How to Track Your Net Worth in Australia (2026)
Add up everything you own, subtract everything you owe, and record the result on the same day each month. That's the entire method.
The rest is knowing what to count, where to find the numbers, and what to do with the result. This guide covers all of it, with the accounts Australians actually have: super, HECS, offset accounts, and the family home.
What counts as an asset?
Anything you own that holds value:
- Cash and savings accounts. Include money sitting in an offset account, it's your cash, not part of the mortgage.
- Super. Locked until preservation age, but it's invested in your name and for many Australians it's their biggest asset outside the home. Yes, it counts.
- Your home. Use a reasonable estimate of what it would sell for today. Yes, it counts too.
- Shares and ETFs. Current market value, straight from your broker.
- Your car. Rough resale value, not what you paid for it.
What counts as a liability?
Anything you owe:
- Mortgage balance
- HECS-HELP debt
- Car loans and personal loans
- Credit card balances
- Buy now, pay later balances
Subtract the liabilities from the assets and you have your net worth. If you're new to the idea, What Is Net Worth? walks through a full worked example.
Where do you find the numbers?
Every figure lives in an app you already have:
| Item | Where to look |
|---|---|
| Bank and offset balances | Your banking app |
| Super | Your fund's app or annual statement |
| Shares and ETFs | Your brokerage platform |
| Home value | Recent comparable sales on Domain or realestate.com.au, or your bank's property estimate |
| Mortgage | Your lender's app |
| HECS-HELP | MyGov, under the ATO section |
You don't need figures to the cent. A close number from the same source on the same day each month is what matters.
Do you need to link your bank accounts?
No. Net worth moves slowly, so manually checking each balance once a month takes about ten minutes and keeps your banking credentials to yourself. We've covered why manual tracking works in its own post.
How often should you update it?
Monthly. Daily checking is watching noise; yearly checking means finding out too late that something drifted. By the end of a month, pay has landed, repayments have gone out, and super contributions have settled. There's a full breakdown of why monthly wins, but the short version: pick a day, repeat it every month.
What should the number actually be doing?
Going up over time. That's it.
The level matters far less than the direction. A negative net worth is normal early on, especially with HECS in the picture. What you're looking for after a few months of snapshots is a trend: is the line rising, flat, or falling?
If it's rising, your income is actually turning into wealth - which is something a payslip alone can't tell you.
You can't improve a number you never look at. One snapshot a month is enough to see exactly where you're heading.
Perch exists to make this exact habit easy: log your balances once a month and watch the trend take shape.