What Does a Tax Return Actually Cost?

There are three ways to lodge an Australian tax return, and they sit at very different price points. The cheapest is not automatically the best value, and the most expensive is not automatically thorough. What matters is how complicated your return is.

Option one: myTax, free

The ATO's own myTax, through myGov, costs nothing. For a straightforward return it is genuinely good: your employer's income, bank interest, health insurance and share dividends are pre-filled, and for many employees the job is mostly checking figures that are already there.

If you have one job, no side income, no investment property, and a handful of standard work deductions, myTax will do the job perfectly well and you should not pay anyone.

Its weakness is that it does not tell you what you have forgotten. It reports what has been declared about you. It cannot know that you drove to a second work site fifty times, or that a third of your phone bill was work calls. Everything a deduction could have been, but was not recorded, is silently absent.

Option two: a registered tax agent

Only a tax agent registered with the Tax Practitioners Board may charge a fee to prepare your return. You can — and should — check anyone's registration on the TPB public register before engaging them. Fees vary widely with complexity and location, so ask for a quote up front rather than assuming.

Two rules make the real cost lower than the sticker price:

• The fee is deductible. What you pay an agent is claimable in the following year's return, under the cost of managing your tax affairs. At a 32% marginal rate, roughly a third of the fee comes back.
• Agent clients get longer to lodge. Registered agents work to their own lodgement programme, often extending well past the 31 October self-lodgement date — provided you are on their books by 31 October.

Option three: software, then lodge yourself

The middle path is to keep good records during the year, then lodge through myTax with everything already itemised. This is where TaxBot sits. Our plans are free to start, then $9.99, $19.99 or $29.99 a month in US dollars, with 50% off if you pay annually.

We are not a tax agent and we do not lodge for you. What we do is make sure that when you or your agent sits down to lodge, nothing has gone missing.

When paying is almost always worth it

Three situations reliably justify a professional:

1. An investment property. Apportioning interest, distinguishing repairs from capital improvements, and running a depreciation schedule are all easy to get wrong in ways that cost real money — in either direction.
2. Business income with structure. Once a trust or company is involved, the questions stop being about deductions and start being about structure, and a good agent earns their fee several times over.
3. Anything you are unsure about. A capital gain, foreign income, crypto disposals, a redundancy payment. The cost of getting these wrong exceeds the cost of asking.

Conversely, if your return is one employer and a few work expenses, paying several hundred dollars for someone to type numbers you already have is poor value.

The cost nobody quotes

Here is the part that rarely appears in a comparison: the largest cost of a tax return is usually the deduction you never claimed.

It does not appear on any invoice. It is not a fee. It is simply money that stays with the ATO because nobody recorded the expense at the time. Neither free software nor a paid agent can recover a receipt that faded in a glovebox, or a work trip nobody wrote down.

That is the argument for keeping records during the year rather than reconstructing them in October — and it applies whichever of the three options you eventually choose. Good records make myTax more accurate, and they make an agent cheaper, because you are no longer paying professional rates for someone to sort a shoebox.

How to decide

Whatever you choose, decide before 31 October — because if the answer turns out to be an agent, you need to be on their client list by that date to get the later deadline.