Australian Capital Gains Tax Calculator

No. There is no separate capital gains tax in Australia. Your net capital gain is added to your taxable income for the year and taxed at your ordinary rates, along with the Medicare levy and any study loan repayment. So what you pay depends on the rest of your income, and two people with the same gain can pay very different amounts.

If you are an Australian resident individual, you can halve a capital gain on an asset you acquired at least 12 months before selling it. The ATO reads that as a clear year, so the discount starts the day after the first anniversary of the purchase, and the anniversary itself is one day short. Buying on 20 June and selling on 20 June the following year does not qualify. Temporary residents do not get the discount, even though they are Australian residents for tax purposes. The discount applies to what is left after your capital losses, not to the gross gain.

Before the discount. You apply your current year capital losses first, then any losses carried forward from earlier years, and only then halve what remains. Applying the discount first would understate the gain. Capital losses can only reduce capital gains, never your salary or other income, and anything left over carries forward indefinitely.

The contract date. A capital gains tax event happens when you enter into the contract to sell, not when the money changes hands. That date decides which financial year the gain falls in and whether you held the asset long enough for the discount, which is why this calculator asks for both contract dates.

What you paid for the asset, plus the incidental costs of buying and selling it such as brokerage, plus any capital improvements and the costs of establishing or defending your title. Non-deductible costs of owning it can also count, though they rarely apply to shares. You cannot count again an amount you have already claimed as a deduction.

Yes. Choose Property and then Investment. The calculator uses the five cost base elements, takes your capital works and decline in value deductions off the cost base, applies your ownership share, and works out the discount and the tax the gain adds. It covers a property you never lived in, a home you later rented out and a rental you later moved into.

If you move out of your home and rent it out, you can choose to keep treating it as your main residence for up to six years, so a gain over that period stays exempt. The choice covers any time the place earns nothing indefinitely, and the six years caps only the days it earns income. You cannot treat another dwelling as your main residence for the same period. If the rental period runs past six years, the extra days are taxable and the calculator works out that share by days.

If your home was fully exempt and then starts earning income after 20 August 1996, the law treats you as having bought it again on that day for its market value. That value replaces what you originally paid, and the 12-month wait for the CGT discount starts again from that day. You need to supply the valuation, and a retrospective valuation by a qualified valuer is accepted. The calculator will not estimate it, work backwards from the sale price or use what you paid, so a result only appears once you enter it. If the six-year rule covers the whole rental period, the home stays fully exempt and no valuation is needed.

Yes. Division 43 capital works deductions you claimed, or could have claimed, come off both the cost base and the reduced cost base, which raises the gain or enlarges the loss. Take the figure from your quantity surveyor schedule or your past returns. The deduction is separate from what the work cost you. Enter the full cost of a renovation as a capital improvement and the deduction in the deductions field, and the calculator adds one and subtracts the other, which is how the ATO worked example does it. Decline in value deductions on fixtures and fittings are applied the same way.

It does not give a figure for an inherited property or a deceased estate, part of a home used to earn income such as a room or a home office, moving out and back more than once, building or renovating before moving in, land over 2 hectares, a spouse or dependent child with a different main residence, overlapping main residences, a rollover such as a compulsory acquisition or a relationship breakdown, or anything bought or built mainly to sell at a profit. Each of those gets an explanation and a link instead, because a plausible looking number would be worse than none.

For gains accruing from 1 July 2027, the 50% discount for individuals, trusts and partnerships is replaced by cost base indexation and a minimum 30% tax on real gains. That is already law. A gain that built up before 1 July 2027 keeps the 50% discount under the transitional rules, even when the asset is sold later, and companies and super funds are not affected at all. This calculator covers sales up to 30 June 2027 and does not estimate a sale on or after that date. The new rules need consumer price index numbers the ABS has not published yet and 2027-28 tax thresholds that do not exist yet, so any figure would be a guess.