Happy New Year, Payroll Professionals

Is 2026 the year you back your career?

A new year always brings fresh calendars, clean slates and a rare moment to pause and ask a question payroll professionals don’t ask often enough:

Is this the year I invest in my own career?

Payroll is no longer just a processing function. It’s risk, governance, trust, compliance, data and decision-making and the market is finally recognising that.

So as 2026 begins, here are a few meaningful ways payroll professionals are choosing to back themselves.

1. Deepen your skills with training and qualifications

Whether you’re early career or highly experienced, structured learning still matters.

Formal payroll training and qualifications don’t just build technical capability, they:

• give you confidence in complex scenarios
• strengthen your professional credibility
• and open doors to more senior or specialised roles

In a world of increasing regulation and scrutiny, knowing is no longer enough being able to demonstrate capability matters.

Visit www.austpayroll.com.au and www.payroll.edu.au for more details

2. Use your payroll expertise in new ways

Many payroll professionals are discovering they don’t have to leave payroll to evolve their careers.

Your skills translate powerfully into:

• payroll consulting
• compliance and assurance work
• remediation projects
• advisory roles supporting HR, finance and boards

The industry needs payroll thinkers not just processors.

Sometimes career progression isn’t a promotion. Sometimes it’s a pivot.

3. Join a professional community that backs payroll

Payroll can be a lonely profession. The stakes are high, the work is invisible when it’s right, and highly visible when it’s not.

Being part of Australian Payroll Association means:

• access to current guidance and trusted resources
• connection with peers who actually understand payroll
• ongoing learning, advocacy and professional recognition

Confidence grows faster when you’re not doing it alone.

https://austpayroll.com.au/membership

4. Work smarter with an AI payroll assistant

2026 doesn’t need to be the year you answer the same payroll questions for the hundredth time.

More payroll professionals are choosing to work alongside Beryl, Australia’s smartest payroll assistant, using AI to:

• validate interpretations
• sense check decisions
• support consistency and confidence
• free up time for higher value work

AI doesn’t replace payroll professionals. It supports them when it’s built for payroll, by payroll experts.

https://austpayroll.com.au/membership

5. Step out of the office and into the room

Growth doesn’t just happen behind a screen.

Our Payroll Summit in Sydney this March is designed for payroll professionals who want:

• real conversations, not theory
• insight into where payroll is heading
• connection with peers, leaders and decision makers

Sometimes the most career defining moments happen when you step into the room.

https://austpayroll.com.au/australian-payroll-summit

A final thought for the year ahead

Payroll professionals spend their careers protecting others, their pay, their trust, their compliance.

2026 might be the year you protect and invest in yourself.

However that looks for you, learning, evolving, connecting or leading, know this:

Payroll has never mattered more.
And neither have the professionals behind it.

Here’s to a confident, ambitious and well supported year ahead.