Summary

The Seasonal Worker Programme is an initiative of the Australian Government to provide employers with reliable returning workers from Pacific Island countries and Timor-Leste to meet unmet labour demands.

The programme is open to employers in agricultural industries (including the horticulture, aquaculture, cane sugar and cotton growing industries).

It is also open to employers in certain locations across Australia in accommodation industries.

Important: The Seasonal Workers Program was replaced by the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme on 4 April 2022.

Taxation

The withholding rate for a SWP employee is 15% if the following conditions are met:

1. Employer is an ATO approved SWP employer
2. Employee is:

• A foreign resident
• Holds a subclass 403 or 408 visa or another temporary visa, i.e. The PayGlobal employee Visa type is "Seasonal Worker"
• Employed before 4 April 2022. If employed after this date the employee is covered by the PALM scheme.

To apply tax prior to v4.64, the Employee Tax code field needed to be blank and the Employee Tax Override rate needed to be set to "15.00". This was because PayGlobal did not officially support SWP taxation.

PayGlobal officially supports SWP from v4.64 onwards due to changes in introduced by STP Phase 2.

To apply tax from v4.64 onwards, the Employee Tax code field needs to be set to "SWP" and the Employee Tax Override rate needs to be empty.

Single Touch Payroll

Prior to STP Phase 2, SWP employees were reported via the Individual Non-Business Payment Summary

STP Phase 2 introduce the need to uniquely identify SWP employees. As such the Tax Code "SWP" is now used to identify these employees for reporting the Income Type "SWP" for the tax years 2021/2022 onwards.