Australia Issues Updated List of Pillar Two Qualifying Jurisdictions

Australia issued the Taxation (Multinational – Global and Domestic Minimum Tax) (Qualified GloBE Taxes) Amendment (Measures No. 1) Determination 2026, on March 20, 2026. It was registered on 20 March 2026 and, under its own commencement clause, starts on the day after registration.

The instrument amends the Taxation (Multinational – Global and Domestic Minimum Tax) (Qualified GloBE Taxes) Determination 2025 to update Australia’s domestic lists of foreign Qualified IIRs, foreign Qualified Domestic Minimum Top-up Taxes, and jurisdictions with QDMTT Safe Harbour status. The update aligns Australia’s qualifying list with the OECD Central Record. 

The amendment adds Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Isle of Man, Malaysia, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa and Thailand across all three relevant tables. It adds Jersey, New Zealand and Switzerland only to the Qualified IIR table in s 5 of the 2025 Determination. It adds Bahrain, Brazil, Japan and the United Arab Emirates only to the Qualified DMTT and QDMTT Safe Harbour tables in ss 6 and 7.

The effective dates are not uniform. North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal and South Africa are recognised from 1 January 2024 across the relevant tables. Gibraltar is recognised from 1 January 2025 for IIR purposes, but from 1 January 2024 for DMTT and QDMTT Safe Harbour purposes. Japan appears only in the DMTT and QDMTT Safe Harbour tables, with an effective date of 1 April 2026. Most of the remaining additions take effect from 1 January 2025. That structure mirrors the OECD’s central-record approach, under which legislation is treated as qualified from the date it becomes applicable to in-scope taxpayers.

Qualifying status is important for the Australian Pillar Two calculation. First, under the IIR offset mechanism in Rules s 2-20, a parent entity’s allocable share of top-up tax is reduced to the extent the relevant amount is brought into charge by an intermediate or partially owned parent under a Qualified IIR. Secondly, under Rules s 5-30, “Domestic Top-up Tax” is subtracted in the jurisdictional top-up tax formula, and that term is defined as amounts payable under a Qualified Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax of the jurisdiction. Thirdly, where a jurisdiction is specified under Rules s 8-200(2), a filing constituent entity may make an annual QDMTT Safe Harbour election, with the result that the group’s jurisdictional top-up tax for that jurisdiction is taken to be zero.

The OECD central record says that non-inclusion does not mean a jurisdiction’s legislation is unqualified; it may only mean that the transitional qualification process has not yet been completed. But for Australian domestic purposes, the operative recognition mechanisms remain the Minister’s determination under Rules s 10-15 and, for safe-harbour purposes, the jurisdictional specification under s 8-200(2).

In practice, that means advisers cannot stop at the OECD list alone: they need both the OECD central record and the Australian determination, because the former indicates transitional qualified status internationally while the latter is what turns that status into operative Australian-law recognition.