Finally: The New Super Reporting Rules That Expose Your Fund’s Real Costs

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Evidence-backed. Sourced from APRA’s October 2024 and January 2025 fund-level expenditure releases, APRA’s Superannuation Data Transformation Phase 1 FAQ, ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 97, and Financial News Wire and KHQ commentary on APRA’s enforcement signals. General information only — not financial advice. Fee and expense data reflects APRA’s published figures for FY 2022–23 and FY 2023–24; always cross-check with your fund’s current PDS and annual statement. Last updated: June 2026.

⚡ Key Takeaways

  • In October 2024, APRA published its inaugural fund-level expenditure tables for FY 2022–23 — the first time members can see, fund by fund, how much goes to administration, marketing, advertising, sponsorship, trustee board costs and payments to industrial bodies and related parties. This data is now updated annually. [9][10]
  • Total industry expenditure across all super funds was $12.7 billion in FY 2023–24 — up 15% from FY 2022–23 — broken down by fund in APRA’s January 2025 update to its Annual Fund-Level Superannuation Statistics. [10][4]
  • The underlying reporting standard, SRS 706.0 Fees and Costs (part of APRA’s Superannuation Data Transformation Phase 1), came into force in March 2023 and requires funds to report detailed fee and cost data across both MySuper and choice products — far beyond what was visible in a typical admin fee line on a member statement. [1][15]
  • APRA has explicitly flagged that it will use the new granular expense data to identify trustees with outlying expenditure and that enforcement powers may be appropriate where spending is not clearly in members’ best financial interests. For the first time, regulators have the data to act — and funds know it. [8][9]
  • ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 97 (RG 97) continues to govern what must be disclosed in PDSs and periodic statements — including transactional costs (stamp duty, brokerage, buy/sell spreads) — but acknowledges persistent blind spots. Some borrowing costs and implicit transaction costs are still not separately itemised, meaning total disclosed fees remain a floor, not a ceiling, on the full economic drag on your balance. [13][7]

Finally: The New Super Reporting Rules That Expose Your Fund’s Real Costs

By The Fine Print editorial team  |  Last updated: June 2026  |  13 min read  |  ⚠️ Not financial advice

For years, Australians paid their super fund an “admin fee” with no idea what it actually funded. Was it investment operations? Member services? Or was a slice going to marketing campaigns, stadium naming rights, union payments and related-party deals? The honest answer was: you couldn’t tell, because funds weren’t required to tell you. That changed in October 2024. APRA’s inaugural fund-level expenditure tables showed, for the first time, what each fund actually spent member money on — broken down into investment management, administration, advice, member services, marketing, trustee board costs, corporate overheads, advertising, sponsorship, and payments to industrial bodies. The total across the industry was $12.7 billion in FY 2023–24, up 15% in a single year. Some of those numbers are defensible. Some are confronting. All of them are now public. This guide explains what changed, what the data means for you, and the three steps to find out whether your fund is spending your retirement savings efficiently or whether a chunk of it is going somewhere you’d rather it wasn’t.

📋 What’s in This Guide

What Changed in 2024 — The Reporting Revolution

The regulatory timeline:

  • March 2023: APRA finalises Reporting Standard SRS 706.0 Fees and Costs as part of the Superannuation Data Transformation Phase 1 (Breadth). Funds must now report detailed fee and cost data across both MySuper and choice products — far more granular than previous annual reporting. [1][15]
  • 26 March 2024: APRA announces it will publish new fund-level expense data from August 2024, including named recipients of payments to industrial bodies and related parties for promotion, marketing, sponsorship and political donations — for the first time, this data will be publicly available. [11]
  • 29 October 2024: APRA releases its inaugural fund-level expenditure tables for FY 2022–23, covering investment-related expenses plus administration and “other expenditure” including advertising, sponsorship and payments to industrial bodies. [9][12]
  • 29 January 2025: APRA expands coverage — its Annual Fund-Level Superannuation Statistics for FY 2023–24 now embed expenditure and insurance data as standard. Total industry expenditure: $12.7 billion in 2023–24, up 15% from 2022–23. [10][4]
  • Annual from 2025 onwards: Fund-level expenditure and insurance tables are now published annually alongside the Annual Super Bulletin, Annual MySuper Statistics and Annual Fund-Level Statistics — a permanent feature of the reporting landscape. [4][5]

What the expenditure tables actually show:

  • For each fund: total expenses as a percentage of assets, broken down by investment management, administration, advice, member services, marketing, trustee board costs, corporate overheads. [9][10]
  • Named recipients for advertising, sponsorship and payments to industrial bodies and related parties — so you can see if your fund’s admin fee includes payments to sporting teams, union bodies, employer associations, or related-party service providers. [9][11]
  • The data enables direct peer comparison: funds of similar size can be benchmarked against each other on each expense category, for the first time. [8][9]

Four Ways the Old System Cost Members Money

1. “Admin fees” hid marketing, sponsorships and related-party deals — for decades

Before October 2024, the typical super member saw a single “administration fee” on their statement. It might have been expressed as a flat dollar amount per year plus a percentage of their balance. What it did not show was the breakdown of what that fee funded. Some of it went to genuine investment operations: custodianship, unit pricing, processing contributions, managing member accounts. Some of it went to member services: call centres, financial education, advice access. And some of it went elsewhere: marketing to attract new members, stadium naming rights, sports sponsorships, payments to union bodies or employer associations who “promote” the fund, and payments to related-party service providers at rates that may not have been market-tested. None of this was visible to members. APRA’s 2024 expenditure tables change that. For the first time, you can look at your fund’s spending line by line and ask: is this what I expected when I agreed to pay this fee? Is a fund that spends a material proportion of my admin fee on brand advertising and sporting partnerships providing me with better retirement outcomes, or is it competing for new members using my existing retirement savings as the marketing budget? [9][10][11]

2. Choice and platform products had higher, more opaque fee structures

APRA has long flagged that choice and platform super products tend to have higher and more complex fee structures than MySuper defaults. The issue is layered: platform products often charge an administration fee at the platform level, a management expense ratio at the underlying investment option level, an advice fee if a planner is attached, and transactional costs that come off returns without appearing on the statement as a line item. SRS 706.0 requires trustees to report different fee and cost arrangements — including member-level fee structures in platform menus — and member counts for each arrangement, giving APRA much more visibility into who pays what. For members, this means products that look cheap in headline admin and investment fees but load up on indirect or transaction costs are more likely to appear in APRA’s data at their true all-in cost. But “more likely to appear” is not the same as “guaranteed to appear” — some implicit costs (borrowing costs in geared strategies, property operating expenses) remain outside the required disclosure. The practical improvement is real, but the gap between disclosed fees and true economic drag is not yet zero. [1][6][13]

3. Inconsistent disclosure made meaningful comparisons almost impossible

ASIC’s review of fee disclosure (including Report REP 398 and subsequent RG 97 updates) found that inconsistent application of fee disclosure rules meant members couldn’t reliably compare the true cost of different products. Two funds with identical actual costs could produce different disclosed fee figures depending on how they structured and classified their expenses. This is not a hypothetical: it affected how members used the ATO’s YourSuper comparison tool and how advisers recommended products. A fund that classified more costs as “investment related” (where they reduce the reported return rather than appearing as a fee) looked cheaper than one that disclosed the same costs as an explicit administration charge. The 2023–24 reporting reforms reduce, but don’t eliminate, this problem. SRS 706.0’s standardised categories and the requirement to name specific recipients of key payments are genuine improvements. What remains is the acknowledged gap: some costs are still permitted to be netted against investment returns rather than itemised, and the comparison problem persists for anyone relying solely on the fee figure on their statement. [6][7][13]

4. Without detailed data, APRA couldn’t meaningfully supervise discretionary spending

Perhaps the most significant implication of APRA’s explicit statement in 2024 — that it will use the new expense data to “identify trustees with outlying expenditure” and that enforcement powers may be appropriate where spending is not clearly in members’ best financial interests — is what it implies about the period before the data existed. If APRA is saying the new data is necessary to seriously scrutinise expenses, the unavoidable conclusion is that for the decade prior to 2024, trustees had significant scope to over-spend on discretionary categories (marketing, sponsorships, related-party deals, trustee remuneration) without meaningful regulatory oversight. The cost of that opacity was borne entirely by members in the form of lower net returns and higher fees, compounding over years of accumulation. The new reporting doesn’t reverse past over-spending. But it creates the evidentiary base for APRA to identify ongoing outliers and for future enforcement or class actions against trustees who continue to spend member money in ways that can’t be justified by member outcomes. [8][9][11]

The Regulatory Context: APRA, ASIC and Enforcement Signals

  • APRA’s enforcement signal (August–October 2024): APRA has stated explicitly that the new expense data will be used to identify trustees with outlying expenditure, and that enforcement powers could be used where spending is not demonstrably in members’ best financial interests. This is the strongest regulatory signal yet that APRA will use the data as an enforcement tool, not just a transparency measure. [8][9]
  • Phase 2 (Depth) of the Data Transformation: The FSC and other industry bodies submitted significant pushback on the complexity of Phase 2, which would require even more granular reporting including indirect costs and portfolio-level data. APRA has held the line that granularity is necessary to properly assess member outcomes. The implication: the current tables are the floor, not the ceiling, of what will eventually be required. [1][6]
  • ASIC RG 97 (ongoing): The fee and cost disclosure framework for PDSs and periodic statements continues to be refined. ASIC has acknowledged that the 2023 updates improved consistency but that borrowing costs, some property operating expenses and implicit transaction costs still aren’t fully captured. ASIC’s own 2025 review of stamp duty disclosure rules reflects this ongoing tension between transparency and the complexity of multi-asset portfolios. [13][16]
  • ASIC 2025 enforcement priorities: ASIC’s 2025 priorities include “misconduct and exploitation in respect of superannuation savings” — complementing APRA’s expenditure focus and signalling that trustees who over-spend on marketing or related-party deals while delivering poor outcomes face regulatory pressure from two directions simultaneously. [14]

✅ Your Three-Step Action Plan

Action 1: Look up your fund’s actual spending profile — not just the headline fee

Go to apra.gov.au and search for “Annual fund-level superannuation statistics” — the expenditure supplementary tables are published there annually (most recently January 2025 for FY 2023–24 data). Download the Excel file and find your fund name. Look at four things: total expenses as a percentage of assets (your expense ratio proxy); spending on marketing, advertising and sponsorship as a percentage of total admin expenditure; any named recipients of industrial body payments or related-party promotion/sponsorship deals; and how your fund’s total spending profile compares to two or three similar-sized funds. If your fund’s marketing and “other” spend is materially higher than peers of a similar size and member base, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s wrong — some marketing spend genuinely supports member growth and reduces per-member fixed costs. But it gives you a question to ask: is the money being spent on things that actually improve my retirement outcome, or is my fund using my savings to chase market share? You can also pull APRA’s Annual MySuper Statistics to get your product’s admin and investment fees in the standardised per-product format, which enables direct comparison with competing MySuper products. [9][10][4][5]

Action 2: Compare fees and 5–10 year net outcomes — and switch if your fund is an outlier

Pull your fund’s expenditure data alongside its investment performance data — both are available from APRA’s Annual MySuper Statistics and Annual Fund-Level Statistics. The question isn’t just “how much does my fund spend?” but “does the spending produce better outcomes for me?” A fund that spends more but delivers materially higher net returns might be justifiable. A fund that spends more and delivers average or below-average net returns is not. Use the ATO’s YourSuper comparison tool to compare your product’s fees and 5-to-7-year net returns against the top-quartile MySuper products in the same risk category. Also check your PDS for any additional transactional or operational costs disclosed under ASIC RG 97 — buy/sell spreads, brokerage, stamp duty — that don’t appear in the APRA expenditure tables. If your fund consistently shows higher total costs and lower net returns than peers, and especially if the expenditure data shows disproportionate discretionary spending, that combination is a strong signal to switch. Before switching, check your insurance terms — cover may change when you transfer funds. [5][13][4]

Action 3: Build a yearly expense check into your super calendar

APRA publishes its Annual Superannuation Bulletin, Annual Fund-Level Statistics and fund-level expenditure tables in the second half of the calendar year, typically around December–January. Set a recurring calendar reminder for each January: “Annual super expense check.” The check covers four points: has your fund’s total expense ratio crept up relative to the previous year and to peers; has the breakdown of discretionary spending (marketing, advertising, sponsorship, related-party payments) changed significantly; how does your fund’s net return after all costs compare to top-quartile alternatives over 5 and 10 years; and has your fund received any APRA or ASIC supervisory communications that are public (APRA enforcement media releases, ASIC infringement notices). For most members in a well-run, low-cost fund, this check takes 20 minutes and confirms the status quo is fine. For members in a higher-cost fund with a growing discretionary spend line, the annual check is the mechanism that catches fee creep before it compounds through another year. The data is free, public and now detailed enough to make the comparison meaningful. Using it is the only way to hold your fund accountable through informed choice rather than regulatory enforcement. [9][10][4][8]

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

What is APRA’s fund-level expenditure data and where do I find it?

Annual tables showing each fund’s spending on investment management, administration, marketing, advertising, sponsorship and industrial body/related party payments. Inaugural FY 2022–23 tables: October 2024. FY 2023–24: January 2025. Search “Annual fund-level superannuation statistics” on apra.gov.au to download the Excel file. [9][10]

What is APRA’s Reporting Standard SRS 706.0?

SRS 706.0 Fees and Costs (March 2023) is the reporting standard requiring trustees to disclose detailed fee and cost data across MySuper and choice products in standardised categories. It underpins the public expenditure tables APRA now publishes annually. [1][15]

What does ASIC RG 97 require funds to disclose?

Fees and costs in PDSs and periodic statements in a consistent format — including transactional costs (stamp duty, brokerage, buy/sell spreads). But ASIC acknowledges blind spots: borrowing costs and some property operating expenses can still be netted against returns rather than itemised. [13][7]

How much did the super industry spend in total in FY 2023–24?

$12.7 billion — up 15% from FY 2022–23 — across all APRA-regulated multi-member funds. Broken down by fund in the supplementary expenditure tables (January 2025 release). [10][4]

Can APRA enforce against funds based on the new expense data?

Yes — APRA has explicitly stated it will use the data to identify outlying expenditure and that enforcement powers are available where spending isn’t clearly in members’ best financial interests. ASIC’s 2025 enforcement priorities on super misconduct add a second layer of pressure. [8][9][14]

⚖️ The Fine Print Verdict

The 2024 fund-level expenditure release is one of the most significant transparency improvements in the history of the Australian super system. For the first time, every member can look up exactly how their fund spends the money deducted from their retirement savings — not just the headline investment fee, but the marketing budget, the sponsorship spend and the payments to related parties. Total industry expenditure was $12.7 billion in FY 2023–24, and the breakdown by fund shows that some are spending more on discretionary categories than others of a similar size. Whether that extra spending is justified by better outcomes is a question members can now ask — and answer — for the first time. APRA’s enforcement signal is clear: trustees who can’t justify their expense profile against member outcomes are on notice. ASIC’s 2025 enforcement priorities on super misconduct add pressure from a second regulator. The data is free, it’s public, and it updates annually. What it cannot do is move your money for you if the numbers are bad. That part is still yours to do.

👉 Go to apra.gov.au and search “Annual fund-level superannuation statistics.” Download the expenditure tables and find your fund. If the marketing and “other” spend looks high relative to peers — compare net returns and consider switching.

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📚 Sources & References

  1. APRA, “Frequently asked questions — superannuation data transformation,” apra.gov.au
  2. Investment Magazine, “APRA releases FY23 expense data for super funds,” investmentmagazine.com.au (October 2024)
  3. KHQ, “Super alert — 1 November 2024,” khq.com.au
  4. APRA, “Annual Superannuation Bulletin,” apra.gov.au
  5. APRA, “Annual MySuper statistics,” apra.gov.au
  6. FSC, “Submission — Superannuation Data Transformation Phase 2 (Depth),” fsc.org.au (2024)
  7. Treasury, FOI 3997–4004, treasury.gov.au (September 2025)
  8. Financial News Wire, “APRA flags use of enforcement powers on super expenditures,” financialnewswire.com.au
  9. APRA, “APRA increases transparency of super fund expenses,” apra.gov.au (October 2024)
  10. APRA, “APRA increases transparency — enhancements to annual superannuation statistics,” apra.gov.au (January 2025)
  11. APRA, “APRA to publish super fund expense data,” apra.gov.au (March 2024)
  12. APRA, “Annual fund-level superannuation statistics — expenditure (Excel),” apra.gov.au (October 2024)
  13. ASIC, “RG 97 — Disclosing fees and costs in PDSs and periodic statements,” asic.gov.au
  14. Bell Rock Advisory, “ASIC enforcement priorities 2025,” bellrockadvisory.com
  15. APRA, “Phase 1 — Breadth,” apra.gov.au
  16. GrowSMSF, “ASIC fees 2025,” growsmsf.com.au

This article is general information only and does not constitute financial advice. Expense ratios and performance comparisons depend on individual fund, product, balance and investment horizon. Before switching super funds or products, check insurance terms and consult a licensed financial adviser. Information is current as at June 2026, based on APRA’s publicly released Annual Fund-Level Superannuation Statistics and expenditure supplementary tables. The Fine Print 🇦🇺 is not affiliated with APRA, ASIC or any fund mentioned in this article.

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