Following this week’s budget announcement, there’s a new rule surrounding image rights that influencers may want to take note of.
Dubbed the ‘fame tax’, the new tax included in Tuesday’s federal budget will make sure that celebrities and high-profile people who licence their image rights to other companies pay tax on all the income and non-cash benefits they receive.
Currently, high profile people can licence their image rights to a business, which can claim losses on the investment, and then pay just 30 per cent tax on the profits.
So what does this mean for celebrities and influencers? "This measure will ensure that all remuneration (including payments and non-cash benefits) provided for the commercial exploitation of a person's fame or image will be included in the assessable income of that individual," the 2018/19 budget says.
The money raised from the change is “unquantifiable”, the budget said, because it’s not known how much some of these celebrities are making.
These new rules come into play July 1 2019.
