Information about income apportionment

What income apportionment is

It’s a practice we used to evenly divide, or apportion, a customer’s employment income across two or more Centrelink fortnightly reporting periods.

We used this method to work out how much income support you were entitled to in each fortnight.

We only needed to divide your income evenly if all of the following applied:

• Your employer pay period didn’t line up with your fortnightly Centrelink reporting period.
• Your payslip or income report showed your total earnings but did not show which days you worked or how much you earned in each Centrelink fortnight.
• We had no other information available.

Your payment rate was still based on the total income you reported across those fortnights.

However, your eligibility or payment rate may have been impacted if the actual days you worked in those fortnights were not evenly spread out.

How we assess employment income

We don’t use income apportionment for debts related to income earned after 7 December 2020.

This is because on 7 December 2020, legislation was introduced to make income reporting easier.

Prior to 7 December 2020, you had to report your gross earnings based on the number of hours you worked during each Centrelink fortnightly reporting period.

Reporting could be complex if your earnings period didn’t align with your Centrelink reporting period. Since 7 December 2020, income only needs to be reported as it appears on your payslip for the same Centrelink fortnight you got paid.

This means we don’t need to divide income across fortnights to work out your payment rate.

What we’re doing to resolve income apportionment

The government is taking steps to address the historic use of income apportionment.

The steps are:

• validating the use of income apportionment to calculate entitlements
• establishing the Income Apportionment Resolution Scheme with a payment of up to $600 to go to people with eligible debts impacted by income apportionment for debt periods between September 2003 and December 2020.

We have more information about the Income Apportionment Resolution Scheme.

If you’d like to talk to us about a matter related to income apportionment, call us on our Income apportionment line.

How this is different to Robodebt

Income apportionment is not Robodebt.

For income apportionment we divided a customer’s employment income across two or more Centrelink reporting periods. We did this to work out how their actual earnings affected their fortnightly Centrelink payment.

We took action on income apportionment when concerns were raised.

Robodebts are debts that were raised between July 2015 and November 2019 under the Income Compliance Program. They were raised using averaged Australian Taxation Office (ATO) income information. We no longer use income averaging to raise debts.

Read more information about Robodebt.