Cbus Super Review: Fees, Returns and the Option With No Track Record

💸 Cbus super fees: the admin slice is the heavy part🔗

Start with the number you pay no matter what. Every fund reports a total fees and costs figure that bundles administration, investment management and other costs together. The default comes in at 0.91% at a $50,000 balance, or $455 a year.

The piece worth pulling out is administration, because you pay it whether markets rise, fall or do nothing. Of that 0.91%, 0.36% is administration, about $180 a year on that balance. That is the highest administration line among the 12 funds reviewed on this site.

The percentage falls as the balance climbs because part of the fee is a fixed dollar amount. Spread a set charge across $10,000 and it looks heavy. Spread the same charge across $250,000 and it thins out. Same option, same fund, 1.33% at one end and 0.83% at the other.

That matters more than usual in construction. Work can be seasonal, or interrupted when a project winds up, or run hot for a year and then go quiet. Balances build in fits and starts, and the stretches when your balance is small are exactly when a fixed admin charge bites hardest.

📊 A passed test is a floor, not a ranking🔗

The default returned 9.29% a year over three years, 6.48% over five and 8.19% over ten, as at 2026-06-30. It passed APRA's annual performance test.

Now the other true thing. That five-year return sits below the median for its growth band, which holds 75%-90% in growth assets and had a five-year median of 7.52%. The gap is 1.04 percentage points.

Both statements hold at once, and here is why. The test measures each product against a benchmark built from that product's own asset mix. It is not grading Cbus against other funds. Passing means the default cleared a hurdle set for its own strategy. The band median is the peer comparison, and on that measure it sits below the middle. Two separate questions, and an honest summary needs both numbers. Our Rest review works through the same pairing.

🧩 Eight options, and four without a number🔗

Read the published returns as a snapshot, not a promise. Over this window the options holding more growth assets published higher returns, and carried more risk along with them.

Then look at the last column again. 4 of the 8 options have no published five-year return at all. That is a limitation of what anyone can tell you about this menu, including us, and we are not going to fill the gap with another option's number or an educated guess.

🪙 The cheap option with no track record🔗

This is the part that deserves the most care, so here it is slowly. Indexed Diversified charges 0.46% at a $50,000 balance against the default's 0.91%, about half. It holds 75.0% in growth assets against the default's 76.1%, so the risk level is nearly identical. In dollars on that balance, $230 a year against $455.

Hold those two facts apart. Cheap and unproven is not the same as cheap and bad. It is unfinished information, and the honest thing is to say so.

If an indexed option is what drew you here, the index option inside super covers what you are actually buying, and our Hostplus review shows a fund where the same comparison does have published figures on both sides.

🧾 Member accounts are not members🔗

Cbus reports 767,560 member accounts, and it is easy to read that as the same number of people. It is not. Anyone with two accounts is counted twice.

Tradies and site workers are the group most exposed to this. Moving between employers and projects is normal, and every move is a chance to pick up a second account without noticing, quietly charging its own set of fees. Consolidating super covers the order of operations, and insurance comes before the fee saving, especially in a trade where income protection is not a theoretical concern.

❓ Frequently asked questions🔗