Family Tax Benefit Just Went Up: What the July 2026 Indexation Increase Means for Your Payment

If you've had a Family Tax Benefit payment land in your bank account since 1 July and thought "that looks about the same as last time," it's worth stopping to actually check. Family Tax Benefit gets indexed every year on 1 July, which means the rates go up in line with the cost of living, but the increase is easy to miss if you're not looking closely at the numbers. And after the mess Services Australia found itself in with underpaid families earlier this year, this is exactly the year to stop assuming the system has done its job properly and start checking for yourself.

Here's what actually changed, what the new rates are, and how to check your own MyGov payment against them in about five minutes.

What actually changed on 1 July

Family Tax Benefit (FTB) Part A and Part B are indexed annually against the Consumer Price Index. It's an automatic process, Services Australia doesn't send you a letter explaining exactly what your new fortnightly rate should be, it just adjusts the payment in the system and expects it to flow through correctly. Most years that happens quietly and nobody notices.

This year, the indexation increase is a bit bigger than usual because cost of living pressures (rent, groceries at Woolies and Coles, insurance, school fees) have kept pushing inflation figures up. The increase works out to roughly 3.6 to 3.7 percent across most FTB rates and thresholds, which sounds small until you see it in actual dollars per fortnight.

The income thresholds that determine how much FTB you're entitled to have also moved. If your family income sits near one of the cutoff points, this matters just as much as the rate increase itself, because a shift in the threshold can change how much you're entitled to even if your income hasn't changed at all.

The new Family Tax Benefit Part A rates

FTB Part A is paid per child, and the amount depends on the child's age and your family's income. Here's how the fortnightly maximum rates moved from the 2025-26 year to the new 2026-27 rates:

• Child under 13: up from $227.36 to $235.78 a fortnight (an extra $8.42 per child)
• Child aged 13 to 19 (secondary student): up from $295.82 to $306.85 a fortnight (an extra $11.03 per child)
• Base rate (the lower rate paid to higher income families who don't qualify for the maximum): up from $73.00 to $75.72 a fortnight

There's also the FTB Part A supplement, which is paid as a lump sum after Services Australia balances your family's payments at the end of the financial year, once your actual income is confirmed. That's gone up from $897.05 to roughly $920.90 per child for the 2026-27 year.

So if you've got two kids, say an eight year old and a fourteen year old, and you're on the maximum rate, your fortnightly Part A payment should have moved from $523.18 combined to $542.63 combined. That's an extra $19.45 a fortnight, or just over $505 across the full year. Not life changing, but it's real money, and it should be showing up.

The new Family Tax Benefit Part B rates

Part B is the payment for single income families or families where one parent earns significantly less, and it's based on the age of your youngest child. The new fortnightly maximum rates are:

• Youngest child under 5: up from $193.34 to $200.53 a fortnight
• Youngest child aged 5 to 18: up from $134.96 to $140.02 a fortnight

The Part B supplement (also paid as an end of year lump sum) has increased from $459.05 to around $475.85 per family.

Income thresholds shifted too. The secondary earner income free area for Part B, meaning how much the lower earning parent can bring in before the payment starts reducing, has moved from $6,935 to around $7,200 for the year. If you went back to a couple of shifts at your local Coles or picked up extra hours over the school holidays, this is the figure that determines whether that extra income actually cost you part of your payment.

Why this matters more this year

Normally I'd say check your payment once a year and move on. But this year follows a genuinely rough patch for Services Australia, where an internal system error meant a large number of families on FTB and other family payments were quietly underpaid for months before anyone noticed. Some mums only found out when they rang up about something unrelated and were told there'd been a "correction" to their file.

The frustrating part isn't that mistakes happen. It's that nobody tells you. You find out by accident, months after the money should have already been in your account.

That's the reality a lot of families are sitting with right now. The system is complex, it relies on automated indexation running correctly across millions of individual payment profiles, and when something goes wrong, it doesn't send you a text message to flag it. It just quietly pays you the wrong amount until you notice, or until an audit years down the track catches it and either owes you a lump sum or asks for money back.

Given that history, treating the July indexation as a "set and forget" update this year isn't a great idea. A five minute check now could save you from either missing out on money you're entitled to, or building up a debt you'll be asked to repay later.

How to check your MyGov payment is right

You don't need to call Centrelink to do this (though you can, more on that below). Here's the quickest way to check it yourself:

• Log into MyGov and go to your linked Centrelink account.
• Go to Payment and Claims, then Manage Payment, and select Family Tax Benefit. This will show you your current fortnightly rate.
• Work out your rough entitlement using the rates above. Count each child's age bracket for Part A, add the base or maximum rate depending on your family income, then add Part B if you qualify based on your youngest child's age.
• Use the Services Australia payment and service finder (search "Family Tax Benefit calculator" on the Services Australia website) and plug in your actual family income estimate for 2026-27. This gives you a proper estimate rather than a rough guess, especially if your income sits somewhere in the middle rather than clearly under or over a threshold.
• Compare the two figures. If what's landing in your account doesn't roughly match what the calculator says you should be getting, that's your sign to dig further.

A practical example: if you're a single income family with two kids, one aged 4 and one aged 9, and your partner's income is around $85,000, you'd be looking at the Part A maximum rate for both kids (because you're under the higher income cutoff), plus the Part B maximum rate based on your youngest being under 5. That's $235.78 + $235.78 + $200.53, which comes to $672.09 a fortnight before any other adjustments. If your MyGov account is showing something noticeably lower than that, like $610 or $590, it's worth querying.

What to do if the numbers don't match

If your payment doesn't line up with what you've calculated, don't panic and don't assume you've done the maths wrong either. Here's the order of steps I'd take:

• Recheck your income estimate on file. A lot of underpayments happen because the income estimate Services Australia is using is out of date, especially if you or your partner had a pay rise, changed jobs, or picked up extra shifts this year. Go into MyGov and update your family income estimate if it's changed.
• Check the ages of your kids are recorded correctly. This sounds obvious, but if a child turned 13 recently and the system hasn't updated their rate bracket, that alone can explain a shortfall.
• Call Services Australia on 136 150 if the gap is still unexplained. Ask specifically, "can you confirm my new FTB Part A and Part B rates from 1 July 2026 and how they were calculated." Being specific gets you a much clearer answer than a general "is my payment right" question.
• Ask for it in writing. If they make an adjustment, ask for a written summary sent to your MyGov inbox so you've got a record of what changed and why.

Given everything that's come out about the underpayment issue, staff are used to these calls right now. You're not being difficult by asking, you're doing exactly what a lot of families should have been doing for years.

The bottom line

The July indexation increase is good news, more money for basically every family receiving FTB, at a time when grocery runs and school costs aren't getting any cheaper. But good news only counts if it actually reaches your account correctly. Take the ten minutes this week to log into MyGov, run your numbers against the new rates above, and make sure Centrelink has actually applied them properly to your family. If everything lines up, great, you've lost nothing but a few minutes. If it doesn't, you've just caught something worth thousands of dollars over a year, and that's worth a phone call.