Payroll tax exemptions by state: NSW, VIC, QLD, WA, SA and TAS compared

Payroll tax is often described as harmonised across Australia. For the core machinery — what counts as wages, how grouping works, how thresholds are apportioned across states — that is broadly true. Exemptions are where it stops being true.

Each revenue office publishes its own exemption list, and every one of those lists is written as though its state were the only one you operate in. Nobody publishes the comparison. So an employer who learns that apprentice wages are exempt in Queensland reasonably assumes the same in New South Wales, where they are fully taxable. Or budgets for a regional discount in Victoria on the strength of a Queensland rule that tests something different entirely.

This guide compares six jurisdictions — NSW, VIC, QLD, WA, SA and TAS — across the exemptions employers ask about most. Every entry is traced to the relevant revenue office and cited at the end. Where we could not verify a jurisdiction’s own guidance, we say so rather than filling the gap with an assumption.

One thing worth settling before any of this matters: an exemption only helps if the payment was going to be taxable in the first place. If you are not yet sure what your state counts as wages — allowances, fringe benefits, superannuation, termination payments — start with what counts as wages for payroll tax, because an exemption applied to something that was never taxable buys you nothing.

The comparison matrix

The short version, across all six jurisdictions. Detail and conditions follow underneath — several of these “Yes” entries carry conditions strict enough to change the answer for your business.

Yes available · No not available · conditional — see the detail below · Not verified we could not reach this revenue office’s guidance to confirm

Charitable and non-profit exemptions

Every jurisdiction we verified exempts wages paid by charitable and non-profit bodies, but none of them treat it as automatic. Two conditions recur.

The first is that the exemption attaches to the work, not just the organisation. Wages have to be paid to someone engaged in work connected to the charitable purpose. Staff doing commercial work that happens to be run by a charity can remain taxable.

The second is that several states require an application rather than self-assessment. Revenue NSW states that not-for-profit organisations and religious institutions must apply for the exemption. RevenueWA requires an application form accompanied by your organisation’s constitution and details of its nature, aims and objects.

Victoria frames eligibility around non-profit organisations whose whole or dominant purpose is charitable, benevolent, philanthropic or patriotic. Tasmania’s Employers Guide lists religious institutions, non-profit private hospitals, private schools and colleges not providing education above secondary level, defence forces, public benevolent institutions and non-profit charitable organisations — noting the list is not exhaustive. Queensland exempts charitable institutions alongside public hospitals, government departments and, on conditions, local government.

Registration with the ACNC, or income tax exempt status, does not decide the payroll tax question in any of them.

Apprentices and trainees: the widest divergence

This is where assuming harmonisation costs the most, because the six jurisdictions land in four genuinely different places — and two of them draw a line between apprentices and trainees that the others do not.

Two practical consequences. First, the exemption-versus-rebate distinction is not cosmetic: an exemption reduces your taxable wages, which can also affect where you sit against a threshold, while a rebate reduces the tax payable after that calculation is done. Second, Victoria’s same-group exclusion is aimed squarely at restructuring — moving an apprentice between two entities you control will not create an exemption. Whether two entities are in the same group is a question with its own tests, covered in how “common control” actually gets tested.

Parental leave: same cap, different people

Every jurisdiction we verified caps the exemption at a maximum of 14 weeks of full-time pay, or an equivalent period at a reduced rate — 28 weeks at half pay being the example most revenue offices use themselves. That much really is harmonised.

Who the leave has to be for is not.

The Tasmanian position is the one to notice. A national employer running a single parental leave policy can have the identical fortnight of partner leave exempt for a Queensland employee and taxable for a Tasmanian one. Nothing in the policy changes; the state does.

Regional discounts: only two states, testing different things

Only Victoria and Queensland offer a regional concession. Neither is an exemption in the strict sense — both reduce the rate rather than the wages — and they are frequently confused because both use an 85% test. The 85% is measuring different things.

Neither discount is available to an employer simply because it pays some wages in the state. Both require the concentration of your workforce, not just its presence. If you are working out what a multi-state wage bill does to your position generally, the VIC and QLD calculator pages show how the underlying thresholds behave before any discount is applied.

Exemptions one state has that the others do not

Beyond the categories above, several jurisdictions carry exemptions with no counterpart elsewhere. These are the ones most likely to be missed, precisely because there is no reason to go looking for them.

• Queensland — general practitioners. Wages paid by medical practices to contracted or employee GPs are exempt. Given how often contractor arrangements in medical practices are caught by payroll tax elsewhere, this is a significant divergence. If you engage practitioners as contractors, read it alongside when an ABN doesn’t keep contractor payments out of payroll tax, because outside Queensland the general contractor rules still decide the question.
• Western Australia — wages for employees with disability. Wages for new employees with disability are exempt for the first two years of employment.
• Victoria — portable long service leave and redundancy scheme contributions. Employer contributions to a portable long service leave scheme are exempt where they are not taxed as fringe benefits, as are contributions to redundancy schemes. Victoria also exempts the first 10 days of workers compensation paid by the employer, and Transport Accident Commission compensation for lost earnings.
• NSW — Jobs Plus Program. Wages for positions created under the Jobs Plus Program are exempt.
• Tasmania — non-profit group training organisations. Wages paid to employees administering or participating in group apprenticeship or group training schemes are exempt where paid by a non-profit group training organisation registered with the Tasmanian Traineeships and Apprenticeships Committee.

Defence force leave and emergency services volunteering are exempt in every jurisdiction we verified, though the wording varies — NSW specifies bushfire and rescue operations, Victoria names Country Fire Authority and State Emergency Service volunteers.

Why South Australia is marked not verified

RevenueSA’s published exemption guidance was not reachable from our review environment at the time of writing. We know from RevenueSA’s rates guidance that South Australia operates a deduction-and-rate-band structure, which we model on the SA calculator page. Its exemptions are a separate body of guidance, and we have not confirmed them directly.

We could have filled that row by assuming South Australia matches its neighbours. Exemptions are the single area where that assumption is least safe — as the apprentice and paternity leave rows above demonstrate, neighbouring states diverge on exactly these points. So the row stays marked, and if South Australian exemptions matter to your position, go to RevenueSA directly rather than reading across from this table.

How grouping interacts with all of this

Exemptions are assessed against your circumstances, but several of the tests above are percentage-based or entity-based, and grouping changes both. A group is assessed on combined wages, so a percentage test such as the 85% regional threshold is measured across the whole group rather than the member you were thinking of. Victoria’s apprentice exemption explicitly fails where both employers are in the same group.

If you are not certain whether your entities are grouped, that question comes before the exemption question — our grouping explainer covers the control, common employee and tracing tests each state applies.

Where this leaves you

If you employ in more than one state, the practical takeaway is that your exemption position has to be worked out per jurisdiction, not once. The categories look similar enough across the six that a single policy feels defensible, and the detail underneath diverges enough that it isn’t.

For the underlying thresholds and rates these exemptions sit on top of, see the NSW, VIC and QLD comparison or the individual calculator pages for NSW, VIC, QLD, WA, SA and TAS.

The ACT and Northern Territory are not covered here. We don’t model those jurisdictions elsewhere on the site either, because both changed their payroll tax settings on 1 July 2026 and we have not been able to verify the current position from their revenue offices. Their wages still count toward your total Australian wages, which affects your threshold in every other state.