Mercer Super Review: One Price, Three Brands and a Costly Top End

🧭 One trust, three brands🔗

The Mercer Super Trust holds options branded Mercer, several branded Virgin from Virgin Money Super, and one labelled Nine Super. Same trust, same reporting to APRA, which is why they all turn up in the same dataset and the same table further down this page.

Nobody joins the trust. You joined through a plan, usually because an employer defaulted you in or you signed up under one of those brands, and what you can actually choose depends on that plan. The full menu in any published table may not be your menu. Your statement or member login settles it in about ninety seconds, and it is worth doing before you read any option name as available to you.

If you never made a choice, you are in the default, Mercer SmartPath. It is age-based, so the mix shifts as you get older rather than sitting still. APRA puts it at 86.2% growth assets. That is not a cautious middle setting, and if you assumed your default was the boring option, it is worth knowing what you are actually holding.

One more number worth reading carefully: 407,410 member accounts, not members. Hold two and you are counted twice. If you suspect you are one of them, consolidating super covers the order of operations, insurance first.

💸 The same percentage at every balance🔗

Most funds charge a mix: a flat dollar amount plus a percentage. The percentage then falls as your balance grows, because the flat part is spread across more money. It looks like a volume discount and, in percentage terms, it is one.

Mercer's default does not work that way. The number does not move: it is 0.83% at the bottom of that table and 0.83% at the top. Two ways to read it, and both are right.

A small balance is not carrying a fixed charge that dwarfs it, which helps the member with a few thousand dollars and no spare cash to protect. A large balance gets no relief as it grows: at $250,000 you pay the same rate as at $10,000, where most funds' published percentage would have dropped by then. Neither is good or bad in the abstract, and it is unusually worth reading at your own number rather than an average one.

Inside the total sits administration, the part you pay no matter what markets do. APRA puts it at 0.16% at a $50,000 balance, or $80 a year, which is low. Investment costs move with performance and asset mix. Administration just turns up. When you compare two funds, lift that piece out and read it on its own, because it is the fee you can predict.

🔍 The dearest options did worse than the default🔗

Read the Mercer Property row slowly. It charges 1.56%, against the default's 0.83%, and holds 87.5% in growth assets against 86.2%, so the risk setting is not far off. Over the same five years it returned 3.38% against 7.28%. In dollars at a $50,000 balance that is $780 a year against $415. Mercer Select Growth, the next most expensive at 1.46%, also trailed the default with 6.48%.

Five years is one window and past returns do not carry forward, in either direction. Our ART review found the same pattern at a different fund, which suggests it is worth checking wherever you are.

🧮 Nothing cheaper at the default's risk level🔗

The standard move inside your own fund is to hunt for a cheaper option holding a similar amount of growth assets, then weigh up whether the switch is worth it. Our Hostplus review is the clearest example of it paying off. Here it comes back empty.

The default holds 86.2% in growth assets. Every option cheaper than 0.83% sits at a very different risk level: 7.5%, 32.7%, 43.7%, 69.2%, 100.0%. Nothing on the cheaper side of the fee scale is built like the default.

A portfolio in the single digits for growth assets behaves defensively, with returns coming mostly from cash and fixed interest. One at the top of the range is all growth, all the time, and falls harder when markets do. So moving down the fee scale here means changing what you own, not trimming a cost. Cheaper, in this case, costs you something else.

📈 Returns, and what the performance test proves🔗

The default returned 7.28% a year over five years, net of fees and tax, against a band median of 7.52%, so it finished 0.24 percentage points below the middle of its own peer group. It still passed APRA's performance test.

That is not a contradiction. The test compares a product against a benchmark built from that product's own asset mix, so it asks whether this portfolio delivered roughly what a portfolio built like it should have. The band median asks how it went against everyone else holding something similar. One is a floor, the other a ranking. A pass means not among the worst, never among the best.

The three-year return is 11.24%, the highest of any fund reviewed on this site. Before anyone gets carried away: three years is one window, and that window covered a strong run for growth assets. A big number in a short window usually says more about the period than about the portfolio. Our guide to the best performing funds goes further into why league tables mislead.

❓ Frequently asked questions🔗