An Australian tax return covers the year to 30 June and is due by 31 October if you lodge it yourself. You can do it from anywhere in the world. How straightforward it is depends on whether every employer has finalised, and whether you can still prove who you are.
When can you actually lodge?
Not on 1 July, whatever the hostel says. Employers have until mid July to finalise their payroll reporting, and until then your income statement is marked as not tax ready, meaning the figures can still change.
Lodging before that point is the most common self inflicted error of the season. The return goes in against incomplete data, the employer finalises a week later with a different total, and the assessment has to be amended, which takes far longer than waiting. A return lodged early because you are leaving Australia permanently part way through the year is a different process with its own rules.
What do you actually need to have?
Less than most people assume. Employers lodge income statements directly, so payslips are a cross check rather than a requirement, and a job you have no paperwork for is still in the system.
You supply what the ATO does not already hold.
- Your TFN and identity documents
- An Australian bank account for the refund, the item people lose first
- Records for any deductions you intend to claim
- A Medicare Entitlement Statement if you are claiming the levy exemption, ordered from Services Australia weeks in advance
- Details of any ABN or contractor income, which is not pre-filled
What decides whether you can lodge from overseas?
Access rather than eligibility. No rule prevents a return being lodged after you have left, and doing it from your parents' kitchen in Manchester is entirely ordinary. The obstacles are identity verification and the refund destination.
Establishing or recovering a myGov identity from overseas is materially harder than doing it here, because the verification routes are built around Australian documents and an Australian mobile number. A closed bank account is the other: the refund has to land somewhere, and reopening an account from abroad is slow. Both are cheap to prepare in your last month in Australia and expensive to fix afterwards. Lodging through a registered agent removes the identity half of the problem, not the bank account half.
What happens after it goes in?
The ATO compares what was withheld across the year against what you actually owed and issues a notice of assessment. Refunds are usually paid about 14 business days after lodgement, and longer through the July to September peak when most of the country lodges at once.
Two things extend that. A return that does not match the pre-filled data goes to manual review, which is not an audit but does add time. And a return lodged with a bank account the ATO cannot pay into simply stops, so a wrong BSB delays more than a complicated deduction.
What changes if you had several employers?
The reconciliation becomes the work, rather than the lodgement. Every employer who reported income against your TFN has to appear, and the risk is not declaring too much but forgetting one and having the ATO adjust your assessment afterwards.
It is also where the money usually is. Over-withholding concentrates at one employer rather than spreading evenly, so the job that ran at 45% for six weeks or the labour hire company that was never registered decides the size of the refund. Working out which employer sat meaningfully above 15% is the part worth doing carefully.
What if you also had ABN income?
Two income types on one return, and only one of them had tax taken out along the way. Wages arrive with PAYG already withheld and pre-filled; ABN income arrives with nothing withheld and nothing pre-filled, so it has to be declared from your own records.
That combination is the most likely to produce an amount owing rather than a refund, because the withholding on the wage side was calculated without knowing about the contracting side. Whether it lands as a refund or a bill depends on the ratio between the two and on what deductions the ABN work supports. Work it out before June rather than discovering it in October.