Eligibility
R&D Tax Incentive Eligibility Criteria: Software Companies
How Division 355 eligibility works for Australian software companies: the core activity test, technical uncertainty, exclusions, evidence and offset rates.
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The R&D Tax Incentive for SaaS and software companies
Software is the largest claiming sector in the program, and SaaS companies sit squarely in it: recurring product development, continuous deployment, and real engineering problems. The catch is that most SaaS development is routine delivery, and the program only rewards the slice that is genuinely experimental.
Refundable offset up to 43.5% under $20m turnoverRegistration due 10 months after year end
Where does R&D actually live in SaaS and software companies?
In a SaaS business the eligible work usually hides inside scale and performance: an architecture that has to hold at a throughput no documented approach reaches, a query layer that must stay fast past documented limits, a sync or caching design whose correctness under concurrency is genuinely unknown. Feature delivery around that core, however valuable, is not R&D.
What SaaS work qualifies, and what does not?
| Activity | Eligible? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Designing a novel multi-tenant architecture where isolation and performance targets have no documented solution | Likely core | Genuine technical uncertainty resolved by experiment |
| Developing a sync engine whose consistency behaviour under concurrent edits cannot be predicted from the literature | Likely core | Outcome unknown to a competent professional |
| Building test harnesses and load rigs specifically to run those experiments | Supporting | Directly enables a named core activity |
| Shipping CRUD features with a standard framework | No | Known methods, predictable outcome |
| Integrating Stripe, Auth0, or other documented APIs | No | Routine integration per documentation |
| Internal admin tooling (billing back-office, CRM customisation) | No | Excluded: software for internal administration |
Classifications are indicative: eligibility always turns on the specific facts, the four criteria in Division 355, and the records behind the work.
What evidence do SaaS and software companies already produce?
SaaS teams generate top-tier contemporaneous evidence by default: pull requests, issue threads, architecture decision records, CI runs, and incident writeups, all timestamped. The work is not creating evidence, it is tying each record to a named experiment and to the hours of the people who ran it before context scatters.
What should SaaS and software companies watch out for?
The ATO's Taxpayer Alert TA 2017/5 targets whole-of-project software claims, so never claim 'the platform rebuild' as one activity. Agile ceremony is not experimental method: sprint boards show delivery, not hypotheses. And time apportionment is where SaaS claims most often fail in review, because salaries dominate the spend and estimates without records do not survive.
Frequently asked questions
- Is SaaS product development eligible for the R&D Tax Incentive?
- The experimental slice can be. Work qualifies when a genuine technical unknown (scale, performance, novel architecture) is resolved through a systematic, hypothesis-driven experiment. Routine feature delivery with known frameworks does not qualify, no matter how commercially important.
- How much can a SaaS startup get back?
- Companies with aggregated turnover under $20 million receive a refundable offset of 43.5% of eligible R&D expenditure (for a 25% tax rate entity), paid as cash even when pre-profit. Salaries apportioned to R&D time are usually the largest component.
- Does agile development count against a claim?
- No. Methodology is neutral. What matters is whether you can show the uncertainty, hypothesis, experiment, and evaluation behind the work. Sprint tickets alone do not show that, so capture the experimental story alongside your normal process.
- Can we claim work on our internal tools?
- Usually not. Software developed for the dominant purpose of internal administration is specifically excluded from being a core activity. Internal tooling can occasionally be a supporting activity when it exists solely to run a named experiment.
Guides for SaaS and software companies
Compliance & Evidence
R&D Tax Incentive Record Keeping: Contemporaneous Evidence
What records the ATO and AusIndustry expect for an R&D claim, what contemporaneous really means, how long to keep them, and a checklist by claim stage.
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Core vs supporting R&D activities, and why it now matters more
The distinction between core and supporting R&D activities has always mattered. From 1 July 2028 it becomes decisive, because supporting activities lose eligibility. Here is how to tell them apart and classify your work correctly.
Read articleThe R&D Tax Incentive is a self-assessment program. This page is general information, not tax, legal, or financial advice; eligibility depends on your specific circumstances and you should seek independent advice for them.