Aggregated turnover of less than $20 million  
For R&D entities with an aggregated turnover of less than $20 million, the refundable R&D tax offset is your corporate tax rate plus an 18.5% premium.

Aggregated turnover of $20 million or more
For R&D entities with an aggregated turnover of $20 million or more, the non-refundable R&D tax offset is your corporate tax rate plus an incremental premium.

The premium increments are based on your R&D Intensity. This is a calculated percentage based on your eligible R&D expenditure as proportion of your total P&L expenditure + any accounting capital R&D expenditure for the year.

All eligible R&D expenditures up to 2% R&D Intensity will receive a non-refundable R&D tax offset equal to your corporate tax rate plus an 8.5% premium.  
Additional eligible R&D expenditure above 2% R&D Intensity will receive a non-refundable R&D tax offset of your corporate tax rate plus a 16.5% premium.

If you are conducting R&D activities, you may be eligible to claim an R&D tax offset under the R&D tax incentive.

The R&D Tax Incentive is broad-based support across most industries, however there are some industries which have exceptions. As long as a company (in any industry) meets the R&D eligibility criteria, then it can claim the R&D incentive. 

You should assess whether you, and the activities you are conducting, qualify for a claim under the R&D tax incentive. To help you do this, we have set out the 6 steps you need to take to work out if you can claim and, if so, how much.

Some common industries that we see claiming the R&D incentive include Biotechnology, Technology / Software, Mining, Engineering, and Life Sciences.

Each R&D activity will have of one or more actions that you must complete to achieve an activity outcome. 
The program supports R&D activities that can be shown to follow a set of specific actions. These actions must meet the requirements set out in the definition of an eligible R&D activity.

The definition of an eligible R&D activity under the R&DTI 
Eligible R&D activities are defined in the legislation that underpins the program. Division 355 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 identifies eligible activities as either core R&D activities or supporting R&D activities.

Core R&D activities

Core R&D activities are experimental activities:

1. Whose outcome cannot be known or determined in advance on the basis of current knowledge, information or experience, but can only be determined by applying a systematic progression of work that:

• is based on principles of established science; and
• proceeds from hypothesis to experiment, observation and evaluation, and leads to logical conclusions; and

2. That are conducted for the purpose of generating new knowledge (including new knowledge in the form of new or improved materials, products, devices, processes or services).

Supporting R&D activities
Supporting R&D activities are activities directly related to* core R&D activities.