Hostplus Review: Fees, Performance and the Indexed Balanced Question

🤔 Two true things, pulling in different directions🔗

This review keeps running into the same argument. Someone reads that Hostplus charges more than plenty of funds and decides it must be poor value. Someone else reads that it keeps posting strong returns and decides the fees cannot matter much.

Both readers are holding half the picture. The default really does sit above its band median on five-year return, and it really does cost more than a lot of alternatives. Neither fact cancels the other. A fund can charge more and still be worth holding, or charge more and not be, depending on what the extra buys and how long you stay invested. No table settles that for you.

💸 Hostplus fees: the same charge, a shrinking percentage🔗

Super fees usually arrive in two shapes: a fixed dollar amount and a percentage of your balance. The fixed part does not care how much you have. A set dollar charge is a rounding error on a large balance and a real bite on a small one. So as your balance grows, the fixed charge stays put in dollars while the percentage it represents shrinks. The charge does not fall. The proportion does.

At $50,000, 0.24% of the 1.31% is administration, and the rest covers investment fees, investment costs and transaction costs. Read the top and bottom rows together: same fund, same fixed costs, a percentage that falls by roughly half across the range.

That matters here more than at most funds, because a large part of the Hostplus membership works in hospitality, tourism and retail, where balances are often smaller for longer. A small balance is exactly where a percentage fee does the most damage, and exactly where a cheaper option makes the biggest difference.

📊 What the five-year return says, and what it does not🔗

The default returned 9.73% net a year over three years, 7.70% over five, and 8.91% over ten, as at 2026-06-30. Net means fees and taxes are already deducted, so those are the numbers that landed in members' accounts rather than a gross figure before costs. The five-year result sits above its band median of 7.52%, which is the middle result among products carrying a similar growth allocation.

That is a real result, not a marketing line. It is also one window. Five years is a small slice of a working life that runs for decades, and a position across one stretch describes what happened, not what happens next. The ten-year figure sitting higher than the five-year one is not a trend either, it is two periods that happened to end on different days.

🧭 The option inside Hostplus that costs a quarter as much🔗

Here is the finding that surprises people, and it deserves more care than it usually gets. Indexed Balanced charges 0.28% at a $50,000 balance and holds 80.0% in growth assets, against the default's 1.31% and 80.3%. Over the same five years it returned 8.14% net, against the default's 7.70%.

In dollars on a $50,000 balance, that is $140 a year against $655.

The useful takeaway is narrower than it first looks. The biggest lever most Hostplus members have sits inside Hostplus. The gap between the cheapest indexed option and the default is wider than the gap between many whole funds, and switching options is not switching funds. Our AustralianSuper review found the same shape at a fund that charges a third as much, and the index option inside super covers what you actually buy when you move.

🧺 The full investment menu🔗

APRA publishes 16 choice options for the fund. Laid out by price, the shape of the menu is the story: the indexed options cluster at the cheap end, the actively managed diversified options sit well above them, and some of those pairs carry similar growth allocations.

Compare like with like before you read any of it as a ranking. A bond option holding a quarter in growth assets has not underperformed a high growth one, it is built for a different job. A five-year return only means something sitting next to the asset mix that produced it, which is why the growth column is there.

✅ What passing APRA's performance test actually means🔗

Hostplus passed. That sounds like a gold star. It is closer to a floor. APRA does not rank funds against each other: it measures each product against a benchmark built from that product's own asset mix, then asks whether the trustee delivered what its own strategy should have delivered. Pass, and you have cleared a bar set for your own design. You have not been named the best fund, or even a good one. You have been found not to be underperforming your own plan.

That still counts for something, and failing carries real consequences. Just do not read a pass as a peer ranking, because it is not one. Our guide to the best performing funds goes further into why a league table of raw returns misleads.

One more number worth reading carefully: 1,641,950 member accounts. Accounts, not members. Anyone holding two is counted twice. It is a fair rough measure of scale and a poor measure of how many people the fund serves. If you suspect you are one of the double-counted, consolidating super covers the order of operations, insurance first.

❓ Frequently asked questions🔗