When will you pay off your HECS debt?

We project your balance one financial year at a time, in the order things really happen: any voluntary repayments are credited first, the remaining balance is indexed on 1 June, and then the year’s compulsory repayment — worked out from your income using the ATO’s current repayment thresholds — is credited when your tax return is assessed. Your income and the repayment thresholds are both assumed to grow at the wage-growth rate you set.

Nobody can know future indexation — it is applied each 1 June at the lower of inflation (CPI) and wage growth (WPI), and it changes every year. It has swung from 0.6% in 2021 to 7.1% in 2023, before that year was retrospectively cut to 3.2% when the lower-of rule was introduced. The calculator defaults to 3%, but the honest answer is to try a few rates and see how much your payoff date moves.

Timing is everything. The amounts withheld from your pay during the year are not credited to your loan until your tax return is assessed — after 30 June — so they do not reduce the balance that gets indexed on 1 June. A voluntary repayment made before 1 June does. That is why this calculator credits voluntary repayments before indexation, and why paying extra in May beats paying the same amount in July.

It is broader than your salary: the ATO adds reportable fringe benefits, reportable super contributions such as salary sacrifice, exempt foreign employment income and net investment losses back on top of your taxable income. If any of those apply to you, your compulsory repayments will be somewhat higher than this estimate shows.

No — there is no time limit, and the debt does not attract interest, only indexation. It remains until it is repaid or cancelled on death (your estate is only liable for the compulsory amount relating to income earned before death). That is why a low income is not on its own a reason to panic about a growing balance — but it is worth knowing how long the road is.