Calculate and report ATO interest

Why we charge or pay interest

We charge or impose interest in specific situations, including:

• late payment of taxes and penalties
• an increase in your tax liability as a result of an amendment to your assessment
• an increase in other tax liabilities, such as goods and services tax (GST) or pay as you go (PAYG) amounts.

Any amount of interest imposed that is later remitted or adjusted will be assessable.

We also pay interest in specific situations, including where:

• you make a payment towards certain tax liabilities more than 14 days before the due date
• your assessment is amended after you paid it and the amendment reduces your tax liability
• a refund that we are required to give is not paid within 14 days.

If we charge you interest, or pay you interest, you report these amounts in your tax return.

• You can claim a deduction for some types of interest we charge you (2025 or prior income years only).
• You must declare some types of interest paid or remitted by the Commissioner as assessable income.

We pre-fill interest information in your tax return.

For more information, see Interest charged by the ATO and Credit interest rates and calculation .

Changes to the deductibility of interest

You can no longer claim a deduction for general interest charge (GIC) or shortfall interest charge (SIC) incurred on or after 1 July 2025.

For GIC and SIC that can no longer be claimed as a deduction, any amount that is later remitted does not need to be included as assessable income.

You must still report GIC or SIC remissions where these relate to interest incurred in 2025 or earlier income years.

For more information, see Denying deductions for ATO interest charges.

Pre-fill interest data

The amount of interest you have been charged or we have paid, is pre-filled if it is relevant to the income year for which you are lodging an income tax return using myTax. The ATO interest pre-fill data is information we provide to help you to work out the amount of ATO interest that is assessable or deductible.

Ensure you verify the accuracy of the pre-filled data by checking it against your account on ATO online services before lodging your tax return.

If your pre-fill data is not accurate, you will need to manually calculate your interest.

If you're a tax agent, don't use the Year to date interest summary report to complete the tax return as there are recurring data issues.

Reporting ATO interest

We provide ATO interest data to individual taxpayers only, for the 2014 and later income years.

We also give this data to tax agents through the Pre-filling report and the practitioner lodgment service. We display a message in the Pre-filling report to advise if a client has ATO interest for 2013 and earlier income years.

From 2021, pre-fill interest data is sourced from all client accounts held by the individual taxpayers in the main accounting system, including the income tax account and integrated client account.

We report the following interest types:

• General interest charge (GIC)
• Shortfall interest charge (SIC)
• Interest on early payment (IEP)
• Interest on overpayment (IOP)
• Delayed refund interest (DRI).

We report on interest that you:

• may be able to claim as a deduction (GIC or SIC) - 2014 to 2025 income years only
• must declare as assessable income (GIC or SIC remissions or credit adjustments)
• must claim as interest paid by the ATO (IOP, IEP, DRI).

Individual taxpayers can choose to report ATO interest deductions and income using either:

• amounts reported by pre-fill
• manually calculating ATO interest.

The instructions for reporting ATO interest will depend on the income year. Follow the instructions for the relevant year:

• Interest reporting in the 2026 income year
• Interest reporting in 2025 and earlier income years.

For more information on SIC and GIC charges we impose, see:

• TD 2012/2 Income tax: when is the shortfall interest charge incurred for the purposes of paragraph 25-5(1)(c) of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997
• PS LA 2011/12 Remission of General Interest Charge.

Interest reporting in the 2026 income year

We have changed the individual tax return labels you use to report ATO interest.

For 2026 and later income years we have removed question D10 – label N Cost of managing tax affairs – Interest charged by the ATO as you cannot claim deductions for GIC or SIC that has been incurred on or after 1 July 2025.

Pre-fill interest data

We pre-fill interest data for individuals.

Check your pre-fill interest data

Before you lodge your tax return, you should check your pre-fill data against your:

• ATO statements of account
• other source documents.

For the 2026 income year, to capture the interest totals in the pre-fill service we use the:

• effective date - the date a transaction affects the account for determining the daily balance and calculating GIC
• processed date - the date we process a transaction on your account.

You don't have to rely on the pre-fill interest amounts.

Circumstances when interest won't pre-fill

Interest calculations will not capture your specific circumstances in the following situations.

Recoupments of interest charged

When we report interest remission and credit adjustments as assessable income, we assume you have claimed a deduction for interest imposed.

If you didn't claim a deduction and you can't amend your earlier return because the time has lapsed, you don't need to include the related interest in your tax return.

You may need to adjust the pre-filled amount to remove the amount you are not claiming.

Change in residency status

We report interest paid by the ATO on the basis of your residency status when the interest data is extracted from your account at the end of the income year.

If you were a non-resident at the date of extraction, no interest paid data will be provided.

If you were a non-resident when we paid you interest, then we should have withheld tax from that payment. If this is the case, you don't have to declare this interest in your tax return.

If tax was not withheld, you must declare the interest as income at question 10 Gross interest.

You may need to adjust the pre-filled amount to remove or add the interest paid by the ATO.

Interest transactions exceeding threshold

We will not pre-fill an amount at label 24X if:

• you have more than 1,000 GIC or SIC records, or
• the net total credit exceeds $20,000.

Generally, a message will be provided to advise that interest has not been pre-filled.

You will need to assess your statement of account to determine if there is an amount of interest that must be reported.

Manual updates that fail to link to the source interest transaction

Where a manual remission occurs that has an effective date that doesn't link to the source GIC or SIC imposition, we have excluded these transactions from the pre-fill report.

Because of these circumstances, there is a risk that you may under-report assessable recoupments. You will need to assess your statement of account to determine if there is an amount of interest that must be reported.

Manually calculating ATO interest

You will need to manually calculate the ATO interest that is be declared as assessable income, if:

• we do not provide you pre-fill interest data, but
  • your statement of account or transaction list on ATO online shows you have ATO interest
  • we told your agent in the Pre-filling report that you have ATO interest on your account
• you don't wish to rely on ATO pre-fill data.

How to manually calculate ATO interest

To manually calculate ATO interest:

• use the processed date of the transaction to work out when the interest that we imposed has been remitted or adjusted (that is, the benefit of the deduction has been reversed)
• use the effective date of the transaction to assess whether it relates to interest imposed in 2025 or an earlier income year
• declare the net credit balance.

Where to report ATO interest

ATO interest needs to be reported at the below labels in the 2026 individual tax return.

Question 10 - Gross interest

This label includes the interest we've paid or credited to you (e.g. interest on overpayment, interest on early payment and delayed refund interest).

The same rules apply for both the pre-fill report and manually calculating amounts that must be declared.

For the calculation, the processed date is when we paid you interest.

Declare the net credit balance.

Question 24 - label X Other income – Category 2 (ATO interest) in the supplementary return

This label includes amounts of interest we imposed on you that have been remitted or adjusted. This includes:

• GIC remissions and GIC credit adjustments
• SIC remissions and SIC credit adjustments.

It doesn't include certain transactions such as write-offs or released amounts.

Under the law, you must declare interest that has been remitted or reduced where you claimed a deduction or can claim a deduction for the interest that was imposed. The benefit that you gain from the deduction must reflect the actual amount of interest imposed.

Interest is assessable in the year that it is remitted or adjusted. See Appendix to PS LA 2011/12External Link for information on assessability of ATO interest.

Examples of the 2026 reporting process