ASIC annual review fees, late fees and how to never pay a penalty

Nobody starts a company for the paperwork, and the annual review is the purest example of paperwork: a fee, a form you usually do not need to change, and a resolution most directors have never heard of. It is also one of the few obligations where doing nothing has an automatic price, and where the price rises on a schedule.

Here is the whole thing, current for 2026-27.

The fees, from 1 July 2026

ASIC indexes its fees each year on 1 July. For 2026-27:

All of it is GST-free. That is worth knowing when you check an invoice from whoever handles your ASIC work: the government charge should appear at cost and without GST, separate from their fee.

The special-purpose rate deserves a moment. A company whose constitution restricts it to acting as trustee of a superannuation fund pays $70 rather than $342. The saving is small in isolation and permanent in aggregate — and we regularly meet SMSF trustee companies paying the full rate because their constitution never contained the restriction. That is worth checking once.

What the annual review actually requires

The fee is the visible part. Three things happen each year, and only one of them is a payment.

The annual statement arrives. ASIC issues it just after your review date — normally your registration anniversary — showing the company details it holds: directors, secretary, shareholders, registered office, principal place of business.

You check it, and correct it if it is wrong. Company details must be current, and changes are lodged on a Form 484. Some changes carry their own deadlines, and the late-lodgement fees above apply per document, so a forgotten address change and a forgotten payment are two penalties, not one.

The directors pass a solvency resolution. Within two months of the review date, directors must resolve whether the company can pay its debts as they fall due. If the answer is yes, you keep the resolution with the company records and lodge nothing. If it is no, ASIC must be told. This is the step almost nobody outside a professional office knows about, and it is the one with the sharpest teeth: directors who let an insolvent company keep trading carry personal exposure that has nothing to do with a $342 fee.

Payment itself is due within two months of the review date. Not the invoice date, not the date you found the email.

How the penalties escalate

Miss the deadline by a day and it is $102. Miss it by more than a month and it is $428. There is no proportionality and, in the ordinary course, no waiver — ASIC’s position is that the dates are published and the invoice was sent.

Keep ignoring it and the path continues: follow-up notices, then a proposal to deregister, then deregistration. A deregistered company ceases to exist. Its assets — including bank balances, and including property — vest in ASIC. They can be recovered by applying for reinstatement, which involves fees, evidence and time measured in months. We have seen this happen to dormant companies whose owners assumed that dormant meant finished. It does not; a company you no longer need should be deregistered deliberately, which is cheap, rather than abandoned, which is not.

The boring way to never pay a penalty

Two options, and both work.

Prepay. ASIC allows annual review fees to be paid up to ten years in advance at a discount. For an SMSF trustee company or a long-term holding company, this is the closest thing to a free lunch in company administration: one payment, a small saving, and a decade with no deadline to miss.

Hand it to a registered agent. Our ASIC registered-agent service is $150/yr a year on top of ASIC’s own fee. We receive the annual statement directly, check the details against what we know of your group, prepare the solvency resolution for signature, lodge any Form 484 changes, and diarise the payment. The economics are not subtle: two late payments cost more than the service does.

If you are setting up rather than maintaining, our company registration service is $1,090 plus ASIC’s $636 registration fee — with the constitution written for the job, which is where the special-purpose question gets settled correctly the first time.

Fees are current for 2026-27 and ASIC indexes them each 1 July; we confirm the figure on your invoice against ASIC’s published schedule rather than from memory.

Questions we get about this

General information only — it doesn’t consider your circumstances and isn’t financial product advice. Get advice on your own position before acting; that’s literally what we’re for.