ReverseTender
What a published Commonwealth contract pays — and an estimate of the margin the company may keep.
Search every contract the Australian Government has published on AusTender since December 2012. See the hourly rate a contractor's or labour-hire notice implies, compare going rates for a role, and see what each department bought and each supplier won. Free, with no login. How the figures are worked out.
Two ways in: your purchase order number, or the questions below. Nothing you type is stored, logged or put in a link.
or
Every field is optional, and the count below updates as you type: stop once it finds yours. Your vendor and department narrow it fastest.
Start with your vendor or your department, or give both your first and last day.
| Notice | How likely | Vendor | Department | Start–end | Value | Why |
|---|
Pick a notice to open it in “A specific contract” with your rate filled in, and estimate the margin your vendor may be keeping. The finder scores every notice on each answer rather than filtering, so one wrong answer — a signing date before your first day, the prime contractor named instead of your vendor, a renamed department — lowers a notice's score rather than removing it. On-call or overtime paid on top makes a notice worth about a quarter more than your rate × hours; answer Yes and the finder allows for it. Departments often leave out the position title, so it only breaks ties. The finder is in beta: the scoring is still being tuned.
Both calculations subtract these from the contract value. They are not figures from the notice. AusTender values include GST.
Default is the ACT general rate from 1 July 2026: 6.75% when Australia-wide wages are over $1.75 million and not over $20 million (ACT Revenue Office). 6.85% to $50 million, 7.35% to $100 million, 7.85% to $150 million, 8.75% above that. Australian Revenue Offices, updated 2 September 2026.
AusTender does not publish where a company is based, its Australia-wide taxable wages, or the payroll-tax rate it pays. Those depend on the state, the wage band, and grouping rules that are not on the notice, so choose the company's state and wage band yourself. A notice cannot tell you the exact percentage. GST is fixed at 10%. Super defaults to 12%, the Commonwealth super guarantee from 1 July 2025; set it to 0 to exclude it. Payroll tax is calculated on base + super. The package figure quoted to a person includes super; the base figure does not.
Clears what you typed and puts margin, payroll tax, and super back to their defaults. It does not change which of the five options you chose.
Look the notice up, type the hourly rate you are paid, then move the margin and payroll tax until the contract matches that rate.
A contract notice ID goes straight to AusTender. An agency reference ID is an exact match against the local cache, which is the only place that field can be searched. Several contracts can share one reference; pick the one you mean.
This contract notice is marked cancelled on AusTender. Its value is not counted in any total or average.
| CN | Supplier | Agency | Value | Start–end | Description |
|---|
Type the rate you are paid.
Opens “A going rate” on notices like this one, around when it started, and marks this contract’s rate on the chart. You can change what it compares with there.
| Step | Dollars | $/hour |
|---|
Agency contains is the agency name, not the reference ID. Put PO-EXAMPLE in Reference ID. The find box under the table only filters rows already listed.
Hours = span days, counting the first and last day, / 365 × 1920. There is no FTE adjustment. Drop below and drop above apply to the per-person ex-GST hourly, after any headcount division. They are not a cut on the raw contract value. A notice is also dropped when the span is under 10 days, or the description is only “Temporary Personnel” or “Labour Hire” with no role. A stated headcount, such as “4 x labour hire”, divides the value. If the notice states no count and the one-person rate is above the upper band, the value is divided by the smallest whole number that brings it to that band. GST, margin, payroll tax, and super come from Assumptions. Dollar figures are rounded to the nearest dollar.
The period is the date AusTender published the notice, not the contract's start or end. A financial year runs 1 July to 30 June, and every preset runs to today. Last 12 months searches the whole cache instead when a reference ID is typed. If the local cache already covers the dates, the scan reads those week files and does not call AusTender. A week file is used whole, so the scan can include a few days outside the dates you typed. A period longer than 366 days is read from the cache: only the days after the cache's last day, at most 31 of them, are fetched. A longer preset the cache cannot serve that way is greyed out, and a longer custom period is refused, not fetched. This does not filter by category code.
Payroll tax is an employer-level tax, not a figure AusTender computes. The state list uses the first rate above each threshold. When set, payroll tax is calculated on base + super.
Ex-GST $/h is the contract value with GST removed, spread over 1,920 hours per contract year, then divided by the people count. It is the implied billable rate. The drop band applies to it. Rate to contractor incl. super starts from that figure and subtracts company margin and payroll tax, then stops before super is taken out: it is the rate to the person, with their super included. Rate to contractor excl. super subtracts super as well, leaving the cash rate. With the defaults, 5% margin, 6.75% payroll tax, and 12% super, it is the lowest of the three.
Value, start date and end date include a later amendment, such as a published extension, when the local amendment index has one. The figure under Value is the current value; “was” is the value as first published. Hours use the amended contract period, not an unused extension. The API does not publish extension-option counts or a max end date, so those are not used.
A day is 8 hours. Only this table is per day: the chart, the breakdown and the Included table stay per hour.
| Rate ($/h) | n | 25th | Median | 75th |
|---|
Typed here and kept here: the rate is not sent to the server, saved, or put in the share link. A day is 8 hours. The rates being compared are each notice’s implied full-time rate, so a part-time contract reads low, and notices the drop band left out are not counted.
Rate to contractor including super, at the assumptions above. Years are contract start years, most recent first; 2013 is the first full year. A starred current-year change compares the same period last year.
| Year | Contracts | 25th | Median | 75th | Change |
|---|
A contract sits in its start year, in Canberra’s date. Years before 2013 are not shown: the cache starts on 26 December 2012. The years run most recent first; the agency and supplier views show their 15 largest groups, ordered by highest median first. The median is the middle included notice, not a weighted average or a pay rate. A year with fewer than 10 notices is not shown; one with 10–19 is shown for context, and its median is indicative. The current year is marked “to date”; its starred change compares contracts starting from 1 January to the scan end with the same period a year earlier, and is not a full-year change. A full-year change is shown only when both years have 20 notices and the period covers both years in full, at today’s margin, payroll-tax and super assumptions; it is not adjusted for inflation. The 25th, median and 75th are rates to the contractor including super.
Value, Start, End and Days include every extension published as an amendment to the notice, so both rate columns and the distribution above are spread over the extended period. Under Value and End, “was” is the figure as first published. Not included: extension options not taken up, an extension signed but not yet published, and an extension published as its own CN, which is listed as a separate notice.
Type part of a name, such as Hays or Boeing, or an ABN. Several ABNs can share one name, and one ABN can carry several names or businesses, so check the names before trusting a total. About 7% of notices have no ABN on the notice; those are grouped by name.
| ABN |
|---|
| Year | Value incl. GST | Contracts |
|---|
| Agency | Value incl. GST | Contracts |
|---|
Each break sums the latest value of each contract once — a contract started in one year but running into the next counts in its start year, and its dollars sit with the agency on the notice. An agency is its ABN, so the names it has gone by are added together. Pick a year here, or its bar in the chart, to see only that year's dollars per agency; pick the bar again for every year. Up to 12 agencies are listed. An agency's name opens it on the department door, showing only its contracts with this supplier.
Values are each contract's total value, including GST where it applies — not what was paid and not annual revenue. A “was” figure is the value as first published before an amendment. Sort by any column heading. Up to 200 contracts, the largest by value, are listed; the totals above count every one.
This is not what was paid, not revenue, and never a payroll-tax rate. The covered span is the local cache, not all-time.
Fills the supplier filter in “A going rate” with this name. Nothing runs until you run the estimate there.
Type part of a name, such as Health or Tax, or an ABN. Leave it empty to list the biggest buyers.
| ABN |
|---|
| Year | Value incl. GST | Contracts |
|---|
| Supplier | Value incl. GST | Contracts |
|---|
Each break sums the latest value of each contract once — a contract started in one year but running into the next counts in its start year, and its dollars sit with the supplier on the notice. A supplier is its ABN, so every spelling of its name is added together. Pick a year here, or its bar in the chart, to see only that year's dollars per supplier; pick the bar again for every year. Up to 25 suppliers are listed. A supplier's name opens it on the supplier door, showing only its contracts with this department.
Values are each contract's total value, including GST where it applies — not what was paid. A “was” figure is the value as first published before an amendment. Sort by any column heading. Up to 200 contracts, the largest by value, are listed; the totals above count every one.
This is not what was paid and never a payroll-tax rate. The covered span is the local cache, not all-time.
Fills the agency filter in “A going rate” with this name. Nothing runs until you run the estimate there.
| Year | Value | Contracts |
|---|
Every contract notice published since December 2012, from this site's copy of AusTender: one row per contract, with its extensions folded in, cancelled notices included and marked, and an hourly rate where the contract is judged one person's.
| CN | Supplier | Department or agency | Description | Value | Start – end | Hourly rate | Published, week to |
|---|
Every word typed must be somewhere in the contract: its CN, agency reference ID, description, supplier or department. A word of three or more letters can sit inside a longer word, so “analys” finds analyst and analysis; a two-letter word, such as IT or HR, must be a word on its own. A whole CN, such as CN4278316, is that contract alone, whatever else is set.
A supplier or department is found the way the other doors find one: by part of a name or an ABN, so every spelling of its name is included. A name that matches nothing says so above the table.
Values are each contract's total value, including GST where it applies — not what was paid. A “was” figure is the value as first published, before an extension or other amendment. A cancelled notice is shown greyed and marked: its value can be wrong, so it is never sorted by value or rate, and it has no hourly rate.
The hourly rate is shown only for a contract judged one person's, worked out as the other doors work it out: the latest value, ex GST, over 1,920 hours a contract year. It is the implied billable rate, before any margin, payroll tax or super. Hover over it, or tap it on a phone, for why the contract was judged one person's.
Published is the week AusTender published the notice in, not the day: notices are read a week at a time. Labour and professional services are the categories the finder treats as labour: temporary personnel, recruitment, computer services, management advisory, project management and legal services. The local copy is refreshed weekly, and AusTender keeps adding notices to a week after it ends, so some from the last few weeks can be missing; AusTender's own search has those.
At most 10,000 matches are counted and paged through; narrow the search to reach the rest. The CSV holds up to the first 2,000 matches, in the order shown.
Fills “A going rate” with these words, supplier and department. Nothing runs until you run the estimate there.