What a Self Managed Super Fund Actually Costs

An SMSF costs money in a different shape to the fund you are probably in now. A retail or industry fund takes a percentage of your balance, so the dollar cost grows as the balance grows and you never write a cheque. An SMSF charges you mostly fixed dollars, whether the fund holds $150,000 or $1.5 million.

That difference is the whole argument. It is also why most of what gets written about SMSF costs is unhelpful: quoting a range without saying which costs are fixed, which scale, and which you control tells you nothing about your own fund.

Here is what the individual line items are, which ones are set by government and therefore not negotiable, and how to work out the balance at which the arithmetic tips in your favour.

The Shape of the Bill

SMSF costs fall into four groups, and it is worth keeping them separate because they behave differently.

• One-off establishment costs. The trust deed, the trustee company if you use one, and registration. Paid once, at the start.
• Fixed annual compliance costs. Accounting, the SMSF annual return, and the independent audit. These barely move with the size of the fund. They move a great deal with how messy it is.
• Government charges. The ATO supervisory levy, and the ASIC annual review fee if you have a corporate trustee. Fixed, published, and the same for everybody.
• Investment costs. Brokerage, management fees inside any ETF or managed fund, property outgoings, loan interest. These are entirely a function of what you buy and how often you trade.

The first three are the price of having the fund. The fourth is the price of what is in it, and you would pay some version of it in any super fund, just less visibly.

What Setup Actually Costs

Three things have to happen before the fund can receive a dollar: a trust deed has to exist, trustees have to be appointed, and the fund has to be registered with the ATO.

The trust deed is the fund's rulebook. Most trustees buy one from a specialist deed provider rather than commissioning a lawyer from scratch, which is reasonable for a straightforward two-member fund. Budget $150 to $700 depending on the provider and whether it comes bundled with the rest of the setup.

Registration with the ATO, including the ABN and TFN and electing to be a regulated fund, costs nothing as a government charge. Providers fold the work into their setup fee.

The trustee company, if you choose one, is the only setup item with a fixed government price tag. Registering a proprietary company with ASIC costs $636 from 1 July 2026. That is the ASIC fee itself. What a provider charges you on top for lodging the application and producing the constitution and consents is a separate service fee, usually a few hundred dollars.

Be careful with quoted setup packages. A figure like "$1,200 to set up with a corporate trustee" contains a $636 government fee that no provider can discount, plus their own labour. Compare providers on the labour, not the total, or you will think one is cheaper when it simply itemises differently.

The fund also needs its own bank account in the trustee's name. Several banks offer SMSF cash accounts with no monthly fee. The account has to be separate from your personal banking, without exception, because mixing fund money with personal money is one of the fastest routes to an audit qualification.

Establishment costs are capital in nature, so the fund cannot claim a deduction for the trust deed or the company registration. The annual costs that follow generally are deductible.

The Trustee Decision Is a Cost Decision

You can run an SMSF with individual trustees or with a company acting as trustee. Individual trustees cost nothing to appoint. A corporate trustee costs $636 up front and an annual ASIC review fee after that. On the face of it, individuals win.

The penalty regime says otherwise. Under section 166 of the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act, the ATO can impose administrative penalties on trustees for specific breaches, priced in penalty units. A penalty unit has been $364 since 1 July 2026. The serious breaches, including lending money to a member, borrowing, and exceeding the in-house asset limit, carry 60 penalty units.

The critical detail is who pays. The penalty is imposed on each trustee. A fund with two individual trustees receives two penalties for the same breach. A fund with a corporate trustee receives one, because the company is a single trustee. And trustees must pay these penalties personally. They cannot be reimbursed out of the fund.

That $70 figure is worth knowing, because it is easy to be quoted the standard company rate by mistake. A company whose constitution restricts it to acting solely as the trustee of a regulated superannuation fund qualifies as a special purpose company, and the ASIC annual review fee is $70 rather than the standard $342. If your SMSF trustee company is being invoiced $342 a year, the constitution is probably not drafted to meet the special purpose test, and that is worth a conversation.

ASIC also charges late fees on the annual review: $102 if you pay up to a month late and $428 beyond that. These are avoidable and surprisingly common.

The Annual Bill

Every SMSF, every year, must prepare financial statements, lodge an SMSF annual return, and be audited by an approved SMSF auditor registered with ASIC. None of these are optional and none of them scale down for a small fund.

• Accounting and the annual return. Preparing the financials and lodging the SAR. Market rates run roughly $1,000 to $3,000 depending on how many investments the fund holds and how much reconciliation work arrives with the shoebox. Funds holding a few ETFs and a term deposit sit at the bottom of that range. Funds holding property, a borrowing arrangement and unlisted investments sit at the top or above it.
• The independent audit. Roughly $350 to $700 for a clean, simple fund. The auditor must be independent of whoever prepared the accounts, which is why it appears as a separate line even when your accountant arranges it.
• Actuarial certificate. Only if the fund pays a pension to one member while another is still in accumulation and you are claiming exempt current pension income on a proportionate basis. Around $150 to $250. Many funds never need one.
• The ATO supervisory levy. $259, covered below.
• ASIC annual review. $70 with a special purpose trustee company. Nil with individual trustees.

The ATO publishes what funds actually pay, which is a better guide than any provider's brochure. For 2023-24, the median operating expense across all SMSFs was $4,553, and the median total expense, which also picks up investment costs, interest and insurance premiums, was $9,874.

Read the medians rather than the averages. Averages for SMSF costs are dragged upward by a minority of very large, very complex funds, which makes the typical fund look more expensive than it is. The median is the fund in the middle.

The same ATO data shows 84.4% of SMSFs had operating expenses below 1.0% of assets, and 43% below 0.5%. The picture of SMSFs as uniformly expensive does not survive contact with the numbers. The picture of them as uniformly cheap does not either.

The Levy Is Paid in Advance

The ATO supervisory levy is $259 a year and funds the ATO's regulation of the sector. It has sat at $259 since 2014-15. A rise to $295 has been announced but is not yet law, so $259 is the figure to budget on until that changes.

It is collected in advance, not in arrears, and this trips people up. The levy you pay with your 2025-26 annual return is the levy for 2026-27. The practical consequence is at the start: a newly registered SMSF pays $518 with its very first annual return, being the levy for its first year and the levy for its second year together. That is not an error on the notice of assessment.

The levy falls due with the annual return, so the due date follows the lodgement date. A continuing fund lodging through a registered tax agent is generally due 15 May. A newly registered fund lodging through an agent is due 28 February. A fund preparing its own return is due 31 October.

Missing the lodgement date costs more than a penalty. The ATO can change the fund's status on Super Fund Lookup to "Regulation details removed", and while that status stands, employers cannot make contributions and other funds will not process rollovers to you. For a fund waiting on a rollover to settle a property purchase, that is a far more expensive problem than the failure to lodge penalty itself.

What Your Investments Add

Everything above is the cost of the structure. The rest depends on what you put inside it, and this is the part you control completely.

• Brokerage. Charged per trade. The cost is driven by how often you trade, not by how much you hold. A trustee making twenty trades a month at $15 a trade spends $3,600 a year on brokerage. A trustee making four trades a year at the same rate spends $60. Same fund, same balance, a difference of $3,540.
• Management fees inside funds. If the SMSF holds ETFs or managed funds, those charge their own fee, deducted before you see the return. Broad index ETFs run from around 0.05% to 0.20%. Actively managed funds run well above 1%. This is a real SMSF cost even though it never appears on an invoice.
• Direct property. Council and water rates, land tax, insurance, property management, repairs, and the ongoing cost of holding a lumpy illiquid asset in a fund that has to pay a pension one day. Property also reliably increases the accounting and audit fee because of the valuation evidence the auditor needs each year.
• Limited recourse borrowing. An LRBA adds a bare trust to establish, a lender with its own establishment fees, legal advice on the structure, and interest for the life of the loan. Loan interest is deductible to the fund, but it is still money leaving it.

If you are considering property inside super, the structural cost is only half the question and the liquidity is the other half. Our guide to property investment using superannuation covers how those two interact, and the investment strategy requirements are worth reading before you commit, not after.

Where the Break Even Actually Sits

The comparison is straightforward once you stop comparing percentages to percentages. Your current fund charges a percentage. Your SMSF would charge fixed dollars. So convert your current fund to dollars and compare like with like.

Take your most recent annual statement and find the total fees deducted for the year in dollars, including the administration fee, the percentage-based administration component, and the investment fee for the option you are in. Add any insurance premiums separately, because you would still need cover inside an SMSF and it may cost more outside a group policy.

Then compare that number to a realistic SMSF cost for the fund you would actually run. Using the ATO's median operating expense of $4,553 as the fixed side:

• At a total fee of 1.0%, the break even is around $455,000.
• At 0.85%, around $536,000.
• At 0.7%, around $650,000.

Two adjustments matter. First, if the fund has two members, the fixed cost is shared, so a couple with $300,000 each are comparing $4,553 against the fees on $600,000, not on $300,000. That single point moves the answer for a lot of households. Second, if your SMSF will hold direct property or a borrowing arrangement, use a higher fixed figure than the median, because your fund will not be a median fund.

The break even is a floor, not a verdict. Below it an SMSF costs you money for control you may still want. Above it the fixed-cost structure is cheaper and keeps getting cheaper as the balance grows, which is the real long-run argument.

What the arithmetic cannot price is your time. An SMSF is a trust you are legally responsible for, and the hours you spend on records, valuations, the investment strategy review and the audit queries are real even though nobody invoices you for them.

There Is No Minimum Balance

You will still see $200,000 or $500,000 quoted as a minimum. There is no legal minimum balance for an SMSF, and there never has been. ASIC withdrew the guidance that had put $500,000 forward as a benchmark in December 2022, after research found balance alone was a poor predictor of whether a fund performed well.

What replaced it is a more useful question: not how much you have, but whether the fund can carry its fixed costs without those costs eating the return, and whether you will actually do the work. A $250,000 fund run carefully by someone who keeps clean records can be perfectly sensible. A $900,000 fund run by someone who has not looked at the investment strategy in four years is not, whatever the balance says.

Before you commit, it is worth reading through what establishing the fund involves. Our guide to setting up a super fund walks through the trustee structure, the deed, registration and the investment strategy in order.

Keeping the Bill Down

Most of the variation in what trustees pay comes from how much untangling their accountant and auditor have to do. The levers are unglamorous and they work.

• One bank account, used only for the fund. Every contribution, every distribution, every expense through it. Nothing personal, ever.
• Bank and broker feeds into the accounting software. Automated data is the single biggest determinant of the accounting fee. Manual entry from PDF statements is what makes a $1,200 job a $2,500 job.
• Keep the audit evidence as you go. Contracts, market valuations at 30 June, rental agreements, the signed investment strategy review. Auditors bill for chasing.
• Review the investment strategy annually and write it down. This is a legal requirement, it takes half an hour, and its absence is one of the most common audit qualifications.
• Answer the auditor quickly. A query that takes three weeks to answer costs more than the same query answered in a day.
• Do not hold assets the fund does not need. Every additional asset class adds accounting work, valuation evidence and audit time.

If the fund's bookkeeping is the problem rather than the fund itself, that is fixable. Our SMSF services cover the administration, the return and the audit coordination on a flat annual fee, so the number does not move with how busy the year was.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are SMSF costs tax deductible?

The ongoing ones generally are. Accounting fees, the audit fee, the ATO supervisory levy, the ASIC annual review fee and ongoing investment advice relating to the fund's assessable income are deductible to the fund. Establishment costs are not, because they are capital: the trust deed and the company registration are part of setting up the structure, not part of running it.

Is financial advice deductible to the fund?

It depends on what the advice was for. Advice about the fund's existing investments and producing its assessable income is generally deductible. Advice about whether to start an SMSF in the first place, or about a member's personal position rather than the fund's, is not. Where a fee covers both, it has to be apportioned on a reasonable basis.

Why is my first ATO levy $518?

Because the levy is collected in advance and a new fund pays two years at once with its first annual return: $259 for the year the return covers and $259 for the following year. From the second return onwards it is $259 a year.

Can I reimburse myself from the fund for a trustee penalty?

No. Administrative penalties under section 166 must be paid by the trustees personally, and paying them out of fund assets is itself a contravention. It is the reason the individual versus corporate trustee decision is a financial one and not just an administrative one.

Does a corporate trustee always cost $70 a year?

Only if the company qualifies as a special purpose company, which broadly means its constitution restricts it to acting as trustee of a regulated superannuation fund and it does nothing else. A company that also trades, or holds other assets, pays the standard annual review fee of $342.

What happens if I lodge the annual return late?

A failure to lodge on time penalty can apply, calculated in penalty units for each 28 day period the return is late. More significantly, the ATO can remove the fund's regulated status from Super Fund Lookup, which stops employer contributions and rollovers until it is restored.

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An SMSF is a small trust with a fixed cost of operation and an unlimited capacity to become complicated. The costs are knowable in advance, which is more than can be said for most financial products, and the trustees who pay the least are almost always the ones whose records are cleanest rather than the ones who shopped hardest on price.

Trew North Accounting has been advising Melbourne business owners and trustees for 40 years, and administers SMSFs from our office in Beaumaris. If you want a straight answer on whether the numbers work for your balance, see our SMSF services, read our FAQs, or get in touch.

This article is general information, not advice for your circumstances. Fees, rates and thresholds change. Check current figures with the ATO and ASIC, or with us, before you rely on them.