About HECS Check

Who makes this

My name is Jason Jung. I'm an independent web developer, and I build and maintain HECS Check on my own — the calculators, the engine behind them, the writing, all of it.

Let me be equally clear about what I'm not, because it matters when you're deciding how much weight to put on a number you found on the internet. I am not a tax agent, an accountant, or a licensed financial adviser. I don't have a professional qualification in Australian tax, and nothing here is personal advice. What I do have is a developer's habit of reading the source material closely, checking every figure against the ATO's own published tables, and showing the working so you don't have to take my word for any of it.

If you want advice about your own circumstances, please talk to a registered tax agent or a licensed adviser. If you want to know whether a number on this site is right, email me and I'll show you where it came from.

Why I built it

The way HECS repayments are calculated changed on 1 July 2025. The old system charged a percentage of your entire income and stepped up at each threshold; the new one is marginal, so only the income above the threshold is charged. It's a genuinely better system, and it made a lot of the advice online quietly wrong overnight.

When I went looking for a calculator that handled it properly, I kept finding the same three problems:

• Most still used the old flat-rate system, or had updated the thresholds without updating the method.
• Almost none dealt with the tax-time refund. Payroll withholding didn't switch to the new marginal tables until 24 September 2025, so a lot of people were over-withheld through 2025-26 and had money coming back without knowing it.
• Nearly all of them ignored salary packaging, which quietly raises your repayment income because reportable fringe benefits are grossed up by 1.8868 before they're counted.

Payoff planners had a fourth problem: they held the repayment thresholds constant for the whole projection. The thresholds are indexed every year, so freezing them makes your debt-free date look years earlier than it will be. I wanted one tool that got all four right for the current year, and when I couldn't find it I wrote it. The first version went online in July 2026.

How I check the figures

Accuracy is the only thing this site really has to offer, so here is exactly how it's maintained rather than a vague promise that it is:

• Every rate and threshold is cited to the ATO page it came from, with the date that page was last updated, at the bottom of each article.
• The engine has a golden test suite — 32 assertions covering the band boundaries, the whole-of-income switchover and both financial years, checked against the ATO's published figures. If a number drifts, the build fails and nothing ships.
• The data guides are computed, not typed. Every table and chart in the worked-from-the-data articles is generated at build time by the same engine that runs the calculators, so an article can't disagree with the tool. Update the engine for a new financial year and the articles update with it.
• Every page carries the date it was last updated, at the top, so you can see how stale what you're reading is.

There's a fixed routine each year: the indexation rate is set on 1 June and the repayment thresholds are indexed on 1 July, so both get reflected here and the "updated" dates move accordingly.

Where I've asked to be checked

Before I promoted this anywhere, I posted it on the Whirlpool finance forum under my own name and asked people to tell me if the 2026-27 figures were wrong. That thread is still there, including the sceptical replies. I'd rather be corrected in public than be quietly wrong.

The same offer stands here. If you think a figure is off, email hello@hecscheck.com with the page and what you expected, and I'll either fix it or show you the ATO table it came from. Corrections get made the same week they're confirmed.

What this site deliberately doesn't do

• No sign-up, and nothing you type is stored. The calculators run entirely in your browser. Your income and debt figures never leave your device and never reach me — see the privacy policy for the detail.
• No affiliate links and no commissions. I'm not paid by a bank, a lender, a packaging provider or anyone else, and there's nothing here trying to sell you a product. If a page recommends thinking about something, it's because the arithmetic points that way.
• No personal advice. The site can tell you what the rules produce for a given set of numbers. It can't tell you what you should do.

HECS Check is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the Australian Taxation Office or the Australian Government. It is general information only and isn't financial or tax advice — your ATO assessment is the only number that counts. For your own situation, consider a registered tax agent or licensed adviser.