Do You Still Need to Lodge a Tax Return?

# Do You Still Need to Lodge a Tax Return?

It is one of the first questions people ask after they stop working, and it gets answered badly at barbecues. Someone will tell you that once you are on the pension you never lodge again. Someone else will tell you that you have to lodge every year regardless, forever.

Both are wrong, and there is a change this tax time that makes the question worth revisiting even if you settled it years ago.

This is general information, not personal financial or tax advice. Lodgment obligations depend on your individual circumstances, and the right answer for you is the ATO's own tool or a registered tax agent — not this article.

It depends on your circumstances, not your age

There is no age at which lodging stops being required. What matters is what your income was and what happened during the year, and there are several independent tests — you only need to fail one of them to be required to lodge.

If you are eligible for the seniors and pensioners tax offset, the relevant test for the 2025-26 income year is your rebate income, which does not include your spouse's. You must lodge if it was more than:

• $34,919 if you were single, widowed or separated at any time during the year, or
• $33,732 if you had a spouse but one of you lived in a nursing home, or you had to live apart due to illness.

Whether you are eligible for that offset in the first place is its own question, and our article on the seniors and pensioners tax offset covers it. If you are not eligible for it, different tests apply.

Rather than reproduce every threshold here — they change each year and there are more categories than most people realise — the better move is below.

The triggers that override your income

Some things require you to lodge regardless of how low your income was. Three of them catch retirees:

You paid tax under PAYG withholding or the instalment system during the year, or had tax withheld from payments you received. This is the big one, and it catches people who do not expect it: if you were put into the PAYG instalment system after a single unusual year — a capital gain, a large parcel of franked dividends — you may still be in it now, paying quarterly on income you no longer have. Your income says you need not lodge; the instalment system says you must. Our article on PAYG instalments for retirees covers how to get out of that loop.

You made personal contributions to a complying super fund and are eligible for the super co-contribution.

Your concessional or non-concessional contributions exceeded your cap — see our article on excess contributions tax.

There are others. Which is why the next section matters more than the numbers above.

Use the ATO's own tool

The ATO publishes a "Do I need to lodge a tax return?" tool, available on its website and in ATO online services. Accessed through ATO online services, it uses information the ATO already holds about you and tailors the result.

That is a better answer than any table, including the one above, for three reasons: it covers every category rather than the common ones, it reflects your actual reported income, and it does not go out of date in July the way printed thresholds do. Our article on using myGov and ATO online services covers getting set up if you are not already.

Five minutes there beats an afternoon of arguing about thresholds.

The franking credit change this tax time

Here is the thing worth knowing even if you already know your lodgment position.

For a great many self-funded retirees, the only reason they lodge anything at all is to get their franking credits refunded. Franked dividends carry credit for tax the company has already paid, and where your own tax rate is low, that credit can come back to you as cash. Our article on refundable franking credits covers how that works and why it matters so much in retirement.

During tax time 2026, the ATO says it will automatically refund franking credits to eligible individuals and issue a notice of assessment, using information that share registries report to it. Unless the ATO advises otherwise, eligible people will not need to apply.

That is genuinely good news and it removes an annual chore for a lot of people. But read the wording carefully, because three qualifications are doing real work:

• It applies to eligible individuals — not automatically to everyone with a franked dividend.
• It runs on information share registries report to the ATO. Holdings that are not captured in that reporting may not be picked up.
• It applies unless the ATO advises otherwise.

So the sensible response is not to relax — it is to check that the refund actually arrived. If you normally receive franking credits back and nothing appears, that is a signal to follow up rather than to assume it has been handled.

Where an application is still needed, it can be made online, over the phone, or by post.

If you don't need to lodge, say so

This is the step almost everybody misses, and skipping it creates a problem so quietly that people do not notice for years.

Working out that you do not need to lodge is not the end of it. The ATO is still expecting a return from you, and it will keep expecting one until you tell it otherwise. If you simply stop lodging, that expectation accrues — and eventually a letter arrives asking about several years at once.

The fix is to complete and lodge a non-lodgment advice. It tells the ATO you are not required to lodge for that year, and it takes minutes.

Two exceptions, where you do not need to bother:

• You have already told the ATO — by return, non-lodgment advice, form or letter — that you do not need to lodge for all future years.
• You are lodging an Application for a refund of franking credits (NAT 4098), which does the job instead.

That second one is worth knowing because it saves a duplicated step for exactly the people most likely to be in this position.

What pulls you back in later

Not lodging one year does not settle the question permanently. The things that most often bring a retiree back into lodging are worth having in mind:

Selling something. A capital gain from selling shares or an investment property will usually require a return, and it needs a cost base — which for a long-held asset is its own project. Our articles on reconstructing a cost base when the records are gone and on choosing which parcel to sell both bear on this, and both are better read before the sale than after.

Going back to work, even part-time, where tax is withheld.

Starting to receive rent, or income from a trust or a foreign pension.

A change in your offset position, which can happen simply because a threshold moved or a spouse's circumstances changed.

The practical answer is to run the ATO's tool once a year rather than deciding the question permanently. Our annual retirement plan review checklist is a reasonable place to anchor that so it does not depend on remembering.

The one-line version

There is no age at which lodging stops — run the ATO's tool each year rather than assuming; if you do not need to lodge, file a non-lodgment advice so the expectation stops accruing; and if you normally get franking credits back, check that this year's automatic refund actually turned up.

Sources

• ATO — Do you need to lodge a tax return? 2026
• ATO — Lodge a non-lodgment advice
• ATO — Refund of franking credits for individuals
• ATO — How to apply for a refund of franking credits
• ATO — Seniors and pensioners tax offset

This article contains general information only. It does not constitute personal financial or tax advice and does not take into account your individual financial situation, objectives, or needs. Whether you are required to lodge a tax return depends on your individual circumstances, and there are more tests than are described here. The rebate income thresholds quoted are for the 2025-26 income year and are indexed or amended from time to time — confirm your own position using the ATO's "Do I need to lodge a tax return?" tool or with a registered tax agent. The automatic refund of franking credits described applies to eligible individuals during tax time 2026 based on information reported to the ATO by share registries, and does not guarantee that any particular person's refund will be issued without an application. Information is current as at 9 August 2026.

Theodore Karoumbalis is an Authorised Representative (No. 1237098) of iAdvice Technology Pty Ltd, AFSL 526700.