POLICY PAPER

Shared Superannuation Accrual

Recognising Caregiving as a Shared Economic Contribution

Pronatalism Australia · June 2026

Executive Summary

Australia’s fertility rate has fallen well below replacement level, and many Australians continue to have fewer children than they say they want. This gap between intended and realised fertility reflects a range of structural barriers to family formation: housing costs, childcare pressures, and the long-term economic penalties of raising children.

One of the least visible of these penalties sits inside Australia’s retirement system. Because superannuation is closely tied to continuous workforce participation, parents who reduce paid work to care for young children, most often mothers, accumulate significantly less super, lose years of compounding, and face greater financial insecurity in retirement. This is a substantial but under-recognised cost of family formation.

Pronatalism Australia proposes Shared Superannuation Accrual (SSA) to address it. Under this model, a portion of the compulsory superannuation contributions earned by the working parent could be transferred into the account of the primary caregiving parent during periods of intensive caregiving. The arrangement reflects a simple economic reality: in most households, income and childrearing are produced jointly.

The proposal would:

recognise unpaid caregiving as a legitimate economic contribution;
reduce the long-term retirement penalty attached to childrearing;
improve the financial security and bargaining position of caregiving parents;
reduce anticipatory financial risk during family formation decisions; and
strengthen institutional recognition of childrearing as socially productive work.

Critically, SSA would not require new direct government spending. Where countries such as Germany, Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom recognise caregiving through publicly funded pension credits, Australia can achieve comparable recognition through a fiscally restrained model that redistributes existing retirement contributions within the household.

Pronatalism Australia proposes that SSA be:

available to either parent on a gender-neutral basis;
linked to workforce participation thresholds;
activated through an opt-in model, presented by default during parental leave or birth registration; and
supported by capped concessional tax treatment to encourage uptake.

Shared Superannuation Accrual is a structural correction rather than a welfare expansion. It acknowledges that raising children carries real long-term economic costs, and that Australia’s retirement system should distribute those costs more fairly within families. At a time of sustained fertility decline, reducing the hidden penalties of caregiving is an important part of helping Australian families have the children they already want. SSA offers a practical, fiscally responsible and family-centred way to begin.

1. The Policy Proposal

Pronatalism Australia proposes a Shared Superannuation Accrual (SSA) model to better recognise the economic contribution of parents who temporarily reduce or leave paid work to care for young children.

Australia’s superannuation system is built around continuous workforce participation. That design reflects conventional paid employment, but it fails to account for one of society’s most important forms of labour: raising children. The consequences are significant. Parents who take on primary caregiving during a child’s early years, most often mothers, accumulate less superannuation, lose the benefit of long-term compounding, and face greater financial insecurity in retirement.

Shared Superannuation Accrual would address this by allowing families to share compulsory superannuation contributions during periods of intensive caregiving. Where one parent reduces paid work below a defined threshold to provide primary care for children below school age, a portion of the working parent’s compulsory Superannuation Guarantee (SG) contributions could be transferred into the caregiving parent’s account. In effect, the policy would treat caregiving as a shared economic enterprise within the household.

Unlike proposals that create new government-funded caregiving payments or retirement top-ups, SSA is designed to be fiscally restrained. It requires no new direct public expenditure. Instead, it rebalances retirement savings within the family unit itself, acknowledging a simple reality: family income is usually jointly produced, even where only one partner is in formal paid work.

2. How the Policy Would Work

Eligibility

Shared Superannuation Accrual would apply where:

a family has at least one dependent child below school age;
one parent has reduced paid work below a defined threshold (for example, below 0.4 of full-time equivalent) for the purpose of caregiving; and
the parents are married, in a de facto partnership, or otherwise recognised as a shared household for tax purposes.

The policy would be gender-neutral. Either parent could qualify as the caregiving partner.

Contribution splitting

Participating households could nominate that a proportion of the compulsory SG contributions earned by the working partner be redirected into the caregiving partner’s account. Pronatalism Australia proposes:

a default split of 50 per cent of compulsory SG contributions;
flexibility for households to elect a lower or higher proportion within defined limits; and
an annual cap on eligible transferred contributions.

This structure recognises that caregiving and income-earning are complementary forms of labour, undertaken jointly for the benefit of the family.

Duration

SSA would apply while the caregiving parent remained below the workforce participation threshold, up to a maximum of five years per child. Where families have several children in succession, eligibility could continue until the youngest child reaches school age.

Incentives and uptake

To encourage participation without creating new spending programmes, Pronatalism Australia proposes two supporting mechanisms. First, SSA should be presented as a default option during parental leave or birth registration, with families free to opt out. Second, transferred contributions should attract concessional tax treatment up to a capped amount, recognising the public value of caregiving while maintaining fiscal restraint. Together, these measures keep the policy an adjustment to Australia’s existing tax and retirement system rather than a new welfare entitlement.

Administration

SSA could be administered through the existing superannuation contribution infrastructure overseen by the Australian Taxation Office. Employers already report SG contributions through established payroll systems; SSA would require only an election mechanism allowing a nominated portion of contributions to be directed into the caregiving partner’s account. This would build on the spouse contribution and contribution-splitting frameworks already present within Australia’s superannuation system.

3. The Problem: The Hidden Cost of Caregiving

Australia’s fertility rate has fallen well below replacement level and continues to decline.¹ Many Australians still want two or more children, yet a growing number are having fewer than they intended, or none at all. This gap between desired and realised fertility is one of the clearest indicators of structural barriers to family formation,² and financial pressure sits at the centre of it.

Public discussion tends to focus on visible costs: housing, childcare, education. Less visible are the long-term financial penalties of stepping away from paid work to care for children. These costs are cumulative rather than immediate. For many parents, and particularly for mothers, caregiving years can mean forgone wages, slower career progression, missed promotions, reduced retirement savings, and decades of lost compound growth.

Australia’s superannuation system magnifies the effect, because it rewards uninterrupted labour market participation and largely ignores unpaid caregiving. Women reach retirement with substantially less superannuation than men, a gap that the Workplace Gender Equality Agency attributes largely to unpaid caring responsibilities, part-time work and lower average pay.³ Modelling by the peak superannuation body suggests that a woman on median earnings who takes a single year out of the workforce is on track to retire with roughly $23,700 less in super than she otherwise would.⁴ The result is what might be called the motherhood super gap. The financial cost of childbearing, on this view, is not only the direct expense of raising children. It is also the opportunity cost embedded in the retirement system itself.

4. The Anticipatory Cost of Motherhood

These costs matter not only after children are born but before they are conceived. Family formation decisions are shaped by anticipated risks, not only by retrospective remedies. For many women, deciding to have a child means weighing uncertainty about future economic security: the possibility that a relationship might break down, that years spent caregiving could reduce long-term independence, or that retirement savings will remain concentrated in a partner’s name.

The existing protections against these risks operate mainly after the fact, once a relationship has already ended. Shared Superannuation Accrual works prospectively instead, providing economic recognition during caregiving itself and reducing uncertainty at the very point when family formation decisions are being made. This matters because lowering perceived vulnerability can materially affect those decisions.

It matters within intact relationships too. Even where families stay together, retirement assets concentrated in one partner’s name can reinforce dependency and unequal bargaining power. Shared Superannuation Accrual would help caregiving parents build retirement assets in their own right throughout the childrearing years, easing the very insecurity that shapes decisions before a child is ever born.

5. Existing Australian Settings: A Good Start, But Incomplete

Australia’s retirement and family policy settings already recognise, in partial and fragmented ways, that childrearing affects long-term financial security.

The recent extension of superannuation to Commonwealth Paid Parental Leave is one example. From 1 July 2025, parents receiving Paid Parental Leave began accruing superannuation on that leave,⁵ a welcome reform that acknowledges time spent caring for a newborn should not interrupt retirement savings entirely. Its reach, though, is limited. Paid Parental Leave covers only a short period at the start of a child’s life, whereas for many families the larger economic adjustment comes in the years that follow, when one parent continues on reduced hours or leaves paid work for longer. It is during those years that the superannuation gap compounds most.

Australia also permits voluntary spouse contributions, allowing one partner to contribute to the other’s superannuation, sometimes with a modest tax offset.⁶ This establishes an important principle: that retirement savings within a family may legitimately be shared. Yet the arrangement is discretionary and often underused. Contribution splitting, which lets some concessional contributions move between spouses after the end of a financial year, reflects the same acceptance that retirement accumulation can be understood at the household level.

In cases of divorce or separation, superannuation can be divided as part of family law settlements, recognising that retirement assets built during a relationship may reflect joint contributions, including unpaid caregiving. But this mechanism, too, is retrospective: it operates only after a family has broken down.

Shared Superannuation Accrual extends a principle already embedded in Australian law: that family life often involves shared economic contributions, even when those contributions take different forms. Rather than introducing a wholly new idea, SSA systematises and strengthens that principle during the years when it matters most.

6. International Precedents and the Australian Opportunity

Australia would not be alone in recognising caregiving within its retirement system. Many advanced economies already provide pension protections or credits to parents who temporarily reduce workforce participation to raise children. What differs is how that recognition is funded.

Germany

Germany offers one of the clearest examples. Under its public pension system, parents receive childrearing pension credits (Kindererziehungszeiten), with up to three years of pension entitlements credited per child and treated as though the parent had earned wages during that time. The principle is explicit: raising children is a contribution to the future sustainability of the retirement system itself.⁷

Sweden

Sweden operates a similar model of child-years pension credits. For the first four years of a child’s life, the caregiving parent receives pension boosts designed to offset reduced workforce participation, measures usually framed as part of the country’s broader commitment to gender equality.⁸

Canada

The Canada Pension Plan provides a child-rearing dropout provision. Years in which a parent has low or no earnings while caring for children under seven can be excluded from pension calculations, so that caregiving years do not reduce retirement entitlements. It is a direct guard against the pension penalty of interrupted employment.⁹

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom grants National Insurance credits to parents receiving child benefit, allowing them to keep building state pension entitlements during periods out of the workforce. Here, too, the principle is that caregiving should not erase retirement security.¹⁰

The Australian opportunity

These examples show that recognising caregiving within a retirement system is neither unusual nor radical. As recently as 2009, Australia was one of only four OECD countries, alongside the United States, Turkey and Mexico, with no system of pension crediting for caregivers at all.¹¹ What sets Shared Superannuation Accrual apart is its funding model. In most other systems, caregiving recognition is socialised through the public purse. SSA offers an Australian alternative: rather than expanding public expenditure, it recognises caregiving within a family’s existing retirement savings.

That makes the policy distinctive in three respects. It is fiscally restrained. It preserves household autonomy. And it reflects the principle that families are themselves a primary site of intergenerational investment. Australia therefore has an opportunity to align international best practice with local fiscal realities, achieving a goal already embraced by many advanced economies through a design that is uniquely family-centred and financially responsible.

7. Responding to Criticisms

Like any family policy reform, Shared Superannuation Accrual raises questions about fairness, incentives and social norms. Each deserves a direct answer.

“Doesn’t this reinforce traditional gender roles?”

This is perhaps the most common objection to any policy that recognises caregiving. The worry is that allowing superannuation to be shared during periods of reduced work might encourage women to leave paid employment, or reinforce dated expectations about motherhood. It misreads the proposal. SSA does not prescribe who should provide care; it is entirely gender-neutral, and either parent may qualify. Its purpose is to remove the financial penalty attached to whichever parent takes on primary care.

The policy supports choice. Some families may decide that the mother reduces paid work, others that the father does, others again that care is divided more evenly. SSA determines none of this. It simply ensures the retirement system does not privilege one arrangement over another. Understood properly, it creates greater economic neutrality between paid work and unpaid care rather than reinforcing any particular model of family life.

“Doesn’t this reduce the working partner’s retirement savings?”

At the individual level, yes. Where superannuation is split, the working partner accumulates less in their own account than they otherwise would. But in most families both the income and the care are provided for the benefit of the household as a whole, and the working partner’s earnings are often made possible by the other partner’s unpaid labour. SSA recognises that interdependence. It does not remove retirement wealth from the household; it reallocates that wealth more fairly within it. The household’s total retirement savings are unchanged. Only their internal distribution shifts.

“Isn’t this already addressed through divorce settlements?”

This objection confuses retrospective correction with prospective recognition. Superannuation splitting at divorce matters, but it happens only after a family has broken down, once the financial and emotional costs of separation have already been incurred. More to the point, it does nothing to reduce the uncertainty a parent faces at the moment of deciding whether to have a child, reduce paid work, or stay home during the early years. Shared Superannuation Accrual reduces that uncertainty by building retirement assets more evenly throughout the caregiving period. The reassurance comes in advance, rather than through legal recovery after the fact, and it recognises caregiving as an ongoing contribution within intact relationships, not merely a contingent claim in the event of separation.

“Won’t this mainly benefit higher-income families?”

As with most superannuation policy, higher earners may generate larger absolute transfers, and that is a legitimate concern. It can be managed through annual caps on transferable contributions, or through limits tied to average full-time earnings. The concern does not undermine the principle, though. Parents across the income spectrum face retirement penalties associated with caregiving; the scale differs, but the structural problem does not.

“Why not simply expand public support instead?”

Some will argue that if caregiving deserves recognition, government should fund it directly through pension credits or superannuation top-ups, as many countries do. SSA reflects a different philosophy. It recognises caregiving without new direct public expenditure, which matters in an era of fiscal constraint, and it works with the grain of how many families already regard income and long-term security as shared. Rather than creating a new welfare entitlement, it adjusts the existing retirement framework to reflect how families actually function, economically restrained and socially realistic at once.

8. Why This Matters for Fertility

Shared Superannuation Accrual is, on one level, a policy about retirement fairness. On a deeper level, it is a policy about fertility.

Sustained sub-replacement fertility matters less for the raw question of population size than for what it means for the continuity of society: fewer future workers, fewer taxpayers, fewer caregivers, and mounting pressure on the institutions and intergenerational compacts that modern societies depend on.

The economic costs described earlier do more than lower a family’s retirement savings; they shape whether children are born at all. The anticipated penalties of caregiving weigh on fertility decisions long before a child arrives, and most heavily on second and third births, where the cumulative impact becomes clearest. A reform that lightens those anticipated penalties therefore speaks to fertility, not only to fairness.

Shared Superannuation Accrual addresses one of these hidden deterrents. It reduces the retirement penalty attached to caregiving, and it signals that childrearing is not economically invisible. That signalling function matters. Public policy does more than distribute resources; it expresses social values. When institutions treat caregiving as productive and valuable, they help shape the norms that surround family life. In this sense SSA is more than a technical retirement reform. It is part of a broader rebalancing of how Australia values family formation.

Pronatalism Australia does not claim that policy alone can reverse fertility decline. Culture matters, as do housing and the health of people’s relationships. But policy can either intensify the costs of family life or help reduce them. At present, Australia’s retirement system intensifies them. Shared Superannuation Accrual would begin to correct that, aligning the country’s economic institutions with one of its most important long-term interests: the raising of the next generation.

9. Conclusion: Recognising Shared Work

Australia’s superannuation system was designed around a simple assumption: that economic contribution is measured chiefly through paid labour. But family life has always involved another kind of labour that is unpaid, intensive, socially indispensable, and profoundly consequential: the work of raising children.

For many families, the early years require one parent to step back from paid work in order to invest more fully in care. That choice often benefits children, strengthens family life, and contributes to the long-term continuity of society. Yet the retirement system still treats it as an economic absence.

Shared Superannuation Accrual offers a practical and fiscally restrained correction. It requires no new government spending, prescribes no family roles, and expands no welfare state. It simply recognises that where one parent earns income and another provides care, both may be contributing to the same shared enterprise. That principle already exists in fragments across Australia’s legal and retirement systems; SSA draws them together into something coherent.

In doing so, it would reduce the hidden long-term costs of caregiving, strengthen family confidence, and remove one of the less visible barriers to family formation. If Australia believes that raising children is among society’s most important contributions, its retirement system should stop treating that work as economically invisible.

Notes

Australian Bureau of Statistics, Births, Australia, 2024 (2025). The total fertility rate was 1.481 births per woman in 2024, a record low, and has remained below the replacement level of about 2.1 since 1976. abs.gov.au
Australian Government Centre for Population, Fertility Decline in Australia: Is It Here to Stay? (2024), which notes that surveys consistently show people are having fewer children than they intend to. population.gov.au
Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Women’s Economic Security in Retirement (2020), which finds women reach retirement with markedly lower superannuation than men and attributes the gap largely to unpaid caring responsibilities, part-time work and lower average pay. wgea.gov.au
Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia, “Super on paid parental leave to help reduce gender gap, boost equity in retirement savings” (media release, 27 June 2025). ASFA modelling finds a woman on median earnings (around $75,000) who takes a year out of the workforce is projected to retire with about $23,700 less in superannuation. superannuation.asn.au
Superannuation is paid on government-funded Parental Leave Pay for children born or adopted from 1 July 2025, at the Superannuation Guarantee rate. See Australian Taxation Office, Paid Parental Leave Superannuation Contribution; Department of Social Services, Super on Paid Parental Leave.
Australian Taxation Office, Spouse super contributions (a tax offset of up to $540 where the receiving spouse’s income is below the threshold) and Superannuation contributions splitting (up to 85 per cent of a year’s concessional contributions may be transferred to a spouse).
Germany credits up to three years of pension contributions per child (for children born from 1992) under its Kindererziehungszeiten scheme, funded by the federal government. See U.S. Social Security Administration, “Caregiver Credits in France, Germany, and Sweden,” Social Security Bulletin 71, no. 4 (2011); Deutsche Rentenversicherung.
Sweden credits pension entitlements for parents of children aged four or younger, with the credit generally directed to the lower-earning parent. See OECD, Pensions at a Glance 2023: Sweden; Swedish Pensions Agency (Pensionsmyndigheten).
Government of Canada, Child-rearing provisions (Canada Pension Plan): periods of low or no earnings while a primary caregiver of a child under seven can be excluded from the benefit calculation.
United Kingdom, National Insurance credits for parents and carers: a parent claiming Child Benefit is credited towards the State Pension until the youngest child turns 12. See GOV.UK, National Insurance credits.
As of 2009, of the 30 OECD member countries only the United States, Turkey, Mexico and Australia had no system of pension crediting for caregivers. See E. Fultz, Pension Crediting for Caregivers (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2009).