W1 — Total salary, wages and other payments¶

If you pay employees, part of your BAS covers the tax you take out of their pay. The first of those labels is W1. It is where you report the total of the payments you made from which you are required to withhold tax.

W1 is a gross figure. That means it is the full amount of the payments before any tax was taken out.

In one line

Label W1 is the total gross salary, wages and other payments you made from which you are required to withhold tax — reported before any tax is taken out.

Why this matters¶

W1 sets the scene for the tax you send to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). It tells the ATO the size of the payments behind your withholding. Getting it right keeps your BAS consistent with what you actually paid your team, and helps the tax you report at the next label line up.

What you will learn¶

What label W1 on the BAS is
Why W1 is a gross figure
How W1 is generally pre-filled from Single Touch Payroll

Understanding the concept¶

W1 is the total of the payments you made from which you are usually required to withhold tax. The ATO explains that this includes payments such as salary, wages, allowances and leave loading paid to employees, and similar payments to certain others.

Two things are worth knowing:

W1 is gross. It is the full amount paid before tax is withheld — not the take-home amount your employees received.
You include a payment even if no tax was withheld from it. The ATO points out that if a payment was of a type you would normally withhold from, it still belongs at W1 — even in a case where the calculated withholding worked out to be nil.

Single Touch Payroll (STP) is the system employers use to report payroll to the ATO each time they pay staff. If you report your payroll this way, the ATO uses those reports to pre-fill W1 on your activity statement for you. A later lesson covers how pre-fill works in more detail.

For accountants & bookkeepers

W1 is the period total of gross salary, wages and other reportable payments subject to withholding. The ATO can only pre-fill electronic activity statements from information sent through STP-enabled software, and the W1 and W2 amounts that make up a pre-fill can be viewed in the payroll report list in ATO online services. Even where the tax-free threshold results in no withholding, the gross payment is still reported at W1.

Example¶

Jordan runs a small landscaping business with two employees, Sam and Priya. Over the quarter, Jordan pays Sam gross wages of $18,000 and Priya gross wages of $15,000.

The total gross paid is $18,000 + $15,000 = $33,000. That $33,000 is the figure for label W1 — the full amount before any tax was taken out.

Because Jordan reports payroll through Single Touch Payroll each payday, the ATO has already added these amounts up. When Jordan opens the BAS, W1 is generally pre-filled with $33,000, so Jordan just checks it against the payroll records.

Common mistakes¶

Reporting the net (take-home) pay at W1 instead of the gross amount.
Leaving a payment out of W1 just because no tax happened to be withheld from it.
Overwriting a correct pre-filled W1 figure with a hand-typed one that does not match the payroll records.
Confusing W1 (the gross payments) with W2 (the tax withheld from them).

How this works in myaccountant¶

In the app — myaccountant tracks the gross pay from your pay runs across the period. When you prepare your BAS, it brings that total through to label W1, so the gross figure lines up with the payroll you have already run.

Key points¶

W1 is the total gross salary, wages and other payments you withhold from.
W1 is a gross figure — before tax is taken out, not take-home pay.
Include a payment at W1 even if no tax was withheld from it.
For STP-reporting employers, W1 is generally pre-filled by the ATO.
W1 pairs with W2, which is the tax withheld from these payments.

Learn next¶

General information only — not tax, super or financial advice.

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