17 banks now feed the ATO's landlord data-match. 1.7 million rental loans in the 2025-26 file

This article is general information only and does not constitute financial or tax advice. Consult a qualified tax professional for advice specific to your situation.

This article is general information only. It does not consider your personal circumstances and is not financial, credit or tax advice. Speak to a registered tax agent before lodging your 2025-26 rental schedule or acting on any of the figures below.

What actually lands with the 2025-26 file

The ATO's Residential Investment Property Loan (RIPL) data-matching program started collecting the 2021-22 income year and was extended in 2023 to run through to 2025-26. That means the file the ATO is now receiving from lenders covers every financial year of the current cycle, and 2025-26 is the fifth and final year under this protocol. It is not a new program, it is the tail of a program that has been building a five-year loan-level view of every landlord in Australia.

The scope is deliberately wide. The ATO estimates it obtains records on approximately 1.7 million individual landlords each financial year. For context, ATO Taxation Statistics show a little over 2.2 million individuals reported rental income in the most recent lodged year. The RIPL cross-check therefore reaches most of the landlord population by loan alone, before the parallel property management data-match is layered on top.

The specific fields collected are set out in the RIPL protocol notice and cover three tiers:

1. Identification. Unique client identifier, full names, all addresses on file, phone numbers, date of birth, email address.
2. Account details. BSB, account numbers, opening and closing balances for the year, term of loan, commencement and end dates, borrowing costs paid up-front.
3. Transactions. Every transaction on the loan, with date, amount and description. That means every draw-down, every offset movement, every redraw and every repayment sits in the ATO file line by line.

The last of those is the one landlords underestimate. Under RIPL the ATO does not just receive a balance snapshot at 30 June. It receives the ledger.

Which lenders are handing the data over

Seventeen authorised deposit-taking institutions are named in the current RIPL protocol:

• The four majors: ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB.
• Second-tier and neobanks: Adelaide Bank, Bank of Queensland, Bendigo Bank, Bankwest, ING, Macquarie Bank, Suncorp, RAMS, Ubank.
• Westpac subsidiaries: St George, Bank of South Australia, Bank of Melbourne.
• ME Bank.

The list covers essentially every mainstream retail investor lender operating in Australia. If a landlord refinanced from CBA to Macquarie in October, the ATO sees the CBA file for the first four months and the Macquarie file for the next eight, along with the settlement balances on either side. The stitched picture across a whole tax year is available at the ATO end before the landlord's return is due.

The parallel rent roll data-match

Running alongside RIPL is the property management data-matching program. It was first published on 17 May 2021, then extended in a notice published in the Federal Register of Legislation gazettes in the week commencing 26 August 2024 to cover the 2023-24 to 2025-26 financial years. Combined, the program runs the eight financial years from 2018-19 to 2025-26.

The data comes direct from property management software providers. Public reporting on the participating providers identifies PropertyMe, Console Cloud, PropertyTree, REST, Kolmeo and Ailo, which between them cover the vast majority of third-party managed rental stock. Each software provider transmits landlord and property identifiers, tenancy dates, weekly rent, bond details, disbursements and expenses paid on the landlord's behalf. That is the exact same information the property manager sends the landlord in their annual statement, delivered to the ATO in parallel.

Data is collected annually following the end of each financial year and, because there are multiple providers, delivered in periodic instalments. Each year's data is retained by the ATO for seven years from receipt of the final verified file. In practice that means 2025-26 rent roll records will still be sitting inside the ATO's compliance system in the early 2030s.

The 9-in-10 error rate is not a rounding issue

ATO Assistant Commissioner Rob Thomson's public position, restated in successive tax time media releases including the most recent ATO warning to rental property owners, is that around 90% of rental property returns contain at least one error. The prior Commissioner Chris Jordan cited the same 9-in-10 figure from an early audit sample of over 300 claims. The rate has proven remarkably stable across years and across lodgement channels.

The most uncomfortable number in the ATO's messaging is the second one: 86% of the returns with errors were lodged through a registered tax agent. The takeaway is not that agents are careless. It is that the source information the landlord hands to the agent is often incomplete or wrong, and the RIPL and property management data-matches now give the ATO a way to test that at scale before any review is opened.

The four errors that drive the 90%

Across ATO commentary and independent reporting including CPA Australia's guidance to public practitioners, four categories dominate the error mix.

1. Repairs vs capital works

The ATO's rental properties guide draws the line between an immediately deductible repair and a capital works deduction under Division 43 spread over the effective life of the asset. Replacing a broken tile in a shower is a repair. Retiling the whole bathroom is capital. Painting a wall damaged by tenant impact damage is a repair. Painting the whole exterior at the end of a tenancy is capital works. The wrong classification claims 100% of the cost in year one instead of 2.5% a year over 40 years, which is the largest single line-item error the ATO says it sees.

2. Loan redraw interest apportionment

This is the error the RIPL data-match was built to catch. The interest on an investor loan is deductible under section 8-1 of the ITAA 1997 only to the extent the borrowed money was used to derive assessable income. If a landlord redraws $30,000 from the investor loan to pay for a family holiday, the interest attributable to that $30,000 is not deductible for the rest of the loan's life. Under the pre-RIPL settlement, that apportionment relied on the landlord to disclose. Under RIPL, the ATO already has the redraw date, amount and description in the file.

3. Borrowing expense timing

Loan establishment fees, mortgage broker fees, valuation fees and lender's mortgage insurance are borrowing expenses. They are deductible over the shorter of the loan term or five years, not in full in year one. The ATO worked examples on borrowing expenses run through the correct calculation. Claiming a full $3,200 borrowing expense in year one when the correct claim is $640 a year for five is a small individual error that shows up in tens of thousands of returns.

4. Rent income mismatch

The property management data-match is the tie-out for this one. Every disbursement the property manager pays through to the landlord is in the rent roll file the ATO receives from the software provider. If the rental schedule reports $34,800 for the year and the PropertyMe statement in the ATO's file shows $37,050, that difference is a discrepancy flag before a human reviewer opens the case. It is also the easiest error to prevent: reconcile the schedule to the annual statement before lodgement, not after.

What the 12 May 2026 negative gearing overhaul does to the risk profile

The RIPL data-match is not new. What is new is the reason the ATO now has a heightened operational interest in reading it against 2025-26 returns.

The Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Act 2026, which took effect on 12 May 2026, kept full negative gearing for grandfathered established stock owned before that date, and put on a track to progressively tighten deductions for new purchases of established stock from 1 July 2027. That means every landlord's rental portfolio now splits into two categories inside the same tax return:

• Grandfathered stock: owned before 12 May 2026, full negative gearing preserved on interest, borrowing costs and other deductible expenses for as long as the property is held.
• Post-12 May established stock: newly restricted from 1 July 2027, with a narrower interest deduction envelope and a tightened depreciation profile.

Every RIPL loan record after 12 May 2026 is a candidate for the ATO to test which side of the split it sits on. If a loan settled 20 May 2026 has interest fully claimed on the return, the ATO can pull the RIPL settlement date and match it to the property acquisition date from the state's title registry via the CGT data-match. The claim survives only if the property is a new build eligible under the new rules or the loan is refinancing a grandfathered position. The audit trail is now much shorter on both sides.

For grandfathered stock the practical risk is different: the ATO wants to be sure the loan is genuinely used to fund the grandfathered property and not to fund a post-12 May purchase off the same facility. Redraw activity from mid-May 2026 onward is precisely the RIPL data the file was built for.

Shortfall penalties and where the cost actually lands

Under PS LA 2012/4 and the underlying Schedule 1 to the Taxation Administration Act 1953, a tax shortfall attracts a base penalty of 25% (failure to take reasonable care), 50% (recklessness) or 75% (intentional disregard). General interest charge runs at the RBA 90-day BAB rate plus 7 percentage points, currently well over 11% and compounding daily.

Worked example. A landlord over-claims $8,000 of interest by failing to apportion for a private redraw. Marginal tax rate 39% (including Medicare). Tax shortfall is $3,120. A reasonable care penalty at 25% is $780. Two years of GIC at roughly 11.5% compounding on a $3,900 base is around $940. Total cost of the error: about $4,860 for a single year's misapportionment on a single loan. If the same error runs across three financial years and the same landlord holds three loans, the number scales.

The point is not that the ATO will penalise every landlord for every error. The ATO's stated approach is education first, review second, penalty third. The point is that with RIPL and the property management data-match together, the ATO now has enough visibility to move from a random-sample audit posture to a targeted-flag posture. The 2025-26 return is the first one lodged with all of that data on both sides of the ledger and the negative gearing reform in effect for the last seven weeks of the income year.

Practical checklist before you lodge 2025-26

Six moves. Every one of them is cheaper than a review.

1. Pull the property manager's EOFY statement direct from the software. PropertyMe, Console, PropertyTree, REST, Kolmeo and Ailo all issue an annual owner statement. Reconcile every income line and every disbursed expense to the numbers in your rental schedule before the agent hits lodge.
2. Download a full-year loan transaction file from the lender. Every RIPL bank provides a CSV or PDF export. Identify every non-standard debit and confirm it was for an investor purpose. Redraws for private use apportion out.
3. Reclassify anything on the borderline of repairs and capital works. Where the invoice describes a whole-of-asset replacement, treat it as capital and let Division 43 do the work.
4. Spread borrowing expenses correctly. New loan in 2025-26? Divide the total by the shorter of the loan term or five years and put one year's slice through the return.
5. Tag every post-12 May 2026 acquisition and post-12 May 2026 loan in your working papers. Note whether the property qualifies as a new build under the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Act 2026 grandfathering exceptions. Hold the evidence.
6. Keep the substantiation for seven years. ATO record-keeping requirements match the RIPL retention window. If the ATO holds the loan data until the early 2030s, the landlord's supporting evidence needs to as well.

Propkt keeps every rent line, expense line and mortgage transaction reconciled in one place across the year, so the reconciliation at tax time is a two-click export rather than a January to June scramble through statements. If the RIPL and property management data-matches are the ATO reading your loan and your rent roll in parallel, the landlord's best defence is the same book kept just as tightly on the other side.

Bottom line

The 2025-26 income year is the last year of the current RIPL protocol, and the first year the ATO's data-match runs against a return prepared under the 12 May 2026 negative gearing rules. Seventeen lenders and six property management software providers now feed the ATO enough information to test almost every material line on a rental schedule before a review is opened. The 9-in-10 error rate is not likely to hold for long once the data-match's tail is fully processed, because the landlords who never got a query letter under the old regime will start receiving one under the new. The cheap fix is to reconcile in August, not defend in April.

Try Propkt

Propkt keeps every rent transaction, expense line and mortgage repayment lined up against the property, so the 2025-26 rental schedule reconciles to the property manager's EOFY statement and the lender's loan transaction file in one export. The mortgage calculator, expense tracker and rent roll all sit in the same portfolio view, so a landlord approaching lodgement has the numbers that match the ATO's numbers, not a set that has to be rebuilt from twelve months of PDFs. Start with Propkt.