TLDR: The R&D Tax Incentive portal is the AusIndustry customer portal at incentives.business.gov.au, where Australian companies register their R&D activities for each income year. Access runs through a myID digital identity linked to the company's ABN in Relationship Authorisation Manager (RAM).
Registration is due 10 months after the end of the income year (30 April for a 30 June year end). It must be completed before the offset is claimed on the ATO R&D tax incentive schedule with the company tax return.
Which portal does what
Two separate systems handle the two halves of the program. AusIndustry, acting for Industry Innovation and Science Australia (IISA), decides which activities are eligible R&D. The ATO administers expenditure and the offset itself.
| Step | System | Who lodges | Timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Register R&D activities | R&D Tax Incentive customer portal (incentives.business.gov.au) | Company, or an agent acting for it | Within 10 months of year end |
| Claim the offset | ATO R&D tax incentive schedule with the company tax return | Usually the tax agent | With the return, after registration |
| Advance or overseas finding | Separate application to AusIndustry | Company | Advance: before the end of the income year the activities are conducted. Overseas: before the end of the first income year the overseas activities are conducted |
Getting this wrong is a common cause of missed deadlines. Lodging a tax return does not register your activities, and registering activities does not claim the money.
How to access the customer portal
Access to the R&D Tax Incentive customer portal is identity-based, not username-and-password based. Three things need to be in place before anyone can start an application:
- A myID digital identity for each person who will use the portal.
- An authorisation linking that identity to the company's ABN in Relationship Authorisation Manager (RAM).
- Someone in the company acting as principal authority.
Set this up before deadline pressure starts. Identity setup and RAM authorisation can take days if the principal authority is travelling or the ABN details are stale.
Principal authority and delegated users
The principal authority is an eligible individual associated with the business in the Australian Business Register, typically a director or the public officer. That person links the business in RAM first, then authorises others as authorisation administrators or standard users.
Finance staff, technical leads and external advisers each need their own myID and their own authorisation. Sharing a login is not an option, and a former employee's authorisation should be removed when they leave.
Agents and advisers
An R&D consultant or tax agent can be authorised to act for the company. The company remains responsible for the content of the registration and for the self-assessment of eligibility, regardless of who typed it into the portal.
What you lodge: registration structure
The portal application is a single online form organised in three layers: Projects, then core R&D activities, then supporting R&D activities. A Project is a commercial container that groups activities. It is not an eligibility unit.
Eligibility is self-assessed per activity against s 355-25 ITAA 1997, which requires experimental activities whose outcome cannot be known or determined in advance and that are conducted for the purpose of generating new knowledge. Both limbs must be met, per activity.
A typical application carries three to seven core activities. If you are unsure how work should be split, see core vs supporting R&D activities.
Core activity fields inside the portal
The current form version was released on 15 August 2025. It is a field-by-field questionnaire, not a single narrative box. Each narrative field allows up to 4,000 characters, and several carry stated character minimums; draft each field to meet its own minimum.
| Portal question | What it asks | Minimum |
|---|---|---|
| Q63 | Describe the core R&D activity | No stated minimum |
| Q79 | Sources investigated worldwide and what was found | No stated minimum |
| Q80 | Why a competent professional could not know the outcome | 600 characters |
| Q82 | What is the hypothesis | 650 characters |
| Q83 | The experiment and how it tests the hypothesis | 650 characters |
| Q84 | How you evaluated, or plan to evaluate, results | 530 characters |
| Q85 | Conclusions reached in the income period | 340 characters |
| Q89 | What new knowledge the activity produced | 600 characters |
There is also a checkbox question on how you determined the outcome could not be known in advance (no information in literature or patents, expert advice, no adaptable solutions, other, or did not look into existing knowledge), plus a checkbox list of the evidence types you kept.
Fields that fail most often
The hypothesis (Q82) and the evaluation step (Q84) are the two weak points reviewers find. A hypothesis must name a variable or mechanism, carry a measurable target under defined conditions, and be falsifiable: state the result that would disprove it.
"We wanted to see if our approach would be more scalable" is a business objective, not a hypothesis.
Q84 asks how results were analysed against the hypothesis using established techniques. Observation and evaluation is the element most often found missing at tribunal, so it needs its own substantive content rather than a restatement of the experiment.
For field-level drafting guidance, see what AusIndustry asks on the registration form and how to write an R&D technical narrative.
Supporting activities
Each supporting activity needs a name, a description of what was done, a multi-select of which core activities it supports, and an explanation of how it directly supported the hypothesis, experiment, observation and evaluation, or conclusions.
A dominant-purpose explanation field appears only when the activity is in an excluded category or produces goods or services. If it appears, explain why supporting the core activity was the ruling, prevailing or most influential purpose, and apportion costs where production is involved.
Do you need to register before you can claim?
Yes. Registration precedes claiming, without exception. The portal issues a registration number, and that number is required on the ATO R&D tax incentive schedule lodged with the company tax return.
The ATO cannot process an offset claim for activities that were never registered with AusIndustry. There is also a minimum spend: at least $20,000 of notional R&D deductions, unless the expenditure is paid to a Registered Research Service Provider or is a monetary contribution under the Cooperative Research Centre program.
Drafting, saving and collaborating
You can save an application and come back to it, and several authorised users from the same company can work on the same draft. In practice the portal is a submission tool, not a drafting tool.
Write your narratives offline first, in a document your technical lead can edit and your finance team can review. Three reasons:
- The character minimums are per field, and you want to see the word counts before you paste.
- The portal accepts plain keyboard characters only, so curly quotes, dashes and special symbols pasted from a word processor cause problems.
- Activity descriptions must align with your contemporaneous evidence, which usually means someone comparing the draft against commit history, tickets, test logs or trial data before it goes in.
Rand builds those narratives from engineering and project evidence, drafts each field to its own portal minimum, and exports them field by field so the portal step is copy and paste rather than composition.
Submitting and what happens next
On submission the portal confirms lodgement and, once the registration is accepted, issues a registration number for that income year. Keep it: your tax agent needs it, and it identifies the registration in any later variation or review.
Acceptance of a registration is an administrative step. It is not a ruling that your activities are eligible. AusIndustry can review a registration after the fact, and the ATO can review the expenditure claimed against it, so the evidence behind each field needs to survive scrutiny years later.
See what evidence AusIndustry accepts for the record types that hold up.
If you want binding certainty in advance, that is an advance finding, applied for separately. A positive advance finding binds for up to three years (the income year of application plus the two following), but the application must be lodged before the end of the income year in which the activities are conducted. No late applications.
Variations, withdrawals and corrections
You can request a variation to an accepted registration through the portal, for example to correct activity descriptions or expenditure-related details. A registration can also be withdrawn.
If a variation changes the amount of the offset you are entitled to, your tax agent may need to amend the company tax return as well. Treat a variation as a two-system exercise, AusIndustry and ATO, not just a portal edit.
The ATO side: schedule and return
The offset is claimed on the R&D tax incentive schedule lodged with the company tax return. That is the ATO's territory, and the ATO's R&D tax incentive guidance sets out the expenditure rules.
Which offset applies depends on aggregated turnover. Companies under $20M get a refundable offset (the company tax rate plus 18.5 percentage points, commonly 43.5%), while companies at $20M or more get a non-refundable offset with a two-tier intensity premium: 8.5 points on notional R&D up to 2% of total expenditure, then 16.5 points on the portion above 2%, applied marginally.
Notional R&D deductions above $150M in an income year attract the offset at the company tax rate only. For the arithmetic on your own numbers, see how to calculate your rebate.
Deadlines that govern the portal
Registration is due 10 months after the end of the income year, a statutory deadline under the Industry Research and Development Act 1986.
| Income year end | Registration due |
|---|---|
| 30 June 2025 | 30 April 2026 |
| 31 December 2025 | 31 October 2026 |
| 30 June 2026 | 30 April 2027 |
Miss it and you must request an extension from AusIndustry, granted only in limited circumstances. Two related deadlines cannot be extended at all:
- An advance finding application must be lodged before the end of the income year in which the activities are conducted or planned.
- An overseas finding application must be lodged before the end of the first income year in which the overseas activities are conducted. Without one, overseas R&D is not claimable, and this is the single most commonly missed deadline in the program.
More detail sits in our registration deadline guide.
Common portal problems
- Leaving access setup until April. myID and RAM authorisations depend on a specific individual being available. Do it in January.
- One giant core activity. The portal wants a discrete uncertainty per activity. Bundling an entire platform into one activity makes every field vague and every minimum harder to meet honestly.
- Pasted special characters. Copy from plain text, not from a formatted document.
- Hypothesis fields filled with product goals. If a field can only ever be confirmed, it is not a hypothesis.
- Q85 written for ongoing work. Conclusions describe what was concluded in the income period, including negative or partial results. Ongoing activities with no conclusions yet should say so rather than invent an outcome.
- Narratives that outrun the records. If the portal describes experiments your evidence does not show, the mismatch surfaces in review, not at lodgement.
Before you open the portal
Have four things ready:
- Activity structure: which projects, which core activities, which supporting activities.
- Prior-art search results for each core activity, including what was found and why the question remained open.
- Hypothesis and evaluation content drafted to each field's minimum length.
- Expenditure figures apportioned by R&D time.
The portal itself is a form. Everything defensible about a claim happens before you log in, in the evidence and the drafting.
Rand assembles both from the work your team has already logged, so the portal session is the last twenty minutes of the process rather than the first week of it. For the wider picture, start with our end-to-end guide to the R&D Tax Incentive.