APRA-regulated super funds will face new data obligations from late 2027, with the regulator consulting on how to implement the federal government’s Retirement Reporting Framework.

A consultation paper, released last month, sets out proposed reporting standards that will give regulators and funds, if not members themselves, a consistent, structured and comparable view of how funds are supporting members through retirement.

The framework is designed to encourage funds to pay at least as much attention to what they do for members in retirement as they do for members during accumulation, and its introduction is arguably past due. 

Almost four years after the Retirement Income Covenant (RIC) took effect, APRA and ASIC’s 2025 Pulse Check revealed “leaders and laggards” among funds, with some investing serious effort in developing retirement solutions, and others investing much less, and content with incremental and sometimes undetectable improvements.

The RIC requires funds to develop, regularly review and implement a retirement income strategy covering how they will help members maximise income, manage risk and maintain flexible access to savings. 

Funds report to APRA on pension benefit payments, member account numbers by age group, and the cost of financial planners but none of this tells regulators or members very much. Current standards are built around accounts rather than individuals, can’t distinguish meaningfully between lifetime income products, and have no mechanism to track what members actually do with their savings at or in retirement.

APRA says it aims to create “a quality, fit-for-purpose implementation of framework set by government, without unnecessary or unreasonable regulatory impact”.

It proposes an update to one existing reporting standard, the introduction of one new reporting standard, and an update to the associated definitions standard. It is seeking to reduce regulatory impact by revoking one superseded data reporting standard to avoid duplication and overlap; promoting coherency with other collections; aligning to existing definitions and concepts wherever possible; and adopting proxies where necessary, such as retirement status indicators.

The framework introduces three indicators and three metrics, to be collected annually from late 2027 and published by APRA from 2028.

The indicators measure what each fund offers: drawdown options beyond the legislated minimum; access to lifetime income products; and access to personal financial advice. Simply listing third-party providers on a website won’t satisfy either of the last two, funds need an actual referral arrangement in place.

What members are doing

The metrics measure what members are doing: the types of retirement products, including lifetime income products, held by members; drawdown levels and value of benefit payments; and balance utilisation and actions taken when an account is closed.

APRA proposes a new reporting standard (SRS 611.1 Retirement Member Profile), amendments to SRS 607.0 RSE Business Model to capture the indicators, and the revocation of SRS 610.0 Membership Profile, which it says has been substantially superseded.

The framework arrives amid significant variation in how well-prepared funds are. The 2025 Pulse Check found more than half of RSE licensees (54 per cent) had planned product enhancements to be in place by June 2026, and 36 per cent were reviewing or planning to introduce longevity products.

The burden of the new reporting requirements will be heaviest on funds that have to date done the least and will draw on member data that many funds still struggle to collect.

The Conexus Institute* largely supported the reporting framework in a submission to Treasury in September 2025. It argued the RRF had the potential to create the right incentives, on the basis that “what gets measured gets done”.

But it said that the primary audience for the framework would be industry stakeholders, not necessarily members, and that APRA is not a consumer-facing institution and may struggle to present data in a form members can readily understand.

When the framework was first announced in November 2024, The Conexus Institute executive director David Bell and research fellow Geoff Warren acknowledged the measures were reasonable but questioned how they would “nudge along the many super funds that are lagging”.

They warned that a complex system with entrenched agents almost guarantees slow progress “unless brave cut-through policies are adopted”.

Submissions to the APRA consultation close on 3 June 2026. The regulator aims to have final reporting standards ready in the third quarter of 2026, the first data collection in the fourth quarter of 2027, and the first publication of the data in 2028.

* The Conexus Institute is a not-for-profit think-tank philanthropically funded by Conexus Financial, the publisher of Retirement Magazine.