The Federal Government’s COVID-19 hardship early release superannuation scheme ended up resulting in outflows totalling $37.2 billion from Australian superannuation funds with AustralianSuper being the hardest hit with the outflow of just over $5 billion.
Just over a month since the Federal Government closed off the scheme, data released by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has revealed the full magnitude of its impact, with 10 funds experiencing outflows of over $1 billion.
In rank order those funds were:
- AustralianSuper $5.020 billion
- Sunsuper $3.667 billion
- REST $3.335 billion
- HOSTPLUS $3.105 billion
- Cbus $2.330 billion
- HESTA $1.823 billion
- BT $1.691 billion
- MLC $1.345 billion
- OnePath $1.087 billion
- AMP $1.082 billion
With the scheme wrapped up, APRA said the 10 funds with the highest number of applications received from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) made 3.2 million payments worth a total of $23.9 billion with the average payment being $7,569.
It said that this translated to those top 10 funds accounting for 66% of the total early release payments made.
Interestingly, those people who accessed both tranches of early release took more in the second tranche, with the APRA data revealing an average first tranche payment of $7,638 followed by a second tranche average of $8,268.
