Finance manager salary in Australia

Finance managers in Australia sit at A$140k to A$170k plus super in 2026, varying by industry, business size and complexity, and location.

The 2026 range

In the current Australian market a finance manager sits at A$140k to A$170k plus super, with a financial controller a step above at A$160k to A$200k plus super. Every band on this page is quoted excluding superannuation: the Super Guarantee is 12% of ordinary time earnings from 1 July 2025, so budget the total cost accordingly. Where a role lands depends on industry, business size and complexity, and location. The bands overlap deliberately, because at this level the title moves around more than the work does.

Where a senior accountant stops and a finance manager starts is set out on the senior accountant salary page. The bands here come out of the same dataset as our finance manager pay report, which splits the role across start-up, scale-up and multinational.

What funded startups advertise and report

The public figures sit at the lower end of that band. Our startup finance salary data holds 31 finance manager figures from 22 funded Australian startups, with a median of A$145k and half between A$137k and A$159k. In Sydney the median is A$143k across 16 figures^[1].

The top of the table is mostly senior manager titles at the bigger scale-ups, such as Canva and AirTrunk, which are a step above the startup seat. Asseti, a seed-stage Sydney startup, advertised A$160k to A$180k: the top of the startup band, for a finance manager who runs the whole function.

What a finance manager owns in a startup

At early scale the finance manager is the function: reporting, cash, budgeting and whatever the founder needs answered this week, usually with a bookkeeper or an outsourced accounting firm doing the processing.

That is also the reason the hire is worth getting right. In one international SaaS business, changes implemented by a finance manager I placed are now saving them an additional A$20k to A$30k a month^[2]. At the salaries above, the right person can pay for themselves several times over inside a year. The wrong one costs you the search again.

If the role needs to own the close, compliance and governance rather than day to day management, it is a controller, and I set out that band separately.

The ad matters more than the number

The most expensive mistake at this level is writing an ad that misprices the role against the market and then waiting. I once saved a client over A$25k in recruitment costs with a single call, by adjusting their finance manager ad's value proposition, title and salary alignment. They had interviews booked in four days and a signed candidate soon after^[3].

What changed was the title matching the actual scope, and the pitch making sense to the people we wanted. If a role has been open for two months, the ad is usually the problem before the salary is.

What the band does not tell you

A finance manager in a business with clean systems and an established process is doing a different job to one in a startup choosing the software, building the reporting and answering to a board for the first time. The second is harder, and the market prices it near the top of the range for good reason. The split by environment is measurable: a start-up, Seed to Series A, typically pays a base of A$140k to A$160k, often constrained by runway, while a scale-up pays A$150k to A$170k with bonuses of 10-20% linked to EBITDA or growth milestones, and a multinational pays A$150k to A$170k, sometimes more, with equity rarely offered at this level.

Location shapes the band more than the guides admit. In smaller markets I see salary gaps, where pay tends to jump from A$120k straight up to A$160k to A$180k, and that makes the A$140k to A$160k bracket quite difficult to fill for roles like finance manager, senior financial accountant or senior business partner.

It also pays to know where the role leads. A strong finance manager in a growing business is often the person who becomes the controller, then the head of finance, as the function grows around them. Hiring someone with that ceiling costs a little more now and saves you two searches later.

I set out how the finance function splits as headcount grows, and which role to add next.

Common questions

These guides set out how we see it, drawn from the searches we run and the finance leaders we work with. They are general information about the market, not financial, accounting or legal advice, and they are no substitute for advice on your own circumstances.