Rest Super Review: What APRA's Numbers Actually Show

📊 Passed the test, and below its band median🔗

Every MySuper product in the country sits an annual exam run by APRA. The test takes a product's net return, after fees and tax, and compares it with a benchmark built from that product's own strategic asset allocation. Clear the line and the product stays open to new members.

Rest's default passed. APRA also lets you group products by how much they hold in growth assets and find the one in the middle. Rest's default returned 6.94% a year over five years against a band median of 7.52% for its 75%-90% band.

Our guide to the best performing funds goes further into why a league table of raw returns misleads, and our Hostplus review shows the same two measures landing the other way round.

💸 Rest Super fees: the percentage shrinks, the bill does not🔗

The percentage falls as your balance rises, from 1.44% at $10,000 down to 0.69% at $250,000. That looks like a volume discount and, in percentage terms, it is. The reason is dull: part of the charge is a flat dollar amount, and the same flat amount spread across more money is a smaller slice of it.

The dollars do not shrink, as the right-hand column shows. You pay more in total at $250,000 than at $10,000, just not proportionally more. Which means the member with the smallest balance pays the highest percentage in the fund, on the balance least able to absorb it. Rest's membership skews young and toward smaller balances, so a lot of members sit at the top of that curve. At $50,000, 0.26% of the 0.81% is administration.

The practical rule: never compare Rest's fees with another fund's without naming the balance. A fund quoting a lower percentage at $50,000 and a fund quoting a higher one at $5,000 are not in the same conversation.

🧩 The menu, read next to the asset mix🔗

The spread in that table is not a scoreboard. Compare options without the asset mix beside them and you are timing a bicycle against a motorbike, then calling the bicycle slow. An option holding a third in growth assets has not lost to one holding nine tenths, it took less of the ride in both directions and would have fallen less in a bad year.

Note where the default sits: 76.2% in growth assets. That is not a middle-of-the-road setting. If you never chose an option, you are in a portfolio that behaves a lot like the growth options on the menu, and it can fall hard in a bad market.

🔍 The finding inside the fund🔗

Rest's Growth Indexed option charges 0.26% in total fees and costs at a $50,000 balance and holds 75.0% in growth assets. Over five years it returned 7.54% a year, against the default's 6.94% at 76.2% growth assets and 0.81% in fees. In dollars on a $50,000 balance, that is $130 a year against $405. It also sits above the 7.52% band median that the default sits below.

What the comparison is genuinely good for is narrower and still useful. It shows that fee gaps of more than half a percentage point exist inside a single fund's menu, and that the cheapest option is not automatically the worst one. The index option inside super covers what you actually buy if you move.

👥 Member accounts are not members🔗

APRA reports 1,993,890 member accounts for Rest. Accounts. Hold two and you are counted twice, so the number is larger than the number of people.

Who is most likely to be double counted? Younger members, and this membership leans young. Changing jobs is the classic way to end up with a second account, and that second account sits there paying its own flat dollar fee every year while holding a balance too small to notice. If you have changed employers since you opened yours, check myGov. Consolidating super walks through the transfer and the insurance question, which is the part people get wrong.

🤔 So is Rest Super good?🔗

No score. A score here would be invented, and you would be right not to trust it. Four questions do a better job.

• What is your fee percentage at your balance? Look it up in the table above rather than guessing. The same fund is expensive at $8,000 and reasonable at $250,000.
• Which option are you in, and how much of it is growth assets? The default sits at 76.2%, closer to the racier end of the menu than most members assume.
• Would a cheaper option on the same menu do a similar job? Published fees at $50,000 differ by 0.55 percentage points between the default and Growth Indexed.
• What insurance do you hold, and could you replace it? Cover inside super does not travel between funds, so this decides whether moving money is even on the table.

❓ Frequently asked questions🔗