Three things, for every fund separately: proof of identity, proof your visa has expired or been cancelled, and proof you have left Australia.
Are you actually eligible yet?
Three conditions have to hold together, and lodging before they do is the most common wasted application. You accumulated super while working on a temporary visa, which includes 417 and 462. You have left Australia. And your visa has expired or been cancelled.
You cannot claim while the visa is still active, even from your home country. If you intend to come back on another temporary visa you can still claim, because eligibility turns on the visa the super was accumulated under having ended.
What identity documents does a fund want?
The passport used on your working holiday visa, and if you have renewed since, both passports. Funds commonly require certified copies rather than photographs, particularly above balance thresholds around $5,000.
Certified means an authorised person has sighted the original and endorsed the copy, and who counts varies by fund: an Australian notary or justice of the peace, an Australian consulate abroad, or a locally recognised equivalent. This is what most often stalls a claim from overseas, because a solicitor in Manchester or a notary in Osaka may or may not appear on a fund's accepted list, and you find out after submitting. Some funds accept digital identity verification instead.
What proves your visa has ceased?
Evidence from the Department of Home Affairs, in one of three forms. A visa grant notice showing an expiry date that has passed. A cancellation notice if the visa was cancelled early. Or a VEVO extract showing current status as expired, the most common because it shows live status.
A VEVO extract has to be generated after the visa has ceased. One pulled a week early shows an active visa and proves the opposite of what you need.
What proves you have departed?
The movement record maintained by Home Affairs, which logs every entry and exit. Funds also commonly accept a departure boarding pass with a passport exit stamp, or an entry stamp into another country dated after the visa expiry.
The departure has to be after the visa ceased. Flying out mid visa and returning later does not trigger eligibility, so a trip to Bali in your ninth month is not a departure for these purposes.
What makes a claim difficult?
Not the tax. The 65% withholding on a working holiday DASP is the same whoever lodges it, so the difficulty is entirely in the paperwork, and it scales with three things.
How many funds hold your money. Each is a separate application with its own document standards, and each has to be located first. A traveller who remembers one fund and had three employers is leaving two behind.
Where you are when you claim. Certification requirements are assessed against the country you are certifying in, and a fund that goes silent is far harder to chase from another continent.
How long ago you left. Roughly six months after your visa ends and you depart, funds must transfer unclaimed balances to the ATO. The money is not lost, but it has moved.
Our superannuation refund service covers exactly those parts: locating every fund rather than the one you remember, meeting fund specific document standards, arranging certification, chasing funds that go quiet, and running the claim alongside your final year working holiday tax return.
What goes wrong most often?
The same short list. Passport details that do not match what the fund holds, because an employer typed your name in a hurry when the account was opened. A visa expiry date entered incorrectly. A departure date that predates the visa expiry. Certification the fund will not accept. And an application sent to a fund holding no balance.
That last one is the most common. A traveller with three employers usually has three funds, each identified and claimed from separately. See finding lost superannuation for how the central record works.
How hard will your three documents be?
Every fund wants the same three things. How hard they are to produce varies with where you are and how long ago you left.
- How long ago you left, which decides whether your money is still with funds or already with the ATO.
- Whether you have renewed your passport since working in Australia.
- What each fund's balance is, since certification requirements commonly tighten above around $5,000.
- Where you are certifying documents, because acceptance varies by country and by fund.
- How many employers you had, which is how many separate applications this becomes.
- Whether your final year return is also outstanding, which is separate money and usually better taxed.
The eligibility rules, withholding and timing are set out where you claim your superannuation after leaving Australia.