The 2025-26 financial year closed on 30 June. If your startup did R&D in that year, you have until 30 April 2027 to register those activities with the Department of Industry, Science and Resources.
That deadline is seven months away, so it’s easy to park it. The department’s own processing targets give you a good reason not to.
How the R&D Tax Incentive registration works
The R&D Tax Incentive is run by two agencies. The Department of Industry, Science and Resources (through AusIndustry) decides whether your activities are registered as R&D. The ATO handles the money.
So there are two separate steps, in this order:
- Register your R&D activities with the department through the R&DTI customer portal.
- Claim the offset in your company tax return, using the R&D Tax Incentive schedule.
If your company’s aggregated turnover is under $20 million, the offset is refundable. That means you can get up to 43.5% of eligible R&D spend back as cash, even if you’re pre-revenue or running at a loss.
The refund only arrives after both steps are done. Register late and you lodge late, which pushes your refund out with it.
The deadline: 10 months after your income year ends
You must register within 10 months of the end of your company’s income year. For a standard 30 June year end, that’s 30 April 2027 for the 2025-26 year.
Treat that date as fixed. The department can grant an extension of time, but you have to request it and it isn’t guaranteed. Planning your cash flow around getting one is a gamble.
If your company uses a substituted accounting period, count 10 months from the end of that period instead.
Why registering early gets you processed faster
The department publishes its processing targets. It aims to process 95% of applications within:
- 20 business days for applications submitted within 6 months after the end of the income period
- 40 business days for first-time applicants
- 80 business days for applications submitted from 6 to 10 months after the end of the income period
For a 30 June year end, the 6-month mark is 31 December 2026.
Apply in October or November and the target is 20 business days, roughly four weeks. Apply in March or April and the target is 80 business days, which is closer to four months.
If you’re a first-time applicant, the 40 business day target applies. That’s still half the late-season target.
The department can miss these targets. It says timing can stretch if your application has limited detail, describes an activity that may be excluded, or raises other eligibility concerns. A well-prepared application in November is still your best shot at a fast result.
What the delay costs a startup
Picture a software startup with $300,000 of eligible R&D spend in 2025-26 and turnover well under $20 million. At 43.5%, the offset is $130,500.
Registered in November, that company could be lodging its tax return before Christmas. Registered in late April, it’s waiting on the department well into winter before the ATO even sees the claim.
For a startup burning cash each month, a few months’ difference in a six-figure refund can decide whether you extend runway, make a hire, or raise on worse terms.
If you need the money before the ATO pays, R&D lenders will advance part of the refund. Many will want to see the registration under way, so registering early can help there too.
What you need before you open the portal
The department’s pre-application checklist covers the basics. For a startup, it comes down to five things.
Portal access
You need a personal Digital ID (myID), and the principal authority for your company needs to have linked it to the business through the ATO’s Relationship Authorisation Manager (RAM). If you’re using an R&D consultant or tax agent, you authorise them to act for you.
Sort this out first. Login and authorisation issues can take days to fix, and April is the worst time to find that out.
Confirm you’re an eligible R&D entity
The claimant has to be a company: incorporated in Australia, or a foreign company that is an Australian tax resident, or that is resident in a country with a double tax agreement with Australia and operates here through a permanent establishment. Sole traders, partnerships and most trusts can’t claim.
Check your spend clears $20,000
You generally need at least $20,000 of eligible R&D expenditure in the year. The exceptions are if you used a registered research service provider or contributed to the Cooperative Research Centres Program.
Check for overseas work
Spend on R&D done outside Australia needs an overseas finding before you can claim it. If your developers are offshore, that spend usually won’t count unless you have one. An overseas finding generally has to be applied for before the end of the income year the overseas work starts, so for 2025-26 that window has usually closed. Your Australian costs, such as salaries paid to founders and staff, local contractors and some software, may still add up to a claim.
Get your records together
You sign a declaration that you kept records while the R&D happened and can produce them if asked. For startups, records usually means GitHub commits, Jira or Linear tickets, design docs, test results, Slack threads, Notion pages and meeting notes.
Keep records that show how staff time split between R&D and other work, and how the R&D progressed. Formal timesheets help, but they aren’t mandatory.
What the application asks you to describe
The application is where most of the work sits. For each core R&D activity, you describe:
The technical uncertainty. What didn’t you know at the start, and why couldn’t a competent professional in your field work it out from existing knowledge?
The hypothesis. What did you think might work?
The experiment. What did you build or test to find out?
The results and conclusions. What happened, and what did you learn?
The new knowledge. What do you know now that you didn’t before?
You also describe supporting R&D activities. These are activities directly related to a core activity, such as building test environments or collecting data specifically for an experiment.
Keep the two separate. The department’s guidance says core and supporting activities have different requirements and shouldn’t be grouped together.
You can group several pieces of work into one core activity if they all address the same technical uncertainty. The department gives the example of repeated load and stress tests on a software architecture to find out if it can scale. Work that tackles different uncertainties should be registered as separate activities.
The application also asks for your estimated expenditure against each activity, so your numbers need to be in reasonable shape before you submit.
Common reasons applications stall
A late start is the obvious one. A few others come up often.
Vague descriptions. “We built an AI platform” tells the department nothing. It needs to see the specific technical problem, what you tried, and what failed.
Routine work written up as R&D. Standard integrations, bug fixes, cosmetic UI changes and market research don’t qualify on their own. Including them weakens the whole application.
Mixed-up activities. Grouping unrelated work, or mixing core and supporting activities, makes it harder for the department to register what you did.
Missing records. If you can’t show the work happened, you can’t back up the claim if you’re reviewed later.
Registration doesn’t lock in your claim
Once the department confirms your registration, it’s tempting to treat the claim as done. The R&D Tax Incentive is a self-assessment program. The department says confirmation of registration does not mean your activities are eligible. Both the department and the ATO can review your claim later.
This is another reason to start early. When you’re not rushing in April, you have time to write the application properly and check the numbers.
What happens after you register
The department sends a registration number once it has processed your application. Your accountant or tax agent needs that number, because the R&D Tax Incentive schedule asks for it. The schedule then goes in with your company tax return.
If your accountant is waiting on the registration before finalising the return, a late registration delays the whole company tax return.
Tell your accountant early that you’re claiming. Agree who is doing the registration, who is preparing the R&D expenditure numbers, and when each piece is due. A short email in October saves a scramble in April.
What’s changing, and what isn’t
The 2026-27 Federal Budget announced changes to the R&D Tax Incentive from 1 July 2028. They include a higher core rate, changes to the refundable threshold and minimum spend, removing supporting activities, and limiting refundability to companies under 10 years old.
None of that is law yet, and none of it touches your 2025-26 claim. For the year that just ended, the current rules apply: the refundable offset of up to 43.5% for companies with aggregated turnover under $20 million, the $20,000 minimum spend, and the 30 April 2027 registration deadline.
A simple timeline for a 30 June year end
September to October: confirm eligibility, pull together records, get portal access sorted.
October to November: write up your core and supporting activities and estimate expenditure per activity.
By 31 December: submit the registration so you fall inside the 20 business day processing target (or 40 if you’re a first-time applicant).
After registration: your accountant lodges the company tax return with the R&D Tax Incentive schedule and the ATO processes the refund.
Get your eligibility checked now
If you’re not sure whether your 2025-26 work counts, a 15-minute call will give you a clear answer. On our success-fee engagements, if your claim doesn’t come through, you don’t pay.
Book a quick eligibility chat at granton.io/meet.
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