There is no average worth quoting, because a refund is not a payment for being a backpacker. It is the gap between what your employers withheld and what you actually owed, which is 15% on the first $45,000. If the withholding was right all year, the gap is close to nothing.
What actually decides the size of your refund?
Three figures, two of which you already hold. Your total income for the financial year running 1 July to 30 June, the total tax withheld across every employer, and the offsets, exemptions and deductions that reduce what you owed. The refund is the second minus the tax due on the first, adjusted by the third.
Quoted averages are meaningless here. An Australian resident's withholding runs against a scale that already includes the $18,200 tax free threshold, so their reconciliation lands near zero by design. A working holiday maker's withholding runs flat at 15%, and every error in it runs one way: too much. The refund is the accumulated error.
Which situations produce a large refund?
The ones where part of your year was withheld at the wrong rate. Large refunds come from finding weeks or months where somebody took 45% or 32.5% instead of 15%, not from clever deductions.
Four situations account for most of them.
- Weeks before your TFN reached the employer. Withholding is 45% instead of 15% until the declaration form is completed, a difference of 30 cents in every dollar.
- An employer not registered with the ATO to employ working holiday makers. They must withhold at foreign resident rates rather than 15%. That is not your error, and it is recoverable through the return.
- Leaving Australia part way through the year. Withholding is calculated as though the income would continue, so a departure in January generally leaves more withheld than was ever owed.
- The Medicare levy exemption never claimed. Worth 2% of taxable income to anyone not entitled to Medicare, and it needs a Medicare Entitlement Statement rather than a tick box.
Which situations produce a small one?
One employer, registered correctly, your TFN on file from week one, and a full year worked. Then the 15% taken through the year is close to the 15% owed at the end of it, and the refund comes down to the Medicare levy exemption and whatever deductions you can substantiate.
That is normal, not evidence anything went wrong. In that year the real money is in superannuation rather than tax, because super accrues at 12% whether or not the withholding was correct.
How do you work out your own number?
Add up income and tax withheld across every job, then compare the total withheld against 15% of the total income up to $45,000. Anything above that figure is the starting point for your refund, before the Medicare levy exemption and deductions. Our tax refund calculator does the same arithmetic if you have the payslips in front of you.
The complication is missing information, not difficult sums. Income statements sit in ATO systems rather than with the employer, so a job you left on bad terms, a labour hire company that has since closed, or a payslip you never received does not put that income out of reach. The figures just have to be retrieved first.
Does everyone get money back when they leave?
No. You are refunded the amount withheld above your correct liability, not the tax itself, so someone taxed accurately all year has little or nothing to reclaim.
Super is a separate system. A DASP claim pays out the balance less 65% withholding on the taxable component, regardless of how your income tax landed. Two people with no refund at all can have very different super balances waiting, depending on how much they earned and how many funds it went into.