Wondered what that funny taste in your favourite drink is? It's the tax. There is $0.64 of excise in a schooner of full-strength draught and $21.95 in a carton of it in stubbies — before a cent of GST, which is then charged on top of the excise. Neither figure appears on any receipt you will ever be handed.
So this page does the arithmetic the docket won't. Pick your drink below, put in what you paid, and it returns the excise or wine tax, the GST, the total, what share of the price that is, and — the number that actually allows comparison — the tax per standard drink. Every rate comes from the ATO's published table with its tariff subitem shown, every price we used is named and dated, and the workings sit at the end of each section for anyone who wants to check rather than take our word for it.
What's in your glass
Excise doesn't care what you paid. It is charged on the alcohol in the container — so many dollars per litre of pure alcohol — which means the tax in a stubby is the same whether it came from a bottle shop special or a hotel fridge at midnight. The price only matters for the GST, and for working out what share of your money ended up in Canberra.
Wine works the other way round entirely, which is why it gets its own treatment below. Set the drink, check the strength against the label, enter what you paid.
Rates from the ATO's published table, effective 3 August 2026 (QC 63605); next indexation 1 February 2027. Beer excise applies only to alcohol above 1.15% ABV — spirits and pre-mixed drinks get no such threshold. Wine figures use the ATO's statutory half retail price method (QC 22751), which is a legal formula rather than an observed wholesale price. A standard drink is 12.5 mL of pure alcohol; the Department of Health's standard drinks guide is the reference. General information only, not advice.
Two things tend to surprise people. The first is that the pub schooner and the bottle-shop stubby are taxed at genuinely different rates on the same beer — the container decides the bracket. The second is the last cell: tax per standard drink is the only figure that lets you compare a cask, a carton and a bottle of spirits on the same footing, and it is where the system stops making sense.
THE WORKING — WHAT THE CALCULATOR DOES
beer: litres × (ABV − 1.15%) × rate (ATO QC 63603). Rate by container and strength: draught subitems 1.2 / 1.6 / 1.11 at $10.57 / $33.11 / $43.39; packaged subitems 1.1 / 1.5 / 1.10 at $55.83 / $65.03 / $65.03. Bands: ≤3%, over 3% to 3.5%, over 3.5%.
spirits and RTDs: litres × ABV × rate, no 1.15% threshold. Spirits subitem 3.2 and pre-mixed subitem 2 both $110.15; brandy subitem 3.1 $102.87.
wine: WET = 29% of a notional wholesale value taken as 50% of the GST-inclusive retail price (QC 22751) = 14.5% of retail. For a glass, the WET share is that figure scaled by the pour: WET on the bottle × pour ÷ 750, because the wine was taxed once at wholesale and the venue's markup is not itself wine-taxed.
GST: price ÷ 11, charged on a price that already contains the excise or WET. standard drinks: litres × ABV × 1000 ÷ 12.5. Full precision throughout; rounded only for display.
Two systems, one bar tab
Australia taxes alcohol two incompatible ways at once, and knowing which is which explains almost every oddity further down this page.
Beer, spirits and pre-mixed drinks are taxed on alcohol. Excise is levied per litre of pure alcohol — a litre of alcohol in a keg, a bottle of gin or a can of bourbon-and-cola attracts a set number of dollars regardless of what the product sells for. Those rates are re-indexed to CPI every February and every August, automatically, without a vote.
Wine is taxed on price. The Wine Equalisation Tax is 29% of a wholesale value — an ad valorem tax, the same basic design as GST. It has not moved since 1 July 2000 and it has never been indexed. A $6 bottle and a $60 bottle can contain identical alcohol and pay ten times different tax.
There is one more wrinkle worth knowing before the numbers start. Beer gets a free ride on its first 1.15% of alcohol: the ATO's wording is that duty "is payable on the alcohol content above 1.15% by volume", so a 4.6% beer is taxed as though it were 3.45% — roughly three-quarters of its alcohol. Spirits and pre-mixed drinks get nothing of the kind. Every drop is dutiable.
And then GST goes on top of the tax
This is the part people assume is an urban myth, so here is the ATO's own worked example rather than ours. Take $120 of wine at wholesale. Add 29% Wine Equalisation Tax: $34.80. That gives a WET-inclusive value of $154.80. GST is then 10% of that — $15.48, not the $12.00 you would pay on the wine alone. The tax base includes the tax. The same sequence applies to beer and spirits: excise is inside the price before GST is worked out on it. If you want to see the GST half of any price on its own, our GST calculator does that arithmetic.
THE WORKING — THE COMPOUNDING SEQUENCE
ATO QC 22750, published example: $120.00 wholesale wine · WET 29% = $34.80 · WET-inclusive value $120.00 + $34.80 = $154.80 · GST 10% of $154.80 = $15.48. GST on the wine alone would be $12.00; the $3.48 difference is GST charged on the wine tax.
The beer equivalent: excise is imposed at manufacture and is part of the price the retailer sets, so the GST on a $60.00 GST-inclusive carton is $60.00 ÷ 11 = $5.45 — computed on a price that already contains $20.19 of excise.
The 20× anomaly
Put every drink on the same footing — tax per standard drink, the same 12.5 mL of pure alcohol in each case, excise and wine tax only with GST stripped out — and the system's shape becomes hard to defend.
| Per standard drink | What we priced | Tax per standard drink |
|---|---|---|
| Cask wine, 4 L | De Bortoli Premium Cabernet Merlot, 13.5%, $21.00 | $0.07 |
| Mass-market bottle, 750 mL | [yellow tail] Shiraz, 13.5%, $8.83 | $0.16 |
| Bottle of wine, 750 mL | Penfolds Koonunga Hill, 14.5%, $17.32 | $0.29 |
| Draught beer, schooner | Full-strength 4.6% on tap, subitem 1.11 | $0.41 |
| Packaged beer, carton | Victoria Bitter 24 × 375 mL, 4.9%, subitem 1.10 | $0.62 |
| Spirits, 700 mL | Smirnoff Red vodka, 37%, subitem 3.2 | $1.38 |
The same 12.5 mL of alcohol carries 7 cents of tax in a cask and $1.38 in a bottle of vodka. Spirits pay about twenty times what cask wine pays. Packaged beer pays nearly nine times. Nothing about the alcohol differs; only the paperwork does.
The $9 bottle — the anomaly at everyday prices
The cask is the extreme case, and it is fair to object that most people do not drink cask wine. So take the wine most Australians do buy. [yellow tail], 19 Crimes, Hardys and Jacob's Creek are the everyday end of the Australian wine shelf, and on the major chains' advertised prices they cluster tightly around $9 a bottle.
| 750 mL, entry tier | Average price | Wine tax (WET) | GST | Total tax | Share of the price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [yellow tail] | $8.83 | $1.28 | $0.80 | $2.08 | 23.6% |
| Jacob’s Creek Classic 2 RETAILERS | $8.99 | $1.30 | $0.82 | $2.12 | 23.6% |
| 19 Crimes Red Blend 1 RETAILER | $9.90 | $1.44 | $0.90 | $2.34 | 23.6% |
| 19 Crimes, Cali tier | $16.33 | $2.37 | $1.48 | $3.85 | 23.6% |
Look down the last column. 23.6% at every single price point, and it will be 23.6% on a $200 bottle too. That is what an ad valorem tax does: it takes a fixed share of the price and has no opinion whatever about the alcohol. Which produces the everyday version of the cask anomaly — the $8.83 bottle carries 16 cents of wine tax per standard drink, against 62 cents on a carton of packaged full-strength beer. The wine most Australians drink is taxed at about a quarter of the rate of the beer most Australians drink, on identical alcohol.
There is a sharper way to see it still, and it needs no second product. Wine tax does not move with strength — so two bottles from the same range at the same $8.83 pay exactly the same $1.28 of wine tax whatever is in them. [yellow tail] Shiraz at 13.5% holds 8.1 standard drinks; the Pinot Grigio, at 11%, holds 6.6. Identical tax, 26 cents a standard drink against 32 — a 23% difference created entirely by the alcohol the tax refuses to look at. Under a volumetric system, the weaker wine would pay less. Under this one it pays more per drink for being weaker.
One footnote on who owns what, because it bears on how independent these labels really are. Accolade Wines and Pernod Ricard's wine business merged in 2025 to form Vinarchy — so Hardys and Jacob's Creek are now the same company. [yellow tail] remains with Casella, 19 Crimes with Treasury Wine Estates.
This is not our discovery, and we would be suspicious of anyone claiming it was. The Parliamentary Budget Office published the same finding in 2015: effective rates that year ran from $2.99 per litre of alcohol on cask wine to $79.38 on spirits and pre-mixed drinks, with packaged full-strength beer at $36.08 against a weighted average of $36.50. That was eleven years ago and nobody in government has updated it since.
Professor Kym Anderson's 2025 working paper reaches the same place from a different direction: the tax on medium- and full-strength packaged beer is "now half as high again as that on even super-premium still wine, and it is nearly twelve times that on non-premium (cask) wine". Our multiple is more conservative than his because we start from a retail cask price rather than his pre-tax figure, and we would rather understate.
One disclosure, because it is the point of a page like this. Anderson's work in this area has been supported by Wine Australia, the University of Adelaide and the Brewers Association of Australia — two of the industries whose tax treatment he is comparing. We use his figures because they are transparently derived and checkable, and we corroborate against the PBO, which takes no industry money. You should know who funds the research you are being shown, including when it agrees with us.
The Henry Review recommended fixing exactly this in 2010, at Recommendation 71: tax all alcohol volumetrically on a common basis. Sixteen years on, the recommendation stands unimplemented and the gap has widened, because one side of it is indexed twice a year and the other has not moved since 2000.
THE WORKING — TAX PER STANDARD DRINK
std drinks = litres × ABV × 1000 ÷ 12.5. tax per std drink = duty ÷ std drinks, duty only, GST excluded.
cask: WET $21.00 × 14.5% = $3.045 ÷ (4 L × 13.5% × 80 = 43.20 std drinks) = $0.0705 → $0.07 · bottle: $17.32 × 14.5% = $2.5114 ÷ 8.70 = $0.2887 → $0.29.
mass-market bottle: [yellow tail] average (8.50 + 8.99 + 9.00) ÷ 3 = $8.83 · WET $8.83 × 14.5% = $1.28035 · GST 8.83 ÷ 11 = $0.80273 · total tax $2.08308 = 23.6% of $8.83 · std drinks at 13.5% = 0.75 × 13.5% × 80 = 8.10 · WET per std drink $1.28035 ÷ 8.10 = $0.1581 → $0.16 · total tax per std drink $0.2572 → $0.26. At 11.0% (Pinot Grigio): 6.60 std drinks, same $1.28035 of WET, total tax per std drink $0.3157 → $0.32 — a 22.7% gap on identical tax.
Other entry-tier means: Jacob’s Creek Classic (8.99 + 8.99 + 9.00) ÷ 3 = $8.99 · 19 Crimes Red Blend $9.90 (single retailer) · 19 Crimes Cali tier (15.99 + 16.99 + 16.00) ÷ 3 = $16.33. Wine tax is 14.5% of retail and total tax 23.6% of retail at every price, so each row is that arithmetic and nothing else.
Packaged beer vs the mass-market bottle, duty only: $0.6221 ÷ $0.1581 = 3.9× · spirits vs the same bottle: $1.3769 ÷ $0.1581 = 8.7×.
schooner: 0.425 × (4.60% − 1.15%) × $43.39 = $0.6362 ÷ 1.564 = $0.4068 → $0.41 · carton: 9.000 × (4.90% − 1.15%) × $65.03 = $21.9476 ÷ 35.28 = $0.6221 → $0.62 · spirits: 0.700 × 37% × $110.15 = $28.5289 ÷ 20.72 = $1.3769 → $1.38.
Multiples: $1.3769 ÷ $0.0705 = 19.5× (spirits vs cask) · $0.6221 ÷ $0.0705 = 8.8× (packaged beer vs cask).
Note the spirits figure is rate-driven, not product-driven: excise per standard drink on any spirit is simply $110.15 ÷ 80 = $1.3769, whatever its strength or price. That is why a disputed ABV on a retailer listing cannot move it.
Multiples: spirits ÷ cask and packaged beer ÷ cask, computed at full precision from the figures above.
Australia's five best-selling beers, taxed
Two of the five beers Australians buy most from a bottle shop are mid-strength — 3.5% ABV. And on packaged beer there is no mid-strength rate to be had. Tariff subitem 1.5 (over 3% to 3.5%) and subitem 1.10 (over 3.5%) carry the identical figure: $65.03 per litre of alcohol. Choosing the weaker beer by the carton earns you no rate discount at all.
The discount exists. It is just not available in a bottle shop. On tap, mid-strength sits at $33.11 per litre of alcohol against full-strength's $43.39 — about 24% off for drinking weaker beer. Walk the same beer out in a slab and that concession vanishes. So the beer at the top of Australia's packaged sales list is a mid-strength that is rated exactly like a full-strength every time someone buys a carton of it.
Here are the five, with what they cost and what of that is tax. Prices are advertised prices at the major chains, captured on 31 July 2026 and named in full in the methods box below.
| Carton, 24 × 375 mL | Average price | Excise | GST | Total tax | Share of price | Tax per std drink |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Great Northern Super Crisp 3.5% MID | $56.982 | $13.75 | $5.18 | $18.93 | 33.2% | $0.75 |
| 2. Carlton Dry 4.5% | $55.482 | $19.61 | $5.04 | $24.65 | 44.4% | $0.76 |
| 3. XXXX Gold 3.5% MID | $54.982 | $13.75 | $5.00 | $18.75 | 34.1% | $0.74 |
| 4. Coopers Original Pale Ale 4.5% | $63.66 | $19.61 | $5.79 | $25.39 | 39.9% | $0.78 |
| 5. Victoria Bitter 4.9% | $61.32 | $21.95 | $5.57 | $27.52 | 44.9% | $0.78 |
Read the last two columns together and the system's shape shows up in a way a price tag never does. Total tax runs from 33.2% to 44.9% of the shelf price across five beers that sit within seven dollars of each other. The two mid-strengths are the cheap end of that range — but only because they contain less alcohol, not because anyone gave them a break. Per litre of alcohol they are taxed at precisely the same $65.03 as the Victoria Bitter.
There is one genuine concession in the mid-strength rows, and it is worth naming accurately rather than overclaiming. Beer's first 1.15% of alcohol is excise-free, and on a 3.5% beer that fixed free ride is a proportionally larger share of the alcohol than it is on a 4.9% one. That, and only that, is why the mid-strengths land at 55 cents of excise per standard drink against full-strength's 62. It is an artefact of a threshold, not a mid-strength rate. Nobody designed it as a health measure.
What it costs the drinker
The drinker's side of the same arithmetic is blunter. A carton of Victoria Bitter holds 35.28 standard drinks at $1.74 each. A carton of Great Northern Super Crisp holds 25.20 at $2.26 — 30% more per standard drink — while carrying the identical excise rate per litre of alcohol. XXXX Gold works out at $2.18, about 25% more than the VB. Drinking less alcohol costs more per unit of it and saves nothing on the rate. Whatever the case for mid-strength beer is, the tax system is not making it.
None of this depends on the price. Excise is charged on alcohol, so the $13.75 on a carton of Super Crisp and the $21.95 on a carton of VB are fixed whether the carton was full price or on special — only the GST moves. If you want to run your own carton through it, the calculator at the top of this page takes the pack, the strength and the price; the GST calculator will separate the GST half of any price on its own.
Where the strengths come from, and why we checked twice
Every ABV in that table is the brewer's own published figure, read off the brewery or brand site on 31 July 2026 and listed with its URL on the data page. That is not fussiness. ABV is the only variable in the excise formula, so a wrong strength is a wrong dollar figure, and two of these five are genuinely easy to get wrong.
Carlton Dry is the trap. The brand's own homepage leads with "3.5% ALC" — but that is Carlton Dry Mid, a separate product sold in separate packs. The flagship listed on the same site's beers page is 4.5%. Take the homepage number and the excise on a carton comes out at $13.75 instead of $19.61 — $5.85 light, an error of 30%. Victoria Bitter is the other one: its brand site publishes no strength for full-strength VB at all, and VB has genuinely moved, cut from 4.9% to 4.8% in 2007 and to 4.6% in 2009 before being restored to 4.9% in 2012. Any source older than 2012 will hand you 4.6%, which understates the carton by $1.76. We took 4.9% from Asahi Beverages, VB's brewer, and cross-checked it against the 1.4 standard drinks printed on the stubby.
The same care applies to the Great Northern range, which is four products at four strengths: Original 4.2%, Super Crisp 3.5%, Light 2.0% and Zero 0.0% — and Zero is not excisable at all. Only Super Crisp is in the table.
What this ranking is, precisely. It measures packaged liquor retail — bottle shops. It is not a measure of what Australians drink in pubs and clubs; the same report named Stone & Wood Pacific Ale the country's top tap beer. Its metric is not stated, and it matters: on Circana's own retail liquor data ranked by dollar value rather than units, the 2023 leader was Hard Rated with Great Northern second. And one of the three commercial contributors of sales data is Asahi, which owns Great Northern. We are using the list because it is the best public ranking that exists and because it has been rendered identically by two outlets — not because it is an audited national statistic. It is not one.
THE WORKING — THE FIVE BEST-SELLERS
Every carton is 24 × 0.375 L = 9.000 L. Beer excise = litres × (ABV − 1.15%) × rate (ATO QC 63603), packaged rates effective 3 Aug 2026 (QC 63605).
Great Northern Super Crisp 3.5%, subitem 1.5 @ $65.03: 9.000 × (3.50% − 1.15%) = 0.2115 LAL · 0.2115 × 65.03 = $13.7538 → $13.75 · GST 56.98 ÷ 11 = $5.1800 → $5.18 · total $18.9338 → $18.93 · 18.9338 ÷ 56.98 = 33.2% · std drinks 9.000 × 3.50% × 80 = 25.20 · 18.9338 ÷ 25.20 = $0.7513 → $0.75 · excise per std drink 13.7538 ÷ 25.20 = $0.5458 → $0.55.
Carlton Dry 4.5%, subitem 1.10 @ $65.03: 9.000 × 0.0335 = 0.3015 LAL · × 65.03 = $19.6065 → $19.61 · GST 55.48 ÷ 11 = $5.0436 → $5.04 · total $24.6501 → $24.65 · 44.4% · std drinks 32.40 · $0.7608 → $0.76 · excise per std drink $0.6051 → $0.61.
XXXX Gold 3.5%, subitem 1.5: excise $13.7538 → $13.75 · GST 54.98 ÷ 11 = $4.9982 → $5.00 · total $18.7520 → $18.75 · 34.1% · std drinks 25.20 · $0.7441 → $0.74.
Coopers Original Pale Ale 4.5%, subitem 1.10: excise $19.6065 → $19.61 · GST 63.66 ÷ 11 = $5.7873 → $5.79 · total $25.3938 → $25.39 · 39.9% · std drinks 32.40 · $0.7838 → $0.78.
Victoria Bitter 4.9%, subitem 1.10: 9.000 × 0.0375 = 0.3375 LAL · × 65.03 = $21.9476 → $21.95 · GST 61.32 ÷ 11 = $5.5745 → $5.57 · total $27.5221 → $27.52 · 44.9% · std drinks 35.28 · $0.7801 → $0.78 · excise per std drink $0.6221 → $0.62.
Price per standard drink: VB 61.32 ÷ 35.28 = $1.7378 → $1.74 · Great Northern 56.98 ÷ 25.20 = $2.2611 → $2.26 (+30.1% on the VB) · XXXX Gold 54.98 ÷ 25.20 = $2.1817 → $2.18 (+25.5%).
Averages. VB (56.95 + 61.00 + 66.00) ÷ 3 = $61.32 · Coopers (59.99 + 64.00 + 67.00) ÷ 3 = $63.66 · Carlton Dry (56.95 + 54.00) ÷ 2 = $55.48 · Great Northern (56.95 + 57.00) ÷ 2 = $56.98 · XXXX Gold (55.95 + 54.00) ÷ 2 = $54.98. Only like-for-like 24 × 375 mL packs are averaged; a Carlton Dry 4 × 6 × 330 mL, a Great Northern 30-pack listing, an XXXX Gold 30-pack and a non-matching case listing were all excluded, and the exclusions are itemised on the data page.
What the country pays
Alcohol raised $8.97 billion for the Commonwealth in 2024–25 — $7.84bn of excise on beer, spirits and pre-mixed drinks, plus $1.13bn of net wine tax. Budget Paper No. 1 sets it out a line at a time, and three things in that table have gone almost entirely unremarked.
| Alcohol tax receipts ($m) | 2024–25 actual | 2025–26 | 2026–27 | 2029–30 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beer excise | 2,729 | 2,710 | 2,810 | 3,100 |
| Spirits excise | 3,320 | 3,270 | 3,300 | 3,380 |
| Other alcoholic beverages (RTDs) | 1,789 | 1,840 | 1,920 | 2,150 |
| Wine Equalisation Tax (net) | 1,134 | 1,110 | 1,160 | 1,290 |
| Total alcohol tax | 8,972 | 8,930 | 9,190 | 9,920 |
Spirits now raise more than beer
Spirits excise brought in $3,320m in 2024–25 against beer's $2,729m — a gap of $591m. In the PBO's 2014–15 snapshot the order was the other way round, beer $2.31bn to spirits $2.00bn. The crossover has happened, it is in the Budget papers, and as far as we can tell nobody has written it up.
Alcohol has overtaken tobacco
The sleeper in the table. Alcohol excise raised $7,838m in 2024–25 against tobacco's $7,767m — the first crossing. On the 2026–27 forecasts it is not close: alcohol $8,030m, tobacco $3,560m. Tobacco excise is collapsing under the illicit trade while alcohol grinds upward twice a year, and the practical consequence is that alcohol is becoming a structurally more important revenue line than tobacco ever was at its peak.
Wine supplies the most alcohol and pays the least tax
On AIHW's 2023–24 figures, wine accounted for 42% of all the pure alcohol available for consumption in Australia — more than beer (32%) or spirits (23%). It paid $1,091m in wine tax that year. Beer, supplying about two-thirds as much alcohol, paid $2,599m. That is the anomaly again, seen from the Treasury's side of the counter: the largest single source of the nation's alcohol is its smallest single source of alcohol tax.
For scale against the rest of the Commonwealth's revenue — income tax raises roughly twenty times the entire alcohol take — it is worth seeing where your own contribution sits. The income tax calculator puts the much larger number next to it.
THE WORKING — THE BUDGET LINES
2024–25 actual, $m: beer 2,729 + spirits 3,320 + other alcoholic beverages 1,789 + WET 1,134 = 8,972. Excise only (WET excluded): 2,729 + 3,320 + 1,789 = 7,838 vs tobacco excise 7,767 = +71.
2026–27 estimate, $m: 2,810 + 3,300 + 1,920 = 8,030 alcohol excise vs 3,560 tobacco = 2.3×. 2023–24 actual (BP1 2025–26 Table 4.7): 2,599 + 3,208 + 1,686 + 1,091 = 8,584; beer ÷ WET = 2.4×.
Consumption shares: AIHW, Alcohol available for consumption, updated 4 Nov 2025, data year 2023–24 — wine 42%, beer 32%, spirits 23%, cider 3% of pure alcohol available.
What the freeze is actually worth
Draught beer excise has been frozen since 1 August 2025 — a two-year hold, legislated by the Excise Tariff Amendment (Draught Beer) Act 2026 after a tariff proposal tabled the previous July. The Prime Minister called it "one of the most popular commitments we took to the election… the first time this has happened in 40 years". It is real: subitems 1.2, 1.6 and 1.11 carry identical rates in the ATO's February and August columns while everything else moved.
Nobody has published what it is worth. So: had draught been indexed by the same factors actually applied to packaged beer over the same period — 1.01612 in August 2025, 1.01900 in February 2026, 1.02010 in August 2026 — the full-strength draught rate would now be $45.83 per litre of alcohol rather than $43.39. That is $2.44 per litre of alcohol not collected.
Passed through to the glass, the freeze is worth 3.6 cents on a schooner and 4.8 cents on a pint. Which is, on any honest reading, not very much. Two years of the most-cited beer policy in a generation amounts to roughly four cents a beer.
The counterweight, because a number that small invites a cheap conclusion and the cheap conclusion is wrong. The same freeze is worth $4.21 on a 50-litre keg, and a mid-sized venue moving twenty kegs a week is keeping about $4,400 a year it would otherwise have handed over — money that lands on a hospitality margin measured in low single digits. The saving was never going to show up in your round; it was designed to show up in the publican's accounts, and there it is real. Both things are true, and the piece that quotes only one of them is doing you a disservice.
Note also what the freeze does not cover. Packaged beer was indexed in February 2026 and again on 3 August 2026. If you drink your beer from a can, the freeze has never applied to you at all.
THE WORKING — THE COUNTERFACTUAL
Draught full-strength (subitem 1.11) held at $43.3903/LAL since 1 Aug 2025. Counterfactual: $43.3903 × 1.01612 × 1.01900 × 1.02010 = $45.8305 → $45.83. Forgone = $45.8305 − $43.39 = $2.4405 → $2.44 per LAL.
Per serving at 4.6% ABV, beer formula with the 1.15% threshold: schooner 0.425 × 0.0345 × 2.4405 = $0.0358 → 3.6c · pint 0.570 × 0.0345 × 2.4405 = $0.0480 → 4.8c · 50 L keg 50 × 0.0345 × 2.4405 = $4.2099 → $4.21. Venue illustration: $4.2099 × 20 kegs × 52 weeks = $4,378/yr.
Indexation factors are those actually applied to packaged beer at each date (ATO QC 63605 and the data.gov.au historical rates file). Freeze provenance: tariff proposal tabled 24 Jul 2025, effective 1 Aug 2025; Excise Tariff Amendment (Draught Beer) Act 2026, Act No. 36 of 2026, assented 8 Apr 2026. Indexation resumes Aug 2027.
The ratchet
Twenty years, one table. These are the ATO's own published rates on 1 August 2006 and on 3 August 2026, dollars per litre of alcohol.
| Rate per litre of alcohol | 1 Aug 2006 | 3 Aug 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Packaged beer, full strength | $37.90 | $65.03 | +71.6% |
| Packaged beer, low strength | $32.52 | $55.83 | +71.7% |
| Draught beer, full strength | $26.68 | $43.39 | +62.6% |
| Draught beer, mid strength | $20.39 | $33.11 | +62.4% |
| Spirits | $64.21 | $110.15 | +71.5% |
| Brandy | $59.94 | $102.87 | +71.6% |
| Pre-mixed drinks (RTDs) | $37.90 | $110.15 | +190.6% |
| Wine (WET) | 29% | 29% | 0% |
The mechanism is worth quoting precisely, because one word in it does all the work. The indexation factor divides the latest June or December CPI by the previous highest June or December CPI since June 1983. Highest, not latest. The rate can rise. It can hold. It cannot fall.
That is not a theoretical distinction — it has been tested. CPI fell in the June 2020 quarter, so the August 2020 indexation did not happen: packaged full-strength beer sat at $51.31 from 3 February 2020 all the way through to 1 February 2021. Then it resumed, from the old high rather than from a lower base. Prices came down; the tax paused and waited.
Wine's 0% is the same story from the other end. WET is a percentage of price, so it rises automatically with prices and never needs indexing — which is precisely why the gap between the two systems widens every year without anyone deciding that it should. If you want to see what two decades of that compounding does to money generally, our inflation calculator is the plainer version of the same arithmetic.
THE WORKING — TWENTY YEARS
Percentage change = (2026 rate ÷ 2006 rate − 1) × 100. Packaged full 65.03 ÷ 37.90 = +71.6% · packaged low 55.83 ÷ 32.52 = +71.7% · draught full 43.39 ÷ 26.68 = +62.6% · draught mid 33.11 ÷ 20.39 = +62.4% · spirits 110.15 ÷ 64.21 = +71.5% · brandy 102.87 ÷ 59.94 = +71.6% · RTDs 110.15 ÷ 37.90 = +190.6%.
The RTD figure includes the step change of 27 Apr 2008, when the rate went from $39.36 to $66.67 per LAL — +69.4% overnight — and never came back down. Source: data.gov.au historical excise rates, 1965 to present.
Six oddities that are all real
None of these are loopholes or errors. Each is what the rules say, working exactly as written.
1. The same can, taxed 2.2× as hard
A 375 mL can at 4.8% ABV. If it is beer, subitem 1.10 with the 1.15% threshold: $0.89 of excise. If it is a pre-mixed drink, subitem 2 with no threshold: $1.98. Identical volume, identical alcohol, 2.2 times the tax, decided entirely by what is in the can.
2. There is no mid-strength discount on packaged beer
Subitem 1.5 (over 3% to 3.5%) and subitem 1.10 (over 3.5%) carry the identical rate of $65.03. Buy mid-strength in cans or stubbies and you pay the full-strength rate on it. Only draught gets a genuine mid band, at $33.11 against $43.39 — about 24% off. Australia offers a tax break for drinking weaker beer only if you drink it in a pub.
The prices we captured make the point a second time. A carton of full-strength Victoria Bitter averaged $61.32 for 35.28 standard drinks — $1.74 a standard drink. A carton of mid-strength XXXX Gold averaged $54.98 for 25.20 — $2.18. Drinking the weaker beer from a carton costs about 25% more per standard drink, and carries exactly the same excise rate per litre of alcohol while doing it. Two of Australia’s five best-selling packaged beers are mid-strength; section 04 works all five through.
3. The bottle shop is taxed harder than the bar
Packaged full-strength beer pays $65.03 per litre of alcohol against draught's $43.39 — 50% more excise, or 61 cents a standard drink against 41. At the low-strength end the gap is not 50% but 5.3 times: $55.83 packaged against $10.57 draught. And "draught" is defined by the container, not the tap — over 48 litres, or 8 to 48 litres and designed to connect to a pressurised system. A keg is draught; a growler you filled from it is not.
4. Brandy still has its 1979 discount
Brandy sits at $102.87 per litre of alcohol while every other spirit pays $110.15 — a $7.28 concession introduced on 9 November 1979 to help grape growers, and never repealed. On a 700 mL bottle at 37% it is worth $1.89 less tax than an identical bottle of gin.
5. The alcopops tax happened in one day
On 27 April 2008 the rate on pre-mixed drinks went from $39.36 to $66.67 per litre of alcohol — up 69.4% overnight. It never came back down, and because indexation compounds from wherever a rate happens to sit, that single morning is why the RTD line shows +190.6% over twenty years while beer shows +71.6%.
6. Some wine pays no net wine tax at all
The WET producer rebate and the excise remission scheme are both capped at $400,000 a year from 1 July 2026 — the two moved together, which went unreported. The practical effect is that a bottle from a small winery may carry no net wine tax whatever, while a chemically identical bottle from a large producer carries the full 29%. The PBO put it plainly in 2015: many small wine producers pay no net WET.
THE WORKING — THE ODDITIES
Same can, 375 mL @ 4.8%: as beer 0.375 × (0.048 − 0.0115) × 65.03 = $0.8901 → $0.89 · as RTD 0.375 × 0.048 × 110.15 = $1.9827 → $1.98 · ratio 2.23 → 2.2×.
Packaged vs draught: 65.03 ÷ 43.39 = 1.499 → +50% · low strength 55.83 ÷ 10.57 = 5.28 → 5.3× · draught mid discount 1 − (33.11 ÷ 43.39) = 23.7% → ~24%.
Brandy: 110.15 − 102.87 = $7.28/LAL · 700 mL @ 37%: 0.7 × 0.37 × 110.15 = $28.5289 vs 0.7 × 0.37 × 102.87 = $26.6433 · difference $1.8856 → $1.89.
Alcopops: 66.67 ÷ 39.36 = 1.694 → +69.4%, effective 27 Apr 2008. Rebate caps: WET producer rebate and excise remission scheme both $400,000/yr from 1 Jul 2026 (previously $350,000 for the WET rebate).
What if we taxed it all the same way?
Everything above is what the system does. This section is what it would do instead — and the alternative is not a thought experiment we invented. It is a numbered recommendation of the last full review of the Australian tax system, and it has sat unimplemented for sixteen years.
Which rate — and why we are not the ones choosing it
A single rate is only interesting if you can say what it is, and choosing one ourselves would be the point at which this stopped being arithmetic and started being an opinion. We did not have to choose. Three independent sources land on the same number, and it is a number already on this page.
The Henry Review, at p.441: "As the current full-strength packaged beer excise rate is closest to the estimates of the average spillover cost of alcohol in Australia, it would be appropriate for rates of tax on other products to converge at this rate over time." Treasury's own costing minute for the recommendation, CQAU 2009-225, states the assumption flatly — the common rate "is assumed to be the current full strength packaged beer rate, including the 1.15 per cent alcohol excise exemption threshold". And the Parliamentary Budget Office, working from what was actually collected, reported in 2015 that its weighted-average effective rate across all alcohol "is very similar to the effective excise rate on full-strength packaged beer".
So the modelled rate is the full-strength packaged beer rate: $65.03 per litre of alcohol from 3 August 2026 — the same $65.03 that taxes the carton in section 04 — with the 1.15% excise-free threshold extended to every product and the Wine Equalisation Tax abolished. That has a useful consequence for anyone checking us. The whole of this section re-derives from a single number, and it is a number the ATO republishes twice a year.
"One rate" does not mean the same tax in every drink
This is the part that gets written up wrongly, and it is worth slowing down for. Recommendation 71 does not abolish beer's 1.15% excise-free threshold. It extends it to everything. A fixed free ride on the first 1.15% of alcohol is proportionally enormous in a 2.7% beer and almost nothing in a 40% whisky — so a single rate per litre of alcohol still produces different tax per standard drink. It compresses the spread. It does not flatten it.
Henry says exactly that, with figures, at p.440: spirits then faced effective rates about 2.2 times those on full-strength packaged beer, and under a common rate would face about 1.3 times. Run the same comparison on the 2026 rates — a 40% spirit against a 4.8% packaged beer — and we get 2.23× today, falling to 1.28× at the common rate. A seventeen-year-old Treasury calculation, reproducing itself on rates nobody involved could have known.
What the table is, and what it is not
Two things to fix in place before the numbers. First, Recommendation 71 proposed convergence over five to fifteen years, by letting indexation close the gap rather than by moving rates overnight. What follows is the endpoint of that convergence priced at today's rates — not next Tuesday's shelf.
Second, and this belongs above the table rather than under it: the retail column assumes 100% immediate pass-through. Every cent of the tax change reaches the price, and the GST rides on it, which is the × 1.1 in our working and the compounding our GST calculator separates out of any price. That is an assumption, not a fact — producers and retailers absorb and over-shift tax changes routinely. We use it because it is the convention ACIL Allen used in the only Australian modelling of this recommendation, and because a stated assumption you can argue with beats a hidden one you cannot.
| Priced at our 31 July 2026 captures | Tax now | At $65.03 | Δ retail (full pass-through) | New price | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Packaged beer — the benchmark, so it does not move | |||||
| Victoria Bitter carton, 24 × 375 mL 4.9% · $61.32 |
$21.95 | $21.95 | — | $61.32 | 0.0% |
| Coopers Original Pale Ale carton 4.5% · $63.66 |
$19.61 | $19.61 | — | $63.66 | 0.0% |
| Carlton Dry carton 4.5% · $55.48 |
$19.61 | $19.61 | — | $55.48 | 0.0% |
| Great Northern Super Crisp carton 3.5% · $56.98 |
$13.75 | $13.75 | — | $56.98 | 0.0% |
| XXXX Gold carton 3.5% · $54.98 |
$13.75 | $13.75 | — | $54.98 | 0.0% |
| Low-strength carton ILLUSTRATIVE PRICE 2.7% · $50.00 assumed |
$7.79 | $9.07 | +$1.41 | $51.41 | +2.8% |
| Draught beer — the pub loses its discount | |||||
| Schooner, full-strength on tap MEDIA-REPORTED PRICE 4.6% · $9.50 |
$0.64 | $0.95 | +$0.35 | $9.85 | +3.7% |
| Pint, full-strength on tap SCALED 4.6% · $12.74 |
$0.85 | $1.28 | +$0.47 | $13.21 | +3.7% |
| Schooner, mid-strength on tap MEDIA-REPORTED PRICE 3.45% · $9.50 |
$0.32 | $0.64 | +$0.34 | $9.84 | +3.6% |
| Wine — the whole of the change, in one column | |||||
| De Bortoli Premium cask, 4 L 13.5% · $21.00 |
$3.05 | $32.12 | +$31.99 | $52.99 | +152.3% |
| 19 Crimes Red Blend, 750 mL 13.5% · $9.90 |
$1.44 | $6.02 | +$5.05 | $14.95 | +51.0% |
| 19 Crimes, Cali tier, 750 mL 14.0% · $16.33 |
$2.37 | $6.27 | +$4.29 | $20.62 | +26.3% |
| Penfolds Koonunga Hill, 750 mL 14.5% · $17.32 |
$2.51 | $6.51 | +$4.40 | $21.72 | +25.4% |
| A $20 bottle ILLUSTRATIVE PRICE 13.5% · $20.00 assumed |
$2.90 | $6.02 | +$3.44 | $23.44 | +17.2% |
| Penfolds Bin 28 Shiraz, 750 mL 14.5% · $49.32 |
$7.15 | $6.51 | −$0.70 | $48.62 | −1.4% |
| A $50 bottle ILLUSTRATIVE PRICE 14.0% · $50.00 assumed |
$7.25 | $6.27 | −$1.08 | $48.92 | −2.2% |
| Spirits and pre-mixed drinks — the other end | |||||
| Smirnoff Red vodka, 700 mL 37% · $48.00 |
$28.53 | $16.32 | −$13.43 | $34.57 | −28.0% |
| Johnnie Walker Red Label, 700 mL 40% · $49.33 |
$30.84 | $17.68 | −$14.47 | $34.86 | −29.3% |
| Jim Beam & Cola, 4 × 375 mL 4.8% · $23.00 |
$7.93 | $3.56 | −$4.81 | $18.19 | −20.9% |
| Nip at a bar, 30 mL ILLUSTRATIVE PRICE 40% · $12.00 assumed |
$1.32 | $0.76 | −$0.62 | $11.38 | −5.2% |
The carton doesn't move. The pub does.
The intuitive summary of this reform — beer up a bit, wine up a lot, spirits down — is wrong in its first clause, and the error is worth correcting because it is the one every explainer makes. Packaged beer above 3% does not move at all. Not a little. Zero. It is already taxed at $65.03, so it is the benchmark, and a carton of Victoria Bitter carries the same $21.95 before and after. So does the Great Northern, the XXXX Gold, the Carlton Dry and the Coopers.
What moves is the pub. A schooner of full-strength draught goes up 35 cents — not because beer is taxed harder, but because the draught discount stops existing. Tap beer currently sits at $43.39 against packaged beer's $65.03; a single rate is a single rate, and the keg loses its 33% advantage. On full pass-through that is 3.7% on a $9.50 schooner. For scale, the draught freeze that dominated a year of beer-tax coverage is worth 3.6 cents; this is nearly ten times it, in the other direction.
The number the wine industry is really arguing about: about forty dollars
Wine is where the reform actually bites, and the shape of it is not "wine goes up". It is that wine gets taxed on its alcohol instead of its price, which means cheap wine pays much more and expensive wine pays slightly less. There is therefore a price at which a bottle is indifferent — and as far as we can tell nobody has published it.
| 750 mL bottle at this strength… | …pays less tax under a single rate above |
|---|---|
| 11.0% ABV | $33.13 |
| 12.5% ABV | $38.18 |
| 13.5% ABV — the common red strength | $41.54 |
| 14.0% ABV | $43.22 |
| 14.5% ABV | $44.90 |
At the ordinary red-wine strength of 13.5%, the break-even is $41.54. Everything below about forty dollars pays more; everything above pays less. That single line is the whole politics of the Australian wine industry's position on volumetric tax, stated as a number rather than as a posture — and it is why a $9.90 bottle rises 51% while a $49.32 bottle falls 1.4%.
The cask is the extreme of the same arithmetic. Four litres of 13.5% wine currently attracts $3.05 of wine tax, because it costs $21.00 and wine tax is a share of price. Taxed on its alcohol instead — and a 4-litre cask holds more pure alcohol than a carton of full-strength beer does — it would attract $32.12. At full pass-through that is $21.00 becoming $52.99: the same box at two and a half times the price, which is the kind of shift our Wages through the Ages page measures in hours of work rather than dollars.
The finding that cuts against the case
One row in that table goes the wrong way for anyone arguing this on health grounds, and we would rather publish it than let someone else find it. Low-strength packaged beer gets dearer.
Beer at or under 3% has its own subitem, 1.1, at $55.83 rather than $65.03 — a real concession, deliberately given to weak beer, that a single rate abolishes. The extended 1.15% threshold gives some of it back but not all: a 2.7% carton goes from $7.79 of excise to $9.07, and on full pass-through that is +2.8% on the price. The weakest beer on the shelf is the only beer in the table that gets more expensive. Treasury's own 2009 costing shows the same effect. It is not fatal to the argument — low-strength beer still ends up with the lowest tax per standard drink of anything we have modelled, at 47 cents — but a page that only published the convenient rows would not deserve to be believed about the inconvenient ones.
What it does to the anomaly
The point of the reform is not the price of any single drink. It is what happens to the spread — the thing section 03 is about.
| Tax per standard drink | Now | At a common $65.03 |
|---|---|---|
| Cask wine, 4 L, 13.5% | $0.07 | $0.74 |
| $20 bottle of wine, 13.5% | $0.36 | $0.74 |
| Schooner of draught, 4.6% | $0.41 | $0.61 |
| Mid-strength carton, 3.5% | $0.55 | $0.55 |
| Full-strength carton, 4.9% | $0.62 | $0.62 |
| Penfolds Bin 28, 14.5% | $0.82 | $0.75 |
| Spirits, 37–40% | $1.38 | $0.79 |
The thing our own table could not have printed
A small observation that falls out of building this. Two of the four brands in the mass-market wine table in section 03 — [yellow tail] and Jacob's Creek Classic — carry no single settled strength anywhere we could verify. We published their tax to the cent regardless, and the figures are exact, because the Wine Equalisation Tax takes no account of alcohol whatsoever. Under Recommendation 71 we could not have published a figure for either bottle at all. The current system can tax a wine whose strength nobody has bothered to publish; a volumetric one cannot, because strength is the only thing it looks at.
What it would raise, and what it would cost
Treasury costed this recommendation at the time. The costing minute puts the gain in 2025–26 at $1.33 billion under a slow fifteen-year transition, or $1.40 billion under a five-year one. The caveat has to travel with the figure every time it is quoted: those are 2009 projections built off a 1 July 2010 start and the forward estimates of the day. They are a counterfactual, not a forecast of the world we are in. What can be said flatly is that Treasury costed this in 2009, put the 2025–26 gain at $1.33 billion, and we are now in 2026 with nobody having collected it.
We looked for the other number — the revenue-neutral rate, the one at which the change raises nothing and only redistributes — and it does not exist for Australia. ACIL Allen computed a revenue-neutral $14.08 per litre of alcohol, but that is wine only and it is 2015. We are not going to index somebody else's partial figure forward eleven years and present it as an answer.
The costs are real and they are not ours to estimate. ACIL Allen, modelling for the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education in July 2015, put the scenario closest to Recommendation 71 at roughly 14,900 full-time-equivalent jobs lost across the economy and a 6.7% fall in alcohol consumption. Those are their figures from a computable general equilibrium model. Ours contains no behavioural response at all, so any number on this page about jobs, consumption or health belongs to ACIL Allen, to Byrnes (2010) or to Doran (2013) — never to our arithmetic.
The academic case against a single rate is worth stating too, and it is more interesting than the industry version. Yang and Srivastava, in the Economic Record in 2023, found that beverage type predicts risky drinking behaviour independently of alcohol content — which, if it holds, means a single volumetric rate is not automatically the optimal one, because the harm is not a pure function of the ethanol. The same paper also found that cask wine is "significantly undertaxed relative to the damage it does". Both findings are theirs; we are not adjudicating between them.
Where the independent modelling agrees with us
A useful check on arithmetic this simple is whether a proper model, built by other people for a different client, lands anywhere near it. ACIL Allen's scenario S3 gives regular keg beer +3.69%. Our schooner comes out at +3.7%. They get a fall on premium bottled wine; we get a fall on premium bottled wine. Different method, different decade, different commissioning body — a health foundation rather than a calculator site — and the same answer.
Where we differ, we are the conservative one, and that needs saying so it does not look like softening. Their cask figure is about +212%; ours is +152.3%. The gap is not a disagreement about the tax — it is that our 2026 cask price of $21.00 is high relative to the tax on it, so the same dollar increase lands as a smaller percentage. We are not claiming the milder number is the better one. It is simply what our own captured price produces.
What the rate is supposed to be for
Recommendation 71 does not say tax alcohol as heavily as possible. It says the rate "should be based on evidence of the net marginal spillover cost of alcohol" — the cost that falls on people other than the drinker. Henry is precise about what that excludes, at footnote 18: not "private intangible costs (such as pain and suffering)".
That distinction gets lost constantly. The most-quoted figure in Australian alcohol policy is the $66.8 billion annual social cost estimated by Whetton and colleagues in 2021. But $48.6 billion of that is the intangible component — the valuation of harm to drinkers themselves and their families — which is precisely the part Henry says a tax rate should not be set on. The number is not wrong. It is being used to do a job its own framework says it cannot do. We take no position on how much anyone should drink; we are pointing out that a rate-setting argument and a harm-accounting argument are two different arguments.
Why sixteen years produced nothing
The record is short, and it is one-directional.
- 2010. The government declined the recommendation. The Office of Impact Analysis lists the seven Henry measures that were taken up; alcohol is not among them.
- 2015. The Re:think tax discussion paper reproduced Treasury's own tax-per-standard-drink chart and its worked example of a ginger beer taxed at $21.54 as a pre-mixed drink or $8.70 as a wine — and then asked no discussion question about alcohol at all. The Tax White Paper it was leading to was never published.
- 2016. The WET producer rebate was trimmed. The tax itself was not touched.
- 2017. The Senate Select Committee on Red Tape recommended a single volumetric rate again, as its Recommendation 1.
- 2025. The excise remission and WET rebate caps were both raised to $400,000, and draught beer excise was frozen for two years.
Sixteen years on, the concessions have grown and the base has not changed. Meanwhile one side of the system is indexed twice a year and the other has been 29% since 1 July 2000, so the gap Recommendation 71 was written to close has widened every February and every August since it was written — which our inflation calculator is the plainer illustration of.
THE WORKING — RECOMMENDATION 71 ON 2026 RATES
Modelled scenario: common rate = the full-strength packaged beer rate, subitem 1.10, $65.03/LAL effective 3 Aug 2026 (ATO QC 63605); the 1.15% excise-free threshold extended to ALL products; WET abolished. New duty = litres × (ABV − 1.15%) × $65.03 for everything. Δ retail = Δ duty × 1.1 at 100% pass-through, the 1.1 being GST on the changed duty.
4 L cask, 13.5%. now: WET = $21.00 × 14.5% = $3.045 (29% of half the retail price, ATO QC 22751). new: 4.000 L × (13.50% − 1.15%) = 0.4940 LAL · × $65.03 = $32.1248. Δ excise +$29.08 · Δ retail × 1.1 = +$31.99 · $21.00 → $52.99, +152.3%.
VB carton 24 × 375 mL, 4.9%. 9.000 L × (4.90% − 1.15%) = 0.3375 LAL · × $65.03 = $21.9476. Rate now $65.03. Rate after $65.03. Change: nil.
Smirnoff Red 700 mL, 37%. now: 0.700 × 37% × $110.15 = $28.5289 (no threshold today). new: 0.700 × (37% − 1.15%) = 0.25095 LAL × $65.03 = $16.3193 · Δ retail −$13.43 · $48.00 → $34.57, −28.0%.
Schooner, 425 mL 4.6%. now 0.425 × 0.0345 × $43.39 = $0.6362. new 0.425 × 0.0345 × $65.03 = $0.9535. Δ $0.3173 · × 1.1 = $0.3490 → +$0.35 on $9.50 = +3.7%.
Low-strength carton, 2.7%. now 9.000 × (2.70% − 1.15%) × $55.83 (subitem 1.1) = $7.7883. new 9.000 × 0.0155 × $65.03 = $9.0717. Δ $1.2834 · × 1.1 = $1.4118 → +$1.41 on the $50.00 illustrative price = +2.8%.
Break-even bottle price = 0.75 × (ABV − 1.15%) × $65.03 ÷ 14.5%: 11.0% → $33.1317 · 12.5% → $38.1771 · 13.5% → $41.5407 · 14.0% → $43.2225 · 14.5% → $44.9043.
Tax per standard drink at the common rate is ABV-driven only: (1 − 1.15 ÷ ABV) × $65.03 ÷ 80. 13.5% → $0.7436 · 14.5% → $0.7484 · 4.6% → $0.6097 · 4.9% → $0.6221 · 3.5% → $0.5458 · 2.7% → $0.4667 · 37% → $0.7876 · 40% → $0.7895 · 4.8% → $0.6181. Spread across the seven published rows: now $1.376875 ÷ $0.070486 = 19.5340 → 19.5× · after $0.789505 ÷ $0.545787 = 1.4465 → 1.45× (quoted to two places; at one place, 1.4, it understates the residual spread).
Henry p.440 ratio reproduction, inputs named because the ratio is mildly ABV-sensitive: a 40% spirit against a 4.8% packaged beer. now $1.376875 ÷ $0.618124 = 2.2275 → 2.23× (Henry: about 2.2×). after $0.789505 ÷ $0.618124 = 1.2773 → 1.28× (Henry: about 1.3×). At our VB's 4.9% the same pair gives 2.21× and 1.27×.
OUR OWN DERIVATIONS — not published figures, and labelled here rather than in the article. (a) Third route to the rate: the PBO's 2014–15 weighted-average effective rate across all alcohol, $36.50/LAL, scaled by the movement in packaged full-strength beer over the same period, $36.50 × ($65.03 ÷ $36.08) = $65.79 — within $0.76 of the modelled common rate. (b) National average alcohol tax per litre of pure alcohol, 2023–24: $8,584m ÷ 217.1 ML = $39.54/LAL, which is what the wine share drags the average down to today.
Not published anywhere on this page, and why: a revenue-neutral all-alcohol rate (none exists for Australia; ACIL Allen's $14.08 is wine-only and 2015), any indexed-forward version of an older academic rate estimate, and the 2010 refusal quote whose primary source we could not retrieve. Treasury's revenue figures ($1.33bn / $1.40bn for 2025–26) are 2009 projections off a 1 July 2010 start and are quoted as such.
Checking the industry's own number
The most-quoted number in Australian beer-tax coverage is the Brewers Association's claim that tax is about 42% of a carton. It appears in article after article, and the page it comes from carries no methodology, no rates, no subitems and no arithmetic at all.
So we computed it independently — five times over, once for each of Australia’s five best-selling packaged beers at the major chains’ advertised prices. Total tax runs from 33.2% of the shelf price on a carton of XXXX Gold to 44.9% on a carton of Victoria Bitter. The industry’s 42% sits inside that band, towards the full-strength end — and on the three full-strength beers, which is what the claim is really about, we get 44.9% for VB, 44.4% for Carlton Dry and 39.9% for Coopers Pale.
So the industry’s figure is a fair description of a full-strength carton, and we can show you why, which is the part they have never published. It is a poor description of a mid-strength one — and mid-strength is what Australia’s two best-selling packaged beers actually are.
One thing the swap in prices taught us, and it is counterintuitive enough to be worth its own paragraph. Our earlier figure for that VB carton was 43.0%, computed on a $64.66 average from smaller retailers. The major chains sell the same carton for $61.32 — 5% less — and the tax share went up, to 44.9%. That is not an error. The excise is $21.95 either way, fixed in dollars by the alcohol in the box; only the GST follows the price down. So the cheaper the carton, the larger the share of it that is tax. Chase a special and you are buying a more heavily taxed beer, not a less heavily taxed one.
We are pointing this out for a reason that cuts against our own interest in a good headline. The number most quoted in Australian beer-tax coverage comes from a lobby group and arrives with no methodology attached — and it appears to be substantially correct. The problem was never that the industry's figure was wrong. The problem is that nobody, including the journalists repeating it, could check it.
Now you can. Every rate above carries its tariff subitem, every price carries its retailer and capture date, and every figure on this page is recomputed from those inputs by a verification script that must report zero mismatches before the page ships. Check our working before you quote us — that is what it is there for.
Australia has had no official retail price series for alcohol since 2011, which is why the prices on this page are dated commercial captures rather than statistics. A photographed price board from a named venue, a dated shelf price, or a docket with the date on it genuinely improves this page — and if you are a journalist working on alcohol tax, we will happily run a specific cut of these numbers for you.
Seen a price we should know about?
Send us a dated shelf or bar price and we’ll fold it into the averages, with credit. Journalists: every figure here is free to use with a link, and we can send the full tax table.
Methods — every input on this page
Three industry bodies have an interest in these numbers being wrong. So here is everything, in one place: what we assumed, what we measured, what we could not get, and how each figure was rounded.
Rates
Every volumetric rate is the ATO's published figure effective 3 August 2026 (QC 63605, updated 29 July 2026), taken from the forthcoming column rather than the expiring one. Excise is re-indexed to CPI every February and August; the next change is 1 February 2027, and 1 August 2027 is when the draught freeze expires. Wine is 29% WET, unchanged since 1 July 2000 and never indexed.
Strengths and serving sizes
Named beers use the brewer's own published strength, read from the brewery or brand site on 31 July 2026 and listed with its URL on the data page: Victoria Bitter 4.9% (Asahi Beverages — VB's own brand site publishes no strength for full-strength VB, and VB has moved, 4.9% to 4.8% in 2007 to 4.6% in 2009 and back to 4.9% in 2012, so pre-2012 sources are a live trap), Coopers Original Pale Ale 4.5%, Carlton Dry 4.5% (not the 3.5% that leads the brand homepage — that is Carlton Dry Mid, a different product), Great Northern Super Crisp 3.5% (the range also holds Original 4.2%, Light 2.0% and Zero 0.0%) and XXXX Gold 3.5%. Each cross-checks against the standard drinks printed on the pack. Elsewhere ABVs are 4.6% for full-strength beer, 3.45%–3.5% for mid, 2.7% for low, 4.8% where a specific can is described, 11.5% for cask wine, 13.5% for a standard bottle, 37% for gin and vodka and 40% for whisky — label strengths where a named product is priced, otherwise the classes used in Anderson (2025), Table 3. Serving volumes: schooner 425 mL, pint 570 mL, middy or pot 285 mL, can or stubby 375 mL, six-pack 2.25 L, carton 9.0 L, wine pour 150 mL or 250 mL, bottle 750 mL, cask 4 L, nip 30 mL. Where a state uses different glass sizes — South Australia in particular, where a schooner is reported as 285 mL and a "pint" as 425 mL — we could find no primary source and so have not built any figure on it.
Prices
Australia has had no official retail price series for alcohol since the ABS stopped collecting it in June 2011. Nothing has replaced it. So every price here is a dated commercial capture, and we tell you exactly whose.
Method: for each product we took the current advertised price from three named Australian retailers on 31 July 2026 and published the mean, rounded to the cent. Every percentage-of-price and GST figure on this page is computed from that mean, not from a round number chosen to look tidy. Where we could only reach two retailers we say so and label it a two-retailer average. Where we could reach none, the figure is labelled an assumption and never presented as an observed price.
Two samples, and you should know which is which. Dan Murphy’s, BWS, Liquorland, First Choice, Vintage Cellars, Woolworths and Coles all block automated retrieval, which for a long time left the major chains out of this page entirely. The beer and mass-market wine prices below close that gap: they are advertised prices at the named major retailer, read from Google Shopping listings and captured by hand on 31 July 2026. We want to be exact about what that means — we saw a Google Shopping listing showing that retailer’s advertised price. We did not fetch it from the retailer’s own site, and we are not going to imply we did. The remaining wine and all the spirits still come from smaller named Australian liquor retailers that publish retrievable prices: real advertised prices at real shops, but not the majors.
One retailer we reached was excluded from every average: it listed a $9–$12 wine at $47.99 and ran 15–40% above everyone else on beer and spirits, which is a data-quality problem rather than a price. Four founder-supplied listings were excluded too, all for the same reason — they were not the same pack. A Carlton Dry 4 × 6 × 330 mL at $53.95 is a different volume and therefore a different excise figure; a Great Northern listing at $44.95 was a different product in the range; an XXXX Gold 30-pack at $52.90 and a case listing at $47.99 are different formats. Only like-for-like 24 × 375 mL packs are averaged. Where one retailer listed bottles and another cans of the same beer at the same volume, we did average them, and we say so in the table.
| Product | Advertised prices, 31 July 2026 | Mean used |
|---|---|---|
| Major chains — via Google Shopping | ||
| Great Northern Super Crisp, 24 × 375 mL, 3.5% 2 RETAILERS | Dan Murphy’s $56.95 · Liquorland $57.00 | $56.98 |
| Carlton Dry, 24 × 375 mL cans, 4.5% 2 RETAILERS | Dan Murphy’s $56.95 · Liquorland $54.00 | $55.48 |
| XXXX Gold, 24 × 375 mL, 3.5% 2 RETAILERS | Dan Murphy’s $55.95 · Liquorland $54.00 | $54.98 |
| Coopers Original Pale Ale, 24 × 375 mL, 4.5% | Dan Murphy’s $59.99 (cans) · Liquorland $64.00 (bottles) · BWS $67.00 (cans) | $63.66 |
| Victoria Bitter, 24 × 375 mL, 4.9% | Dan Murphy’s $56.95 · Liquorland $61.00 · BWS $66.00 | $61.32 |
| [yellow tail], 750 mL, entry tier | Jim’s Cellars $8.50 (Shiraz) · Dan Murphy’s $8.99 (Jammy Red) · Liquorland $9.00 (Pinot Grigio) | $8.83 |
| Jacob’s Creek Classic, 750 mL 2 RETAILERS | Dan Murphy’s $8.99 (Shiraz) · Dan Murphy’s $8.99 (Sauvignon Blanc) · Liquorland $9.00 (Pinot Noir) | $8.99 |
| 19 Crimes Red Blend, 750 mL, 13.5% 1 RETAILER | Dan Murphy’s $9.90 | $9.90 |
| 19 Crimes, Cali tier, 750 mL, 14% | MyBottleShop $15.99 · Foodworks $16.00 · Dan Murphy’s $16.99 | $16.33 |
| Smaller named retailers — retrievable published prices | ||
| De Bortoli Premium Cabernet Merlot cask, 4 L, 13.5% | Coles $19.00 · Liquor Legends $21.99 · Wilberforce Cellars $22.00 | $21.00 |
| Wolf Blass Red Label Chardonnay, 750 mL ABV ASSUMED | Chambers Cellars Emu Plains $9.00 · Supercellars Cabramatta West $11.00 · Point Lonsdale IGA $11.99 | $10.66 |
| 19 Crimes Red Blend, 750 mL, 13.5% | Taste Canowindra $12.00 · East Keilor Cellars $13.99 · Pottsville Cellars $14.99 | $13.66 |
| Penfolds Koonunga Hill, 750 mL, 14.5% | Chambers Cellars Neutral Bay $16.99 · Supercellars Penrith $16.99 · Roma Vino North Epping $17.99 | $17.32 |
| Penfolds Bin 28 Shiraz 2022, 750 mL, 14.5% | Chambers Cellars Winston Hills $44.99 · Chambers Cellars Emu Plains $44.99 · Chester Hill Supercellars $57.99 | $49.32 |
| Smirnoff Red vodka, 700 mL, 37% | North St Marys Cellars $48.00 · Supercellars Fairfield $48.00 · Sunbury Cellars $48.00 | $48.00 |
| Johnnie Walker Red Label, 700 mL, 40% | Jim's Cellars $45.00 · Chambers Cellars Greystanes $49.99 · Supercellars Cabramatta West $52.99 | $49.33 |
| Jim Beam White & Cola, 4 × 375 mL, 4.8% | Tom's Cellars $20.00 · Copacabana Cellars $24.00 · Moorebank Cellars $24.99 | $23.00 |
Prices we could not capture, labelled as such wherever they appear. The schooner at $9.50 is the Australian Hotels Association's recommended price reported in March 2026 — media-reported, not an official statistic, and the AHA branch was not named in the reporting, which matters because a schooner is 425 mL in most states and reportedly 285 mL in South Australia. The calculator's opening prices for a pint and a middy are scaled from that schooner by volume purely to give the tool a starting point; change them to what you actually paid. The nip of spirits and the two wine-by-the-glass prices are stated assumptions carried from our data contract, not observations. The single-can, six-pack and single-premix prices are derived by dividing the captured carton and four-pack, and are labelled derived rather than observed. Hardys is named as one of the four everyday wine brands and priced nowhere on this page, because none of the Hardys listings we were given was a 750 mL bottle — they were 1 L, 3 L and 12-pack formats. One of them, a Hardys Stamp 3 L at $9.99, we chased and rejected: it is the regular price of the 1 L, and every 3 L price we could find sits between $15 on promotion and $25 on the shelf. It would have moved a headline, so it does not appear. No $30 bottle of wine is quoted anywhere on this page, because we could not capture one at that price point — the wine we tried came in around $23. Nor is gin: we could not retrieve a gin price from a retailer we trust, so the spirits figures use vodka and whisky.
Why the mass-market wine table has no per-standard-drink column. Entry-tier wine varies in strength far more than entry-tier beer does — [yellow tail] runs from about 11% in the Pinot Grigio to 13.5% in the Shiraz, and Jacob's Creek Classic from 12.2% to 13.9% — so a single per-standard-drink figure computed off a brand-average strength would be misleading by up to a quarter. Since wine tax is a share of price and takes no account of alcohol at all, the dollar and percentage figures need no ABV and are exact; the per-standard-drink figures we do quote are stated against one named varietal at its own verified strength. The Jacob's Creek Classic Shiraz strength is the one we could not settle — the listing gives 13.0% ABV and 8.2 standard drinks, which cannot both be true — so no per-drink figure is published for it.
Two more ABV notes. No retailer showed an ABV for the Wolf Blass Chardonnay, so its 12.5% is a class assumption and its figures should be read as illustrative. Retailers disagreed about the Smirnoff Red listing — three said 40%, one said 37%, and the Australian product is 37% — so we used 37%. As it happens the disagreement changes nothing that matters: excise per standard drink on any spirit is the rate divided by 80, or $1.38, whatever the strength.
The best-seller ranking
The five beers in section 04 are the top five of the 2025 ranking of Australia's best-selling beers by retail sales, built on Circana retail scan data combined with sales figures supplied by Dan Murphy's, Asahi and Lion, and reported by news.com.au on 27 December 2025 and by Drinks Digest on 29 December 2025. The two published lists match position for position, one to ten.
Three limits on it, all of which we would want stated if we were quoting someone else's list. It measures off-premise sales — bottle shops; on-premise and tap volume data is limited and is not in it, and the same report named a different beer, Stone & Wood Pacific Ale, the country's top tap beer. The 2025 edition does not state its metric, and the choice changes the answer: on Circana's own retail liquor data ranked by dollar value rather than units, the 2023 leader was Hard Rated with Great Northern second. And one of the three commercial contributors of sales data, Asahi, owns Great Northern. It is the best public ranking that exists and it is double-reported; it is not an audited national statistic, and we do not present it as one.
Rounding
All arithmetic runs at full precision and is rounded only for display: dollars to the cent, percentages to one decimal place, standard drinks to two. No figure is computed from a rounded intermediate. Where a rounded figure is quoted in prose it matches the table it came from.
The LAL truncation footnote
Excise is assessed on litres of alcohol at the point of manufacture or import, across a whole consignment, and the ATO's rules truncate those quantities at that scale. Nobody assesses duty on a single glass. Every per-serving figure here is therefore the pro-rata share of a bulk liability rather than a separate assessment — which is the accurate way to describe it, and the way an excise practitioner would.
What we deliberately did not publish
Tax per adult and per household, because the ABS population and household denominators need pinning to exact releases first. National GST collected on alcohol, because the available consumption series appears to exclude on-premise sales and so gives a floor rather than a figure. Cider, because it sits in both tax systems at once and the Budget papers do not break it out. Any international ranking, because the widely-quoted "third or fourth highest in the world" traces to a lobby group with no published method — we use Anderson's hedged formulation instead: Australia taxes alcohol more than most other affluent economies apart from Finland and Norway. The full list, with the retrieval path for each, is on the data and sources page.