Women across Australia continue to miss out on super due to time spent out of the paid workforce to care for children and other family members. This contributes to an overall gender gap in super balances, which leads to working women in Australia retiring with a quarter less super than men. This structural inequity also means women suffer more acutely from unpaid super. Unpaid super is when a worker is not paid their full superannuation entitlement on time or is not paid their super at all – either unintentionally or deliberately.

Missing out on super – which is a legal workplace entitlement in Australia - dramatically erodes women’s super by retirement, magnifies existing inequity, and erodes women’s future financial security. A key driver of unpaid super is that super payments are misaligned with wages. The Australian Government has pledged to introduce payday super laws. This reform will reduce the scale and impact of unpaid super - this will strongly benefit women. This report calls for this commitment to be backed by legislation, and quickly.

Key findings

• In 2022-23, one in four women (or 1.5 million) across Australia had unpaid super owed to them, missing out on a total of $1.9 billion in Super Guarantee contributions.
• Over the last 10 years, working women across Australia missed out on $15.5 billion in unpaid super.
• The average affected working woman missed out on $1,300 in super in a year – which can mean more than $26,000 less in retirement savings for a typical worker.
• Younger women were the worst harmed by unpaid super: 31% of women aged 20-29 and 29% of women aged 30-39 had unpaid super in 2022-23.
• Lower-paid women were hit hardest, with half of all working women in their 20s and 30s who earn less than $25,000 a year not being paid some or all of the super they were legally owed.