How to Register Your R&D Activities with AusIndustry

By Alex Knight, Founder and CEO, Advanced

Every R&D Tax Incentive claim starts in the same place: AusIndustry.

Before you lodge a tax return, before your adviser prepares the RDTI schedule, before the ATO processes a refund, you need a registration number from AusIndustry. Without it, there is no claim. This guide covers what the registration involves, when it has to happen, and what founders most commonly get wrong.

What AusIndustry actually does

The R&D Tax Incentive is jointly administered by two government bodies. AusIndustry, operating within the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, handles the qualitative side: what activities you conducted and whether they meet the program's R&D definition. The ATO handles the quantitative side: how much you spent and what offset you're entitled to.

Your registration with AusIndustry establishes the activity record that the ATO then applies the financial calculation to. The two sides of the claim can't exist without each other, and AusIndustry comes first.

One important clarification: receiving a registration number from AusIndustry is not a confirmation that your activities qualify or that your refund is approved. It means your application was received and processed. The substantive assessment of whether your activities genuinely meet the R&D definition happens at the ATO stage and in any subsequent compliance review.

The deadline you cannot miss

Eligible R&D activities must be registered with AusIndustry within 10 months of the end of your company's income year. For most Australian companies whose income year ends 30 June, this means the registration deadline falls on 30 April of the following year. If your income year ended 30 June 2026, your registration deadline is 30 April 2027.

Miss this deadline and you cannot claim the RDTI for that year. There are no exceptions for oversight, and extensions require demonstrating exceptional circumstances. The ATO does not accept late registrations for standard income years. For companies with non-standard income years, the calculation is the same: 10 months from the end of your income year, whatever date that falls on.

What you need to prepare before you register

The AusIndustry registration is not simply a form you fill in on the day. It requires substantive preparation, and the quality of what you submit materially affects the strength of your claim.

Company eligibility details

You need to confirm your company is an eligible R&D entity. For most founders this means an incorporated Australian company. Trusts and partnerships do not qualify. Some foreign corporations with Australian R&D operations are eligible but the rules are specific and warrant specialist advice.

You also need your aggregated annual turnover figure. If your turnover is under $20 million, you're eligible for the 43.5% refundable tax offset. Above $20 million, a non-refundable 38.5% offset applies. Calculating aggregated turnover correctly requires including the turnover of associates and connected entities, not just your own company's revenue.

Your activity descriptions

This is the most important part of the registration and the part most founders underinvest in. For each R&D project you're registering, you need to provide a description that demonstrates:

The core R&D activities involved genuine technical uncertainty. You didn't know if the outcome was achievable before you started. The work proceeded from hypothesis through experiment to evaluation. The results are new knowledge, not the straightforward application of existing techniques.

 Vague or generic descriptions lead to rejection. AusIndustry needs to understand what you did and why it was uncertain.

The descriptions that create risk are ones that read like a product feature list rather than an experimental record. "We built a machine learning model to improve recommendation accuracy" does not describe R&D. "We investigated whether a transformer-based architecture could achieve sub-100ms inference on constrained hardware without accuracy degradation beyond X%, a problem with no established solution in our domain" describes R&D.

The difference is specificity about the technical uncertainty and the experimental approach, not the commercial outcome.

Supporting activities

If you're claiming supporting R&D activities alongside core activities, you need to document how each supporting activity directly enables the core experimental work. Supporting activities are only eligible when they exist in service of a core R&D activity.

How to lodge the registration

All R&D applications must be submitted to AusIndustry via the R&D Tax Incentive customer portal, where you will be required to provide evidence of your eligibility and a project description of your eligible R&D activities, in addition to some financial disclosures, such as your aggregated turnover for the financial period.

Access the portal through the business.gov.au website. You'll need your myGovID credentials and an active ABN to log in.

Within the portal, you create a new registration for each income year you want to claim. Each registration requires:

A company eligibility declaration. Your aggregated turnover disclosure. One or more project descriptions covering your core R&D activities. Details of any supporting R&D activities. The financial year you're registering for.

Approximately two weeks after lodging your application with AusIndustry, you will receive a Notice of Registration from AusIndustry containing your innovation number. This innovation number is disclosed in the Research and Development schedule of your tax lodgement.

Keep this innovation number. Your tax adviser needs it to complete the RDTI schedule in your company tax return.

What has changed in recent years

The AusIndustry registration form has become more detailed in recent years. The new form places a greater burden on the claimant to provide more detail regarding their activities, with the expectation that this will reduce the need for regulator inquiries. The ATO has explicitly stated that this is part of a broader effort to focus on higher risk cases.

In practice this means the registration is no longer a light-touch formality. Founders who treated it as a quick checkbox exercise are finding that inadequate descriptions at the registration stage create problems downstream, either through ATO compliance activity or through a registration that doesn't fully support the expenditure being claimed.

If you're registering for the first time or your activities have changed significantly from prior years, the investment in getting the activity descriptions right at this stage pays for itself many times over.

The gap between registration and refund

Most founders think of the RDTI as a refund that arrives at the end of the process. The registration is the step that starts the clock. But between registration and refund, there's a significant timing gap.

The sequence looks like this: you conduct eligible R&D activities during the financial year, register those activities with AusIndustry by April 30 of the following year, lodge your company tax return after 30 June including the RDTI schedule, and wait for the ATO to process your claim, typically in the October to December window.

For a company whose financial year ends 30 June, the gap between when R&D spend goes out and when the refund lands is 9 to 12 months. During that period, the capital is committed and the refund is accruing, but the cash is sitting in the ATO's processing calendar rather than in your account.

R&D financing closes that gap. Advanced advances the anticipated refund before the ATO processes the claim, based on the activity registration and the expected eligible expenditure. No equity, no monthly repayments, repaid when the refund arrives.

For the full mechanics of how early access works and how the capital flywheel compounds your next year's claim, see our R&D Tax Incentive capital strategy guide.

Common mistakes at registration

Registering too late in the financial year

You can register at any point during the income year or within the 10-month window after it closes. Waiting until April of the following year to think about your registration leaves no room to correct errors, gather records, or work through any issues with your adviser.

Describing outcomes rather than experiments

Activity descriptions that focus on what the product does rather than what technical uncertainty the experimental work was trying to resolve create risk. The program rewards the experimental process, not the commercial result.

Claiming 100% of salaries when only 30% of time was spent on R&D raises red flags. Be honest and accurate.

Missing the connection between activities and expenditure

Your registration establishes the activity record. The expenditure you claim at the ATO stage needs to connect clearly to those registered activities. Claiming significant salary expenditure for activities that are described vaguely or narrowly in the registration invites scrutiny.

Not keeping records that match the registration

The registration is a public commitment to AusIndustry about what experimental work you conducted. The records you keep need to substantiate that commitment. Contemporaneous records, created at the time the work was happening, are significantly more defensible than records assembled after the fact.

What happens if your claim is reviewed

AusIndustry and the ATO conduct compliance reviews across the RDTI program. If your registration is selected for review, you'll be asked to provide supporting evidence for the activities you registered.

The quality of your contemporaneous records at this point determines the outcome. Strong records demonstrate the experimental hypothesis, the process followed, the results observed, and the conclusions drawn. They support the apportionment of salary costs. They document the connection between each claimed cost and the registered activity.

The registration itself is not a guarantee of anything. It's the starting point from which both the claim and any subsequent review proceed.