More than a billion dollars in super is waiting for people who have already left Australia

Sophia Kim left Australia in May 2025 with less than $10,000 of superannuation sitting in an Australian fund. More than a year later, she still did not have it. She had worked here first on a working holiday visa and then on a longer-term employment visa, and once she was gone she started applying for the payment temporary residents are entitled to claim on their way out. She applied in February 2026. Then again on 17 March. Then 10 April. Then 15 April. In June she called the ATO again.

“I just kept turning in new applications because I was so over waiting at this point,” she told Yahoo Finance Australia, which published her account on 20 August 2026. “They’re a mess.”

Kim was unusual only in how stubborn she was. Most people in her position never start, or start and quietly give up. As at 30 June 2026, the Australian Taxation Office was holding just over one million unclaimed super accounts belonging to former temporary residents, worth about $1.08 billion. That works out at roughly a thousand dollars a person, sitting in Canberra, owed to people now scattered across the world. A fair share of it belongs to Indian passport holders who studied here, worked here on a 485, and flew home without ever filling in the form.

What the departing Australia superannuation payment is and who can claim it

The Departing Australia Superannuation Payment, universally shortened to DASP, is the mechanism by which a temporary resident gets their super out of the Australian system on leaving for good. The ATO sets four conditions, and all four must be met:

You accumulated super while working in Australia on a temporary resident visa, other than subclasses 405 and 410. Your visa has expired or been cancelled. You have left Australia and hold no other active Australian visa. And you are not an Australian or New Zealand citizen, and not a permanent resident.

The second and third conditions catch people out constantly. Leaving is not enough on its own. If your student visa still has eight months to run when you fly home, you cannot claim until it ceases. The ATO’s online system is explicit: you may start and save an application while you are still here, but you can only submit it once you have departed and your visa is no longer in effect. New Zealand citizens sit outside this system entirely and can transfer their super across the Tasman instead.

Your employer’s obligation to have paid that super in the first place does not depend on your visa. The ATO states plainly that it does not matter whether the worker is full time, part time or casual, or “a temporary resident, such as a backpacker”. The only common carve-out is for workers under 18, who must work more than 30 hours in a week to qualify.

The tax is the part almost nobody gets right

DASP is taxed on the way out, and the rates are steep. They have been unchanged since 1 July 2017.

The tax-free component of your super is paid at nil. The taxable component’s taxed element, which is where most private-sector employees’ contributions sit, is withheld at 35 per cent. The taxable component’s untaxed element, which generally arises in funds that have not already paid tax on contributions, such as some public sector schemes, is withheld at 45 per cent.

Then there is the working holiday maker rate: 65 per cent, on both the taxed and untaxed elements.

Here is the part that costs people real money. The ATO’s own wording is that “the DASP WHM tax rate applies to the entire payment, including any super you may have earned while working under a different visa.” Read that twice. If you spent one season on a 417 picking fruit in Mildura, then did a diploma, then two years on a 485 in a professional job in Melbourne, the 65 per cent rate applies to the whole balance. Not the 417 portion. The whole thing. A $22,000 balance built mostly on graduate-visa wages comes back as roughly $7,700 rather than roughly $14,300, purely because of a few months on a working holiday visa years earlier.

This is not a penalty anyone announces to you at the airport. It is the single most expensive detail in this entire subject, and it is why the working holiday route into study, which is common enough among Indian arrivals who came for a season first, deserves a conversation with a registered tax agent before you lodge anything.

One consolation: DASP does not form part of your assessable income for Australian tax purposes, so it does not go into an Australian tax return. The withholding is the end of it.

Beware of older guides still circulating online. An Indian Link piece from May 2021, still indexed and still useful in parts, quotes a 38 per cent rate, which was the temporary budget repair levy figure that applied between 2014 and 2017. It has not been correct for nearly a decade.

Do nothing, and it moves anyway

Super does not stay in your fund waiting patiently. Once it has been six months or more since you left and your visa has ceased, your fund is required to close the account and hand the balance to the ATO as unclaimed super money. The transfer runs on a fixed calendar: the ATO issues funds a notice identifying former temporary residents, and funds report and pay by the next scheduled statement day, 31 October or 30 April.

The good news is that the money is not gone. You can claim ATO-held super at any time, with no deadline, through the same DASP online system. The bad news is that your payment options narrow sharply. Where the money is still with your super fund, you can be paid by electronic transfer to an Australian bank account, by Australian dollar cheque, or by international money transfer. Once the ATO holds it, the ATO says you can only choose electronic transfer to an Australian bank account in your name, or a cheque.

That single sentence is the reason the most common practical disaster in this whole process is closing your Australian bank account too early. An Australian dollar cheque posted to Jalandhar or Hyderabad is a genuinely painful thing to bank.

Payday super changed the shape of your final pay

From 1 July 2026, employers must have super guarantee contributions arrive in an employee’s fund within seven business days of paying wages, rather than quarterly. The rate is 12 per cent of qualifying earnings, and new employees get a 20 business day window for their first contribution. As this magazine covered when the rules changed, the point of the reform is that shortfalls surface in weeks instead of months.

For someone leaving the country, that is genuinely useful. Under the old quarterly system, your last few weeks of super might not have been due until well after your plane had gone. Now it should land almost immediately, which means you can actually check it before you go. Check that you have, because unpaid super remains a serious problem.

The Super Members Council’s August 2025 report found that in 2022-23, Australians were underpaid $5.7 billion of super, affecting 3.3 million workers at an average of $1,730 each. The same report notes that workers in insecure employment and “people without a deep understanding of workplace entitlements in Australia, such as many workers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, are far less likely to make reports.”

Andres Puerto, a Colombian international student, discovered exactly this when he went looking for his super during the pandemic and found that about $3,500 owed by a cafe and bookshop employer had never been paid. “I tried to contact him, I sent him messages, emails, calls, and he never replied,” he told SBS News in June 2020. You cannot claim a DASP on money that was never contributed.

What to do before you fly out

• Log into ATO online services through myGov and list every super fund you have ever had. Casual jobs breed accounts.
• Check your last few payslips against your fund’s transaction history. Under payday super the contribution should appear within seven business days. If it has not, use the ATO’s “Report unpaid super contributions from my employer” tool while you are still here.
• Certify your identity documents now. For balances of $5,000 or more, funds generally want certified copies, and the ATO notes it is much easier to get documents certified while you are in Australia.
• Start and save your DASP online application before you leave, so all you have to do offshore is press submit.
• Keep your Australian bank account open until the money lands. AustralianSuper’s own fact sheet advises departing members to consider exactly this, and to check what fees the bank charges to keep it open. This is the cheapest insurance in the process.
• Keep your passport, visa grant notices and employer details, including ABNs, in one accessible file. Paper applicants with $5,000 or more in the fund generally need a Certification of Immigration Status, Form 1194, from Home Affairs, and it carries a fee. Below $5,000 you can instead give your fund evidence that you have left Australia and your visa has expired, though the fund may still ask for the certificate.
• If any of your Australian work was on a 417 or 462 visa, get advice before lodging, because of the 65 per cent rule above.

Claiming once you have gone

The DASP online system is free. Paper applications go on NAT 7204 for fund-held money or NAT 74880 for ATO-held money, and your fund may charge a fee for a paper claim depending on the balance. Your immigration status is confirmed automatically with the Department of Home Affairs.

The ATO says a DASP is generally paid within 28 days of a completed application being received. Sophia Kim’s experience suggests “completed” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Asked about delays, the ATO told Yahoo Finance that “some payments may require longer processing times due to complexity and incomplete nature of the applications”, and that resolving queries takes longer “where contact needs to be made with individuals residing overseas in different time zones”, particularly where identity is hard to confirm.

The lesson is to be complete the first time, and to resist the urge to lodge again when nothing happens. Duplicate applications appear to have pushed Kim back to the start rather than to the front.

This article is general information only. It is not financial or tax advice and does not take your circumstances into account. Check the ATO directly or speak to a registered tax agent before acting.

A thousand dollars is not life-changing money. It is also two months of rent in a new city, or the deposit on a flat in Pune, or the thing you meant to sort out and then did not. The $1.08 billion the ATO is holding was built one forgotten account at a time, by people who worked shifts in Australian kitchens, warehouses and aged care homes and then got on a plane. The paperwork is annoying and the tax is punishing, but the money is yours, there is no deadline, and the hardest part is the half hour you spend on it before you leave.