Robodebt
An Australian welfare debt scheme that relied on averaging annual income across fortnightly benefit periods. Income averaging stopped in November 2019; refunds, litigation and a royal commission followed.
Case studySources & confidence: Qualified confidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Checked chronology, settlement categories and the nature of the 2025 legal announcement against Australian government sources.
- Services Australia: Information about Robodebt
Income-averaging debts from July 2015 to November 2019.
- Services Australia: Robodebt class action settlement
June 2021 approval, distinction between refunds and settlement payments, payments in September 2022.
- Attorney-General: Robodebt class action appeal settlement, 4 September 2025
The 2025 announcement concerns settlement of an appeal, rather than a second class action.
- Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme: report
Official report delivered in July 2023; report landing page and recommendations checked, not the complete evidence record.
What this check doesn’t establish
- No total settlement figure is given because debt cancellation, refunds and compensation are different categories.
- Individual harms, causal attribution and the full Royal Commission evidence were not independently reviewed.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
The scheme used annual tax income to infer income over benefit-reporting fortnights, producing debts for recipients to contest. Services Australia identifies the relevant income-averaging period as July 2015 to November 2019.
The original class action settlement was approved in June 2021. Refunds and settlement payments were separate, so describing the combined debt relief as a single cash settlement is misleading. The September 2025 announcement concerned a class action appeal settlement, not a second class action. The Royal Commission reported in July 2023.
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/cases/au-robodebt.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-26