The $1,000 deduction won’t hurt all firms, only the ones built on volume

The $1,000 standard deduction won’t wipe out accounting firms overnight. It will do something far more dangerous. It will quietly remove work.

Australia has around 10–11 million salary and wage taxpayers. A big portion of those returns are simple, low-risk, low-thinking jobs. Check the receipts. Confirm the numbers. Lodge.

That work has been priced cheaply for years, usually $150 to $300 and done at scale.

From 1 July 2026, a chunk of that work simply won’t come through the door.

• Clients won’t complain.
• They won’t argue.
• They’ll just stop booking.

If only 20–30% of salary-only clients opt out of paid returns, that’s hundreds of millions of dollars removed from the profession. Not from complex work. From volume.

The firms that feel it hardest will be the ones built on throughput:

• High numbers of individual returns
• Tight margins
• Heavy reliance on junior staff and seasonal workload spikes

Those firms won’t fail immediately. They’ll just feel constant pressure, fewer jobs, more price resistance, more effort for less reward. The firms that won’t notice are already doing something different.

They use compliance as the entry point, not the product. They talk about decisions, not deductions. They sell outcomes, not forms. This change doesn’t punish accountants. It punishes business models that never evolved.