Four concessions, and the order you claim them in changes the tax

Qualifying is the easy half. The order is where the money is.

Division 152 gives four concessions to a small business owner selling an active asset: the 15 years exemption, which disregards the whole gain; the 50% active asset reduction; the retirement exemption, worth up to $500,000 over a lifetime; and the small business rollover, which defers what is left for two years. Most advice stops at working out which of them you can have.

That is the part almost nobody prices. The 50% active asset reduction applies automatically unless you choose out of it under section 152-205 — and choosing out of it pushes more of the gain through the retirement exemption instead, which consumes more of your $500,000 lifetime limit but can put considerably more into superannuation under the $1,865,000 CGT cap. Whether that is the better answer depends on your age, your marginal rate, your total super balance and what you plan to do with the money. It is a real decision, and it is made by ticking or not ticking a box.

Every choice under Division 152 has to be made and recorded by the day the return is lodged. After that the order you claimed them in is the order you claimed them in.

Which makes this one of the few tax decisions where running the arithmetic early is worth more than running it well.

What it works out

• The basic conditions, on your figures. Either the aggregated turnover test at $2 million or the maximum net asset value test at $6 million, with affiliates and connected entities counted the way section 152-10 counts them.
• The active asset test. Whether the asset was active for half the ownership period, and — where you are selling shares or units — whether the 80% test and the 20% significant individual test are met.
• Every lawful combination, priced. Not just which concessions apply, but every order they can be applied in, each one taken through to the tax actually payable.
• Where the money ends up. Into your hands at up to 47%, into superannuation under the CGT cap, or deferred into a replacement asset — the three destinations have three different after-tax answers.
• The gap between best and worst. Ranked on one stated measure: what the sale leaves after tax.

What the full report adds

1. Every combination side by side. Including the ones an adviser would not bother modelling because they look unpromising — several of which are not.
2. The superannuation consequences. What each route does to your total super balance, the $1,865,000 cap and the contributions you can still make afterwards.
3. The choices and the records. What has to be recorded, by whom and by when, for the combination you land on to actually hold up.
4. Every sale, every entity, as many times as you like. One payment, no expiry. Change the contract date, the price or the structure and run it again.

What it will not do

It does not give tax advice and it does not sign anything. Whether the conditions are met on your particular facts — what the asset actually was, who actually controlled what, whether the records support the claim — is a judgement a registered tax agent makes, and this report is the arithmetic they would otherwise be doing by hand. What you are assessed on is determined by the Australian Taxation Office on the return you lodge. Everything here runs on 2026-27 income year rates.