Kaye Fallick

Kaye is a retirement commentator and coach, with 25 years’ experience writing about retirement income. She has authored two books on life stage changes – Get a New Life and What Next? – and enjoys regular radio and podcast appearances. Her favourite mission is to offer plain English explanations of complex rules so that all retirees can benefit. She is based in Melbourne but enjoys escaping to Italy whenever possible.
How does your super compare?

How does your super compare?

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The Australian Tax Office (ATO) quietly released some statistics end June. I say quietly because this data is really interesting. And useful for individual retirees keen to understand their overall financial standing.

The data is somewhat ponderously called the Individuals statistics for Taxation statistics 2022–23 and is buried in amongst a lot of other statistics on tax paid in Financial Year 2022-23. Reproduced below are the two pieces of information that matter most: a table of median super balances by age and gender and the same information represented in a chart. 

I have chosen to highlight the median balances (as opposed to the average) because median amounts offer a much more useful benchmark than averages. That’s because the average super balances can’t help but be skewed higher by the 135+ people holding more than 10 million in their super account. One individual has a balance of 534 million! So using averages is just not useful. As a refresher on high school maths, a median amount represents the middle value in a set of numbers, with half (in this case, super accounts) being lower, and half being higher. So it’s the midway point and that’s what makes it such a useful yardstick.

Here are the most recent individual balances, published in late June 2025 by the ATO.

Surprising annual super returns

Surprising annual super returns

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In news just in, Australian super funds have had a third strong year with double digit returns. 

The financial year-on-year returns were published by superannuation research house SuperRatings late last week. SuperRatings estimates returns on the median balanced option to be 10.1% for the year to 30 June (and 1.4% over the month of June). 

Australian funds had strong momentum across the start of the financial year but endured a ‘rollercoaster’ second half according to the research house. This is borne out by a return of 8% to 31 January, but since the Trump Administration tariff changes on so-called ‘Liberation Day’, returns fell as low as 0.8% before rebounding and finishing the year at 10.1%.

Says Executive Director of SuperRatings, Kirby Rappell:

“We saw exceptional volatility in returns over the year, particularly following the announcement of US tariffs in early 2025, however the benefit of staying the course was once again proven as a quick rebound has resulted in the third double digit return year over the past decade.”

SuperRatings measures returns across all Australian super funds and categorises the funds into Accumulation (savings mode) or Pension (decumulation or drawdown mode). These subsets are then further categorised into three different levels of growth asset exposure:

the Balanced option will have between 60-76% of total assets invested in growth assets, 

the Capital Stable option will have between 20-40% and

the Growth option will have between 77-90%.

Here is how the accumulation (savings) funds performed over the past month, the past financial year and in previous years.