established fund is not a boring default choice. It's a genuinely safer one. You can see how the big, established funds actually compare on our Best Super Fund page.

Aware Super and Prime Super have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to explore a Successor Fund Transfer, the formal process by which one super fund's members and assets move into another. If it goes ahead, the combined fund would manage around $254 billion for more than 1.4 million members, making it one of the largest superannuation funds in the country.

The two funds are very different in size. Aware Super already manages roughly $235 billion for about 1.3 million members. Prime Super, by comparison, is a much smaller fund with around $8.3 billion under management and about 140,000 members, many of them working in agriculture, farming, health and aged care, and education, with a strong base in regional Australia. Prime Super's chair, Nigel Alexander, described the fund's legacy as built on trusted relationships and a deep connection to regional communities, and said Aware Super offered the scale to help deliver better outcomes for members going forward.

Nothing changes immediately. Both funds will spend the coming months on a due diligence process to work out whether the deal genuinely benefits their members, and during that time each fund continues operating exactly as before. If everything proceeds, the funds expect the transfer to be completed towards the end of 2027.

This isn't Aware Super's first move like this. The fund's growth over the past few years has come almost entirely through mergers rather than organic growth alone, including VicSuper and WA Super in 2020, and TelstraSuper, which completed its own merger into Aware Super in April 2026. A Prime Super merger would be the next step in that same pattern.

Zoom out and this is part of a much broader trend across the entire industry. Australia used to have hundreds of small super funds. Regulatory pressure to weed out underperforming, sub-scale funds, combined with the genuine cost advantages that come with size, has pushed the industry toward a much smaller number of much larger funds. For members, that trend usually means lower fees and access to a wider range of investments over time, but it can also mean losing some of the personalised, industry-specific service that smaller funds like Prime Super have built their reputation on. Whether that trade-off is worth it tends to come down to what you actually value in a fund.

AustralianSuper, the country's largest super fund with around $430 billion under management and 3.6 million members, is lifting its administration fees for the first time since 2022. From 31 October 2026, the asset-based part of the admin fee for accumulation members rises from 0.10% to 0.12% a year. Members in Choice Income and Transition to Retirement Income accounts see the same change from 1 November 2026.

In dollar terms, most members won't notice a huge jump. Around 88% of accumulation members, roughly 3.1 million people with balances up to $250,000, will pay up to an extra $1.83 a week. It adds up more for larger balances though. Members with between $300,000 and $500,000 in their account face increases of up to $5.97 a week, more than $310 over a year. The fund is also raising the annual cap on this fee from $350 to $600, a 71% jump that will mainly affect the roughly 7% of accumulation members with the largest balances, and removing an administration fee tax benefit that had been softening the cost for accumulation and Transition to Retirement members.

AustralianSuper says the increase is going toward member services, financial advice and cybersecurity infrastructure. It's also worth noting this isn't the whole fee picture moving in one direction. Investment fees and costs actually fell for most members over the past financial year, with the Balanced option, where most members are invested, dropping from 0.57% to 0.53% a year. The fund says that even after the admin fee rise, its overall fees still sit 17% below the MySuper industry average.

Whether the extra service spending shows up in practice is a fair question to ask. We covered a mystery shopper study earlier this year that found AustralianSuper failed to answer the large majority of test calls into its service line, so members footing a higher bill for service improvements have a reasonable basis for wanting to see that translate into an actual answered phone. You can read more in our piece on what that call centre audit found.

If you want to see exactly how this affects your own balance, your fund's website will have a fee calculator, and it's a reasonable moment to check your latest statement and see where your fund sits against others on our Best Super Fund page.