What Your Accountant Wishes You Knew Before You Sold
Most builders spend 20 years growing a construction business, and about 20 minutes thinking about how to exit it. That gap is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You've spent years quoting jobs, managing subbies, chasing payments, and keeping your construction business running. The business you built is worth real money. But when it comes time to sell, whether you're retiring, scaling down, or handing over, that gain doesn't automatically land in your pocket. The ATO wants a share.
What most small and medium construction businesses don't know, until it's almost too late, is that there's a set of tax concessions specifically designed for them: the Small Business CGT Concessions. Used correctly, they can legally reduce your tax bill to almost nothing.
The four concessions
- 15-Year Exemption, Own the business or active asset for 15+ years and be 55 or older, and you can pay zero CGT. The entire gain is wiped.
- 50% Active Asset Reduction, Reduce your capital gain by 50% because the asset was used in your business. Stacked with the general 50% CGT discount, you could pay tax on as little as 25% of the gain.
- Retirement Exemption, Exempt up to $500,000 (lifetime limit) of capital gains, provided the money funds your retirement.
- Rollover Relief, Defer the gain if you're not ready to fully exit and intend to reinvest.
These concessions can be stacked. Your accountant knows about them, the question is whether you've given them enough runway to use them. Planning your exit years in advance, not weeks, is what separates a good sale from a great one.
