Do you have to lodge a TPAR?

The five services inside the system

The taxable payments reporting system covers payments to contractors for these services. If your business provides one of them and pays contractors to deliver it, a report may be due.

Two rules that reverse the answer

Building and construction has its own test. The ATO says the percentage calculation “doesn’t apply to building and construction services you provide”. Instead, a business primarily in building and construction lodges if it pays contractors for that work — and primarily means 50% or more of this year’s income or business activity, or of last year’s income. Run the 10% test over a building business and you can get a wrong “no”; treat every business that does some building work as a builder and you get a wrong “yes”. The ATO’s hardware shop that arranges installations does not lodge for them.

Courier and road freight are combined. If you provide both, the payments for both are added together before the test is applied. Assessed separately each might sit under ten per cent while the combination clears it — which is precisely why the ATO combines them.

Which direction the test runs

This is the part that gets inverted. The 10% test looks at the payments your business received for relevant services, against your business income. It is not about how much you paid contractors. What you paid contractors is what you report, once the test has put you inside the system.

Which makes the employee-or-contractor line worth getting right before August rather than during it. Someone you pay as an employee gets a payslip and never appears in a report; someone you engage as a contractor sends you an invoice, and that is the payment you report.

The ATO’s own steps: add up the payments received for each relevant service during the year, including payments received where employees or contractors performed the work on your behalf; take your business income for the year, or your projected income if you have been trading under twelve months; then divide the first by the second and multiply by a hundred.

28 August, and the 2027 Saturday

A TPAR is due by 28 August each year, for the financial year that ended the previous 30 June. In 2026 that is a Friday. In 2027 it falls on a Saturday.

Lodgment dates that land on a weekend generally move to the next business day, but the ATO states that rule on its activity statement pages rather than its TPAR pages, so this site will not assert it for this form. Treat the Saturday as a reason to lodge in the week before rather than as an extra weekend you have been granted. The BAS due dates page covers the rollover rule where it is stated.

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