In simple terms, it shows you how much additional voluntary contribution your fund needs each year to make a specific commercial property work under standard SMSF lending rules. The result is colour-coded against your annual contribution caps, so you can see at a glance whether the property is realistic for your fund structure before you engage an accountant, solicitor or lender.

In practice, this tool is most useful once you've identified a specific property, whether that's your own business premises, a commercial unit you've been tracking, or an investment target your adviser has flagged. Importantly, knowing the required contribution commitment upfront helps you rule unrealistic properties in or out early, which saves time and professional fees on deals that were never going to work.

The two tools answer opposite questions. Our SMSF Borrowing Capacity Calculator starts with your fund's current position, including balance, existing contributions and income, then works forward to the maximum loan available. This Contribution Gap Calculator starts with a target property, then works backwards to the contribution commitment required to sustain the loan under the 1.25x Fund Coverage Ratio.

Most serious trustees benefit from running both. Use the Borrowing Capacity Calculator early, when you're scoping what the fund can currently support. Then, once you've identified a specific commercial property, use this Contribution Gap Calculator to stress-test that property against your fund's capacity. Consequently, the combination moves you from generic exploration into specific, actionable planning.

No. This calculator is built specifically for commercial property under a Limited Recourse Borrowing Arrangement (LRBA). Residential SMSF lending operates under different lender policies, different LVR tiers, and different rental shading conventions, so the output would be misleading if applied to a residential purchase.

If you're considering residential property through your SMSF, you'll need specialist advice from a residential SMSF broker because it's a different product category altogether. Commercial SMSF lending, whether for owner-occupier business premises or investment types like warehouse, medical or industrial, is where this calculator applies. That's the scope we specialise in at Smart Business Plans, and the scope this tool was designed to reflect.

The Fund Coverage Ratio is the SMSF lending equivalent of a Debt Service Coverage Ratio, representing the ratio of total assessed fund income to annual loan repayment. Most SMSF commercial lenders require a minimum of 1.25 times, meaning assessed income must be at least 1.25 times annual repayment. If your fund's assessed income is $75,000, the maximum annual loan repayment a 1.25x lender will accept is $60,000.

We use the 1.25x benchmark in this calculator because it's the most common minimum across our SMSF commercial lender panel. That said, some lenders require 1.30x and others accept 1.20x for specific property profiles. Consequently, a marginal result at 1.25x doesn't automatically mean the deal is unworkable, it means lender selection becomes more important. That's the conversation we have when you book a call.

The 25% shave covers the real-world costs that eat into gross rent. These include vacancy periods between tenants, routine maintenance, property management fees and occasional capital expenses. Lenders apply this shading because they're assessing serviceability across the full loan term, not just the opening position. A property generating $72,000 gross annually contributes $54,000 to the Fund Coverage Ratio calculation.

Furthermore, the 75% shading convention is standard across commercial lending, not unique to SMSF. However, some lenders apply heavier shading for specific property types. Notably, childcare, hospitality and specialty assets often get shaded more aggressively because the tenant pool is narrower and vacancy risk is higher. If your target property falls in one of those categories, the calculator result may be slightly optimistic relative to what a formal lender assessment produces.

This calculator is deliberately focused on the serviceability question rather than the deposit question. Your fund balance matters for how much you can contribute as a deposit, but it doesn't directly determine whether the fund can service the loan once the property is operating. Annual repayment is driven by loan amount and interest rate, and serviceability depends on rental income and contributions, all of which the calculator captures.

If you'd like to model whether your fund has enough balance to actually settle the deposit plus stamp duty and bare trust setup costs, our SMSF Borrowing Capacity Calculator covers that side of the analysis. Used together, the two tools give you a complete picture: one checks whether your fund can meet the deposit, the other checks whether it can sustain the ongoing repayments for the life of the loan.

For the current financial year, the concessional cap is $30,000 per member per year and the non-concessional cap is $120,000 per member per year. Concessional contributions are pre-tax and taxed at 15% inside the fund, while non-concessional contributions are after-tax and attract no further fund tax. Under the bring-forward rule, eligible members under 75 can contribute up to three years of non-concessional caps in a single year, which is $360,000 per member.

Importantly, both caps are legislated to increase from 1 July 2026 under announced indexation. Always confirm current figures with your accountant, and factor in any unused concessional contributions you may be able to carry forward from previous years. For many trustees closing a larger opening-year gap, carry-forward contributions provide a meaningful buffer that makes the first year of the loan more manageable.

Division 296 applies from 1 July 2026 and adds 15% additional tax on earnings attributable to the portion of your Total Superannuation Balance (TSB) above $3 million. For most commercial property clients with balances comfortably under $3M, the tax efficiency of holding business real property in super still stacks up even after factoring in Division 296.

Here's where it matters most. Clients already close to or above the $3M threshold need to think about contribution strategy alongside balance trajectory. Large voluntary contributions across a decade of loan term can push TSB well past $3M, and the effective tax on fund earnings shifts upward accordingly. Consequently, if you're in that position, the contribution strategy conversation needs to happen alongside balance modelling, which is your accountant's specialist area. This calculator tells you the contribution required for serviceability, while Division 296 asks whether that plan is tax-optimal over time.

Yes, with two caveats. Bring-forward non-concessional contributions let you contribute up to three years of caps in a single year. Carry-forward concessional contributions let you use unused cap space from previous years, up to five years back, provided your TSB was under $500,000 at 30 June of the previous year. Both mechanisms can bridge a larger first-year gap than standard annual caps allow.

However, they are one-off strategies, not permanent solutions. If the calculator shows an ongoing gap of $45,000 per year for a one-member fund, which has a $150,000 combined cap, bring-forward gets you through year one but doesn't solve years two through fifteen. The calculator deliberately uses standard annual caps because that's what's sustainable. We recommend talking with your accountant about using these mechanisms strategically in year one, alongside a broader contribution plan that brings the ongoing gap inside standard caps for the rest of the loan.

A red status means the property isn't executable at that price under your current fund structure. Restructuring the deal is needed before you can progress to formal application. In practice, there are five levers worth considering, in rough order of impact. First, switching to interest-only reduces annual repayment by 15 to 20% and flows straight through to a smaller required coverage. Second, scaling down the property target by 10 to 15% often moves a red result into amber or green territory.

Additionally, increasing the deposit reduces the loan and the required coverage, while adding a second contributing member doubles available caps and doubles full-weight income in the coverage calculation. Finally, extending the timeline to build the fund balance across 12 to 18 months before purchasing frequently resolves things entirely. Which lever matters most depends on where the constraint is sitting and what's realistic for your circumstances. Book a call and we'll walk through the combination that makes most sense for your scenario.

The calculator provides a first-pass viability check, not a final lender decision. If the result is green, you've confirmed the property is realistic for your fund, and the next step is a formal broker assessment to match lender policies to your specifics. If amber, you'll want to explore which lever closes the gap most efficiently before moving to application. If red, the purchase needs restructuring before it can proceed to a lender.

In all three cases, the next move is a proper broker assessment. That's where we take your fund's actual balance sheet and match it against the 60+ lender panel we work with to find the best fit for your scenario. Book a discovery call and we'll walk through where you stand, what your lender options look like, and the typical timeline from here through to settlement. Our commercial property market reports also cover current lender appetite and yield trends across the major Australian markets.