Payments to the United States and United Kingdom submarine industrial bases are among the largest single transfers the Commonwealth makes, they go to foreign governments, and several have been described as non-refundable. The threshold question is the simplest one available: how much has gone, to whom, and when.

Something real is published. Defence's annual report carries Program 2.16 Nuclear-Powered Submarines as a line in its supplementary tables, with budget against actual: total operating expenses of $2,056.3 million in 2024-25 against a $2,257.8 million budget, almost all of it classified as suppliers, plus $208.1 million of non-financial asset purchases. A reader can therefore establish what the submarine program cost last year to within a rounding error.

What that figure cannot do is separate a payment to the United States Navy's industrial base from wages at Osborne, a contract with ASC, or a lease in Canberra. All of it is "suppliers". So the published number answers a question about program cost while the question the public is asking -- how much left the country, and to which partner -- is not answerable from it at all.

The gap is a reporting split, not a missing record. Defence pays the invoices, so it necessarily knows which of that $2.06 billion went abroad and when.

Defence's annual report supplementary tables give the program total, which is the right starting point and is more than most reporting on this acknowledges.

Individual payments are announced by ministers, confirmed at Senate estimates, or disclosed by United States congressional sources, which have at times been the clearest public record of what Australia has paid. Assembling those into a series means guessing at currency, recipient, and whether a figure is a fresh payment or a restatement, then trying to reconcile the result against a program total that also contains domestic spending. The arithmetic does not close.

Marked verified on 2026-09-03. All four documents were downloaded and searched rather than described. The Defence annual report carries Program 2.16 at $2,257,842 thousand budgeted against $2,054,654 thousand of suppliers actual, and the note that the Submarine Agency "can authorise spending on behalf of Defence" while responsibility for drawing from the Consolidated Revenue Fund stays with Defence.

Checked against four primary documents on 2026-09-01, which is why this entry carries reported rather than estimate. The check changed the entry substantially and the earlier version was wrong on a central point.

The correction. This entry previously said the payments were not accounted for anywhere, on the strength of the ASA annual report and budget statements containing no figure. They do not -- but that is because ASA authorises spending on Defence's behalf while Defence retains responsibility for drawing from the Consolidated Revenue Fund, a note the Defence report states explicitly. The money is in Defence's departmental accounts under Program 2.16, reported annually against budget. The verdict moves from no to partial and aggregated now leads, because the failure is granularity rather than absence. Recording that correctly matters more to this register than the stronger claim did.

What each document showed. Defence's administered schedules are almost entirely military superannuation -- $10.35 billion of employee benefits and $289 million of subsidies -- with no AUKUS or industrial base line, so the payments sit in departmental suppliers rather than as administered transfers. The Final Budget Outcome 2024-25 reports Defence only at whole-of-function level, about $47.8 billion, and contains no occurrence of the words AUKUS, submarine or industrial base. The ASA annual report and portfolio budget statements cover departmental operations of roughly $320 million a year and carry no US dollar figure, date or cumulative total.

inconsistent has been dropped. An earlier draft carried it on the basis that publicly reported instalment figures contradict each other. They vary, but much of the variance looks like Australian and US dollar amounts for the same payments circulating side by side in secondary reporting, and the government's own published figure -- the program total -- is internally consistent. The register should not keep a blocker it can no longer defend.

Still unchecked: whether the country split appears in Senate estimates answers or in the portfolio additional estimates statements. If a reconciled recipient split is published in either, this should drop to derived.

Scope is kept narrow on purpose. The question asks only what was paid and when. What each tranche buys, and against which milestones, genuinely engages classification, and folding it in would let a real exempt claim over the deliverables side excuse the absence of a split that does not turn on classification at all.

Companion to Is each major Defence acquisition running to schedule?, which records a different failure in the same portfolio: information that was published for years and was then withdrawn.