About Benefits Radar

Who runs it, how it's paid for, and what it will never do. If you're deciding whether to point someone else at this site, this page is written for you.

What it is

Benefits Radar tracks Australian government payments, rebates and concessions that only pay if you apply — and that mostly have a deadline nobody official reminds you about. Family Tax Benefit lump sums expire twelve months after the financial year. Child Care Subsidy backdates twenty-eight days. NSW toll credits die every 30 June. Miss the window and the money is simply gone.

The library currently covers 200+ active programs across the federal government, New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, plus 33 schemes we keep on the record because they've closed. If you live in another state or territory you'll still get the federal programs, but not your state's own concessions — we'd rather tell you that than pretend to national coverage we don't have.

Who builds it

One person, in Australia. Not a government agency, not a charity, not a startup with staff — an independent project maintained by an individual who got a Health Care Card in the mail, couldn't work out what it was actually good for, and discovered nobody had written it down in one place.

Saying that out loud costs something, and it's still the right call: you should know exactly how big the thing behind the website is before you rely on it. What that buys you is that there's no growth target pushing the content around, and one email address gets you a real answer: hello@benefitsradar.com.au.

How it's funded

Today: it isn't. There are no ads on this site, no affiliate or referral links, no sponsored placements, no paid listings, and nothing for sale. Nobody has paid to be included, ranked higher, or mentioned. You can check that claim the same way we do — there is not a single outbound commercial link on any page.

That won't stay true forever; this has to pay for itself eventually. So here is the commitment, written down before there's any money on the table:

Anything we earn from will be labelled as such, on the spot, not in a footer.
Where a free official option exists, it goes first. If the government runs a comparison service or a free advice line that does the same job, you'll see that above any commercial link, every time — not the other way around.
Money will never move the order. Programs are ranked by what they're worth to you and how easily they're missed. No commercial arrangement will ever change that ranking, and we will not accept one that's conditional on it.
Your information is never the product. We don't sell personal data, and we don't share it. That isn't a pricing decision we might revisit — see the privacy promise.

If you ever find this site breaking one of those four, tell us and say so publicly. They're only worth writing down if they cost us something.

The one thing we won't do

We will never tell you that you're eligible for something.

That sounds like a limitation, and it partly is — but it's deliberate. Deciding whether a particular person qualifies for a particular payment is the agency's job, and in some cases doing it for you would require a licence we don't hold. So what this site does instead is show you what the threshold is and what you've told us, link you to the official page, and leave the last step to you. We remind; we never lodge a claim, never ask for a myGov login, never want your CRN, and never stand between you and Services Australia.

How the information is kept current

This is the part that actually takes the work, and it's the reason the site exists rather than a list someone wrote once.

Every item links to the official government page it came from, and carries the date we last checked it against that page. Not the date we published — the date we last looked.
Every program is re-verified against its own official page on a rotation — all 200+ of them within the last few weeks. An automated pass runs weekly over the rules and the deadline calendar. What that pass does not do: it cannot reach external sites from where it runs, so dead-link checking is done by hand alongside the rotation rather than every week. We would rather say that than claim a weekly sweep we do not do.
Closed schemes stay on the record. Half the benefits advice online is promoting programs that ended years ago. When something closes we mark it closed instead of deleting it, so you can find out it's gone rather than wondering why the application page 404s.
Where the official source is unclear, we say so rather than picking whichever reading sounds more confident. Some entries are flagged as ambiguous, or as "the two official pages disagree". That flag is doing real work: it's the difference between information and a guess with good posture.

Every item carries the date we last checked it against its official source.

If you work with clients

Financial counsellors, settlement and community workers, library staff, social workers — this site is free, has no login, and asks nothing of you or your organisation. Handing someone the URL doesn't sign anyone up to anything.

Two things worth knowing before you use it in front of a client. First, it never makes an eligibility determination, so it won't contradict an assessor — it shows the published threshold and links the official page. Second, the closed-programs list is probably the most useful part for you: it's there so you don't spend an appointment sending someone after a scheme that ended in 2024.

Printable one-page handouts, one per state, listing the programs with a closing date — designed to fit a single A4 sheet, with the last-checked date printed on it:

NSW one-pager · Victoria one-pager · Queensland one-pager

A printed sheet freezes on the day it leaves the printer, and dates and dollar figures move — so please don't run off a large batch. The web version is always the current one.

If something here is wrong, out of date, or missing an obvious program in your state, please tell us — hello@benefitsradar.com.au. Corrections from people who do this work daily are the single most valuable thing we receive, and they get acted on.

What we know we're missing

State and territory coverage beyond NSW, Victoria and Queensland. Council-level concessions, which differ by local government area. A handful of entries where the only way to settle a question is a phone call to a government hotline that we haven't made yet — those are flagged where they appear, rather than quietly smoothed over.

Benefits Radar is an independent Australian project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any government agency. Information here is general in nature and can change at any time — always confirm details on the linked official page before acting.