Understanding your AMMA / AMIT tax statement

If you hold Australian ETFs or managed funds, you’ll usually receive an AMMA statement each year — the AMIT Member Annual Statement, sometimes called an AMIT tax statement. It tells you the income the fund has attributed to you and how your cost base needs to change. This guide explains what’s on it, how the cost-base adjustment works, and how to handle it at tax time.

What is an AMMA statement?

Most listed Australian ETFs and many managed funds are Attribution Managed Investment Trusts (AMITs). Under the AMIT rules, a fund attributes its taxable income to you for the year — based on your units — rather than simply reporting what it paid in cash.

That distinction matters. The cash distributions that hit your bank account during the year don’t always equal the income you’re taxed on. The AMMA statement reconciles the two: it sets out the components of your attributed income and a net cost-base adjustment that keeps your future capital gains accurate.

You’ll usually receive it after 30 June (often July–September), once the fund finalises its components.

What’s on the statement

An AMMA statement breaks your attributed income into components. The exact layout varies by fund, but you’ll typically see:

Component	What it is
Franked dividends + franking credits	Australian dividend income passed through the fund, with attached imputation credits.
Unfranked dividends	Australian dividend income with no franking credits.
Interest and other income	Australian interest and similar income.
Capital gains — discount	Gains on assets the fund held more than 12 months (eligible for the CGT discount).
Capital gains — other	Gains that don’t qualify for the discount.
Foreign income + foreign tax offset	Overseas income, plus any foreign tax paid you may be able to claim.
AMIT cost-base net amount	A single net figure that increases or decreases your cost base — see below.

Each component maps to a label on your tax return, which is why a year-end income report that groups them by myTax item code saves a lot of manual work.

How the components map to tax work

You don’t need to memorise every label before lodging, but you do need to keep the components separate. A helpful way to read the statement is:

Statement area	What you do with it
Franked dividends, unfranked dividends and franking credits	Reconcile with your taxable income report and dividend records.
Capital gains components	Keep discount gains separate from other gains because they flow through differently.
Foreign income and foreign tax offsets	Add them to your foreign income / FITO total. Don’t double-count foreign tax already reported by the fund.
AMIT cost-base net amount	Apply the increase or decrease to your holding’s cost base for future CGT.

That last line is easy to skip because it doesn’t always affect this year’s cash tax payable. It matters later, when you sell the ETF or fund units.

Cost-base increases and decreases

The AMIT cost-base net amount exists because attributed income and cash distributions rarely match exactly.

Cost-base increase — when the income attributed to you is more than the cash you received. You’ve been taxed on income you didn’t get in cash, so your cost base goes up (reducing a future capital gain).
Cost-base decrease — when the cash you received is more than the income attributed to you (common with “tax-deferred” amounts, like a return of capital). Your cost base goes down (increasing a future capital gain).

The statement nets these into one figure. You apply it to your parcels’ cost base so that, when you eventually sell, your capital gain is correct and you aren’t taxed twice — or not at all.

A worked example

Say you hold units in an Australian shares ETF. Your AMMA statement for the year shows:

Line	Amount
Cash distributions received during the year	$1,000
Franked dividends attributed	$600
Franking credits	$257
Capital gains — discount (attributed)	$200
Foreign income	$40
Total attributed income	$1,097

For your income, you declare the attributed components — franked $600, franking credits $257, the discount capital gain $200, foreign income $40 — not the $1,000 cash figure.

For your cost base, compare attributed income ($1,097, excluding the franking credit gross-up the fund hasn’t paid in cash) against the cash you received ($1,000). Where the attributed cash-equivalent income exceeds distributions, you get a cost-base increase; where tax-deferred amounts mean cash exceeds income, you get a decrease. Your AMMA statement does this netting for you and prints the single adjustment to apply.

The point: the $1,000 that landed in your account is not your taxable income, and your cost base almost certainly changed during a year you didn’t buy or sell a thing.

Common mistakes to avoid

Using the cash distribution as taxable income. The statement’s attributed components are the source of truth.
Ignoring the cost-base adjustment. It changes the future capital gain or loss when you sell.
Double-counting foreign tax. If foreign tax is already reported on the AMMA statement, it is part of your FITO total.
Mixing components across holdings. Keep each ETF or fund statement tied to the correct holding and financial year.

How Metrifly handles AMIT

Metrifly groups the income side in your taxable income report — trust and AMIT components alongside dividends, franking credits, foreign income and crypto, each labelled with its myTax item code.

The cost-base adjustment carries through to your capital gains report, so when you sell those units the parcel cost base already reflects the AMIT increases and decreases from prior years.

To get there:

Make sure the fund is set up as a holding and your distributions are confirmed — see Confirm your dividends.
Add the finalised components from your AMMA statement so your attributed income and cost base match the fund’s figures.
Run your taxable income report and capital gains report for the year.