According to the ATO, you need to pay superannuation guarantee contributions for employees aged under 18 if:

• they work for you more than 30 hours in any week, and
• you pay them $450 or more (before tax) in salary or wages in a calendar month (prior to 1 July 2022). The $450 threshold is being removed from 1 July 2022.

This means when you pay under 18 employees, you'll need to check how many hours they've worked and, if necessary, adjust the super in their pay.

1. Check the hours worked

When you pay an employee who's under 18, keep an eye on how many hours they work each week. If they work 30 hours or less in a week, you don't need to pay super for them and you can change the calculated super guarantee amount in their pay (see steps below).

If an under 18 employee is paid fortnightly or monthly, you'll need to determine how many hours they worked each week. If they worked more than 30 hours in any week during the pay period, you'll need to pay super for that week.

Take a look at this example for a monthly paid under 18 employee whose hours vary each week.

Based on this example, you'll need to pay super on 63 hours for weeks 2 and 4.

2. Adjust the super in the employee's pay

Once you've worked out how many hours you need to pay super on, you can adjust the employee's pay accordingly.

1. Start the pay run as usual. Need a refresher?
2. Click the blue zoom arrow to open the employee's pay.
3. In the Hours field for the Base Hourly payroll category, enter the number of hours you need to pay super for. Using our example above this is 63.
4. Take note of the calculated Superannuation Guarantee amount.
5. In the Hours field for the Base Hourly payroll category, enter the number of hours the employee is being paid for this pay period. Using our example above, this is 118.
6. Overtype the Superannuation Guarantee with the amount you noted at step 4.
7. Complete the pay run as normal.

See it in action

Here's our example where we're paying the employee for 118 hours, but only paying super on 63 hours.