The hidden factors deciding how much house you can buy.
When you’re buying a home, it’s easy to focus on the big numbers: your salary, your deposit, and the price of the property you want to buy.
But sometimes, it’s not that simple. Your borrowing power can change significantly based on factors that are easy to overlook. It could be that $20,000 credit card limit you set last year, the car loan you’re still paying off, the HELP (HECS) debt eating into your income, or even the children you have along the way.
To help buyers understand their buying power, the team at AFMS Group looked at what happens when you change just one factor, running five borrower profiles through a panel of ten lenders. We then compared the results with income and property price data across Australia’s 87 statistical regions.
The findings show that some of the biggest differences in borrowing power have little to do with how much you earn.
Key Findings
- For a median earner, closing an unused $20,000 credit card could increase borrowing power by around $100,000, making it one of the biggest changes a buyer can make without increasing their income or deposit.
- Two children could reduce a median earner’s borrowing power by $120,000, while a $650 monthly car loan could reduce it by $85,000.
- A 0.75 percentage point cut in interest rates could add around $35,000 to a median earner’s borrowing power, but closing a $20,000 unused credit card could be worth almost three times as much.
- Where you live can matter more than how much you earn, with median house prices varying 10.7 times across Australia compared with a 1.61 times difference in median full-time earnings.
- A couple earning two local median incomes could afford the median house in 67 of Australia’s 87 regions, compared with just 13 regions for a single median earner.
What Can Change Your Borrowing Power?
Borrowing power, also called borrowing capacity, is the most a lender will let you borrow. It is worked out from your income after tax, your living expenses and any existing commitments, with the repayments tested at an assessment rate about three percentage points above the rate you would pay. That is why a commitment that looks small each month can take a large slice off the loan.
The Five Borrowers We Tested
To understand how different factors affect borrowing power, we started with five simple borrower profiles, ranging from a single earner on $80,000 to a professional couple earning $240,000 between them.
Each buyer starts from the same position: an owner-occupier taking out a 30-year principal and interest loan, with no children, existing debts or HELP debt. We then changed one factor at a time and ran the same borrower through a panel of 10 lenders.
This lets us see not only which factors have the biggest impact, but also how the same commitment affects buyers at different income levels.
All figures are indicative scenarios rather than loan pre-approvals. Potential home prices are based on a 20% deposit and exclude stamp duty, conveyancing and lenders' mortgage insurance.
What Can Reduce Your Borrowing Power?
Not all financial commitments have the same impact on how much you can borrow. For a median earner, two dependants have the biggest impact in our model, followed by a $20,000 credit card limit and a $650-a-month car loan.
Dependants
For a median earner, one dependant reduces borrowing power by $60,000, while two reduce it by $120,000. The impact is similar for other single earners, with two dependants reducing borrowing power by $115,000 for the $80,000 earner and $110,000 for the $120,000 earner. For a median-income couple, two dependants reduce borrowing power by $90,000.
For families, this can create a difficult trade-off: borrowing power can fall at the same time as the need for a bigger home grows.
Car and Personal Loans
A $650-a-month car loan reduces borrowing power by $85,000 for a median earner, compared with $55,000 for a $400-a-month personal loan. A $30,000 HELP debt has a smaller $50,000 impact for the same borrower.
HELP debt becomes more significant at higher incomes, though. The same $30,000 debt reduces borrowing power by $20,000 for the $80,000 earner, but by $80,000 for the $120,000 earner. This means the impact can change significantly depending on income.
Credit Card Limits
A $20,000 credit card limit reduces borrowing power by $100,000 for a median earner, even if the card isn't being used. That's because lenders assess the approved limit rather than the balance, treating the $20,000 limit as a $760 monthly commitment in this assessment.
For a median earner, the credit card limit therefore has a $15,000 greater impact on borrowing power than the $650-a-month car loan. Reducing or closing an unused credit card limit could be a relatively simple way for buyers to increase their borrowing capacity without changing their income or deposit.
Not sure how your own commitments stack up? AFMS Group compares 30+ lenders and can show you what you could realistically borrow before you start looking.
The Same Commitment Can Take 3x as Much of Your Borrowing Power
The dollar amount lost from borrowing power can look similar across different income levels, but the impact is much greater for someone starting with less borrowing power. In other words, a $100,000 reduction means more to a below-median earner than it does to a higher-income couple.
For example, a $20,000 credit card limit reduces borrowing power by 22.4% for a single below-median earner, compared with 8.0% for a couple earning $240,000. The difference is even clearer with dependants: two children reduce borrowing power by 27.1% for a below-median earner, compared with 8.0% for a couple earning $240,000. Across the five profiles, two dependants reduce borrowing power by between $90,000 and $120,000, but the relative impact is much greater for those with less borrowing power to begin with.
How Much Does a 0.25% Interest Rate Cut Increase Your Borrowing Power?
When you’re trying to buy a home, it’s easy to pin your hopes on interest rates coming down. And they can make a difference, but perhaps not as much as you might think.
For someone earning $95,000, a 0.25% rate cut could add around $11,000 to their borrowing power, while a 0.75% cut could add around $35,000. For a $240,000 couple, a 0.25% cut could add more than $28,000. The catch is that you can’t control when rates move. What you can control are other factors lenders consider. For that same $95,000 earner, reviewing a $20,000 unused credit card limit could have a much bigger impact on borrowing power than a rate cut.
Does a Bigger Deposit Increase Your Borrowing Power?
A bigger deposit does not necessarily mean a bigger loan. Lenders are primarily assessing whether you can afford the repayments, so changing the deposit has little effect on borrowing power in this model. Its biggest impact is the amount of cash you need upfront.
For a median earner, a 20% deposit means saving $125,000 to buy a $625,000 home. Under the 5% Deposit Scheme, that falls to just over $26,000, meaning almost $99,000 less cash is needed upfront. The trade-off is a lower purchase price of around $521,000.
So while a smaller deposit can help a first home buyer get into the market sooner, it does not make their borrowing power bigger.
What Can You Actually Buy?
Knowing how much you can borrow is only half the story. The next question is what that borrowing power can actually buy.
Where Your Borrowing Power Goes Furthest in Australia
Property prices determine how far that borrowing actually goes. The regions where people can borrow the most are not necessarily the places where that money goes furthest.
North West Victoria comes out on top, with a couple on two local median incomes able to afford a home worth around 3.27 times the region’s median house price. The Northern Territory Outback follows at 2.71 times, while South Australia’s Outback comes in at 2.69 times.
What’s interesting is that these regions do not necessarily have the highest borrowing power. North West Victoria ranks 53rd out of 86 for borrowing power, while Far West and Orana ranks 80th. Not one of the ten regions where borrowing power goes furthest is a capital city.
That comes down to the much bigger gap in property prices across Australia. Median full-time earnings vary by 1.61 times between regions, but median house prices vary by 10.7 times. In other words, where you live can have a much bigger impact on what your borrowing power can actually buy than how much you earn.
Where Your Borrowing Power Goes Least Far
The other end of the rankings looks very different. Nine of the ten regions where borrowing power goes least far are in Sydney. Yet some of these areas rank highly for borrowing power, showing how quickly property prices can change the situation.
Sydney’s North Sydney and Hornsby ranks first for borrowing power, but 86th for what that borrowing can buy. A couple on two local median incomes could borrow around $1.30 million, but with a 20% deposit that only stretches to a home worth $1.63 million, 0.54 times the region's $3.01 million median house price.
In Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, the gap is even wider, with what a couple can pay reaching just 0.39 times the $3.79 million median house price. It shows why looking at borrowing power on its own can give a very different picture from looking at what that borrowing can actually buy.
What This Means for Sydney Buyers
Sydney is where the gap between borrowing power and buying power is widest. The incomes are among the highest in the country, and the house prices are higher still.
- Sydney regions rank near the top for borrowing power and the bottom for what it buys. North Sydney and Hornsby is 1st for borrowing power, Northern Beaches 2nd and Inner West 4th. For what that borrowing can buy against the local median house they rank 86th, 84th and 83rd of 87.
- A couple on two local median incomes can afford the median house in only 2 of Sydney’s 14 regions: Outer West and Blue Mountains (1.11 times the median house) and Outer South West (1.04 times). Blacktown just misses at 0.99. The Eastern Suburbs is the lowest in the country at 0.39.
- Units are where Sydney borrowing power still works. The same couple can afford the median unit in all 14 Sydney regions, from 2.03 times the median unit in South West Sydney to 1.00 in the Eastern Suburbs. A single buyer on the local median can afford the median unit in Outer West and Blue Mountains and South West Sydney, and the median house nowhere in Sydney.
- The 5% Deposit Scheme’s $1.5 million Sydney cap does not limit what a couple can borrow in any region, but it limits where they can look. In five regions (Inner West, City and Inner South, Northern Beaches, North Sydney and Hornsby, and the Eastern Suburbs) every house sits in a suburb whose median price is above the cap. The scheme works best on houses in Outer West and Blue Mountains, Outer South West, South West and Blacktown, where fewer than one house in five is priced above it.
How Much Harder Is It to Buy a Home Alone?
Buying on one income can make a much bigger difference than you might expect. A single buyer earning the local median can afford the median house in just 13 of 87 regions, compared with 67 regions for a couple earning two local median incomes.
In the typical region, a single buyer can afford around 67% of the local median house price. And for most single buyers, saving a bigger deposit is not the answer.
In 74 of 87 regions, the loan is the thing holding them back, meaning they simply cannot borrow enough to close the gap. That makes the factors affecting borrowing power even more important, as reducing an existing commitment could make a meaningful difference to what a single buyer can afford.
Where Does the 5% Deposit Scheme Work?
A smaller deposit can make it easier to get into the market, but the scheme’s price cap can still affect what you can buy. The impact also looks different for single buyers and couples.
For single buyers, the cap is generally not the main constraint. In none of the 86 regions would it limit the price a median-income single buyer could afford. The closest it comes is South Australia’s Outback, where they could afford around $495,000 against a $500,000 cap.
For couples, the cap can be more restrictive. In 59 of 86 regions, a couple earning two local median incomes could afford a home priced above the scheme’s price cap. In Central Queensland, for example, they could afford a home worth around $1.11 million, while the cap is $700,000.
There is also the question of what the cap can actually buy locally. In 43 of 86 regions, more than half of houses sit in suburbs where the median house is priced above the cap, and in 10 regions it is practically every house.
What Buyers Should Do Before Applying for a Home Loan
Andrew Hadjidemetri, Principal Mortgage Broker and Founder at AFMS Group, on what the findings mean for buyers:
The biggest takeaway is that borrowing power is about much more than your salary and deposit. Things like an unused credit card, car loan or other commitments can significantly affect what a lender will offer. I’d encourage buyers to understand their borrowing position before they start looking at properties, rather than finding a home first and trying to make the numbers work afterwards. It is also important to remember that your maximum borrowing capacity is not necessarily what you should spend.
Some of the factors affecting borrowing power can be changed, whether that is reducing a commitment, reviewing credit card limits, or looking at different lenders and deposit options. A mortgage broker can help buyers understand the full picture and compare their options. At AFMS Group, we compare more than 30 lenders to help buyers understand what they can realistically borrow and what options may work for their circumstances.
Before You Apply: Five Things to Check
The report shows which factors move borrowing power most. These are the ones a buyer can do something about before a lender looks at the application.
- Close or reduce credit cards you do not use. Lenders count the limit, not the balance. A $20,000 limit cost the median earner $100,000 of borrowing power in this report, more than a 0.75 percentage point rate cut would add.
- Look at the car or personal loan. A $650 a month car loan cost $85,000. If a loan is close to being paid out, clearing it before you apply can matter more than waiting for rates to move.
- Know how your HELP (HECS) debt is treated. Lenders take the compulsory repayment off your income, and the effect grows as income rises: $50,000 of borrowing power at $95,000, $80,000 at $120,000. Paying it out is not always the best use of savings, so ask how each lender assesses it before deciding.
- Count dependants in your numbers early. Two dependants cost the median earner $120,000, the largest factor in the report, and they raise the living-expense benchmark rather than adding a repayment, so there is no loan to pay out.
- Get your borrowing power checked before you look at homes, not after. The same borrower gets different answers from different lenders. Two of the ten lenders on the panel sat noticeably above the rest, which is why the report uses the median rather than the average. A broker can run your profile across the panel and show you where you stand.
Borrowing Power Questions
Short answers to the questions buyers ask most, using the figures from this report.
Does a credit card limit affect borrowing power?
Yes. Lenders assess the approved limit, not the balance you owe. In this report a $20,000 limit reduced a median earner's borrowing power by $100,000, even with nothing owing on the card. Reducing or closing an unused card is one of the quickest ways to increase your borrowing power.
Does HECS or HELP debt affect borrowing power?
Yes, through the compulsory repayment taken out of your income. A $30,000 HELP debt reduced borrowing power by $50,000 for someone earning $95,000, and by $80,000 for someone earning $120,000, because the repayment rate rises with income.
Do children affect how much you can borrow?
Yes. Dependants raise the living-expense benchmark lenders use in their assessment. One dependant reduced a median earner's borrowing power by $60,000 and two dependants by $120,000, the largest single factor in the report.
Does a bigger deposit increase borrowing power?
No. Lenders assess whether you can afford the repayments on your income, so the size of your deposit has little effect on the loan amount. A bigger deposit adds to the price you can pay and can avoid Lenders Mortgage Insurance, but it does not increase the loan itself.
How much does a 0.25% rate cut add to borrowing power?
Around $11,000 for someone earning $95,000 and about $28,000 for a couple earning $240,000. A 0.75 percentage point cut adds about $35,000 for the median earner, roughly a third of what closing a $20,000 credit card limit is worth.
Want to know what these numbers mean for you? Talk to a first home buyer broker at AFMS Group. No consultation fees, lender-paid.
About the Data
What This Report Measures
- How much five illustrative households can borrow, and how much one financial factor at a time changes it
- How far that borrowing goes against local house prices, across Australia's 87 statistical regions (Statistical Area Level 4 regions as mapped by the ABS)
- We calculate borrowing capacity on a panel of ten lenders; incomes, prices and dwelling counts are third-party data
How much can Australians actually borrow, and where does that borrowing go furthest? We answered these questions by running the same five borrowers through the servicing tools we use for real loan applications, changing one thing at a time, and then setting the results against what homes in each part of the country actually cost.
Where the Figures Come from
- Borrowing capacity: our own, produced with the servicing tools we use for real loan applications. Each figure is the median across a panel of ten lenders (Firstmac, Resimac, Macquarie, ubank, CommBank, ANZ, Bankwest, St George, Westpac and NAB). The median is published rather than the average, because two lenders sit noticeably above the rest. No figure is attributed to any individual lender.
- Regional incomes: ABS median full-time earnings by statistical region, pooled over three years, then carried forward to the June quarter of 2026 (latest available period) using the ABS Wage Price Index so that incomes and prices sit at close to the same date. Three years are pooled because a single year's figure for a smaller region carries too much sampling error to rank on.
- Suburb prices: Microburbs median house and unit prices, current to September 2026, covering 4,494 suburbs. Microburbs document their median as a "smart median": quality-adjusted so that it reflects the typical property rather than whichever properties happened to sell, and always inside the 25th to 75th percentile band. The quality adjustment is their method and we take it as supplied; the band containment we checked ourselves, and it holds in every one of the 6,045 suburb medians we use.
- Dwelling counts: ABS Census 2021, used to weight suburb prices into regional figures.
The 5 Borrower Profiles
| Borrower profile | Income | Who this represents |
|---|---|---|
| The below-median earner | Single, $80,000 | Below the national median full-time wage |
| The median earner | Single, $95,000 | The national median full-time earner aged 25–64 |
| The solo professional | Single, $120,000 | Buying alone on an above-average income |
| The two-median household | Couple, $190,000 | Two median earners together |
| The dual professional couple | Couple, $240,000 | Two above-average earners |
- Standardised for all 5 borrower profiles: first home buyer, buying a home to live in, 30-year loan, principal and interest. Unless a scenario says otherwise, none has children, existing debts or a HELP debt.
- Each couple earns exactly twice the matching single. That makes "buying alone versus together" an exact comparison rather than an approximate one.
These are lending scenarios rather than portraits of typical households, and the difference matters when reading the couple figures. The realestate.com.au Housing Affordability Report 2026 puts median household income at just over $125,000, drawn from the ABS Survey of Income and Housing and extrapolated to current terms. Our two-median couple, on $190,000, sits about 1.5 times that. A median household counts every kind of household, including people living alone and retirees, while these profiles are two working full-time earners.
How Borrowing Capacity Is Calculated
Only one thing changes at a time. Where a figure is attributed to a credit card limit, it is the same borrower, the same income and the same lender panel, with nothing different but the card. That is what makes each gap attributable to the factor named rather than to a difference in the borrower.
- Assessment rate: lenders do not assess you at the rate you pay. A 6.09% product rate as at August 2026, plus the regulator's minimum 3 percentage point buffer, means every borrower is assessed as though paying 9.09%. Not every lender on the panel applies the full 3 points, some non-banks assess below it, so 9.09% describes the standard case rather than all ten. For context, the most recent Reserve Bank observation for new owner-occupier variable loans is 6.23%, at 31 May 2026. A rate placed through a broker would be expected to sit below an all-institutions average for new lending, and that series is where the RBA appears in the sources: as a cross-check on the product rate, not as an input to the model.
- Living expenses: the HEM industry benchmark, which is not public, held at a single Sydney postcode for the whole country. Holding it fixed is deliberate: if living costs moved region by region as well as prices and incomes, a region's position could not be attributed to either. Because it is a city postcode, every borrowing figure is slightly conservative.
- Rounding: borrowing capacity figures supplied by the lender panel are rounded to the nearest $5,000 and should be read as indicative of scale rather than as pre-approvals. A gap is the difference between two of those rounded figures, so it carries up to $5,000 of rounding in its own right. A contracted monthly repayment costs every borrower much the same borrowing power in principle, and across the card, car loan and personal loan rows the differences between borrowers run to one or two of those steps. Dependants are the exception and should not be read that way: they raise the living-expense benchmark rather than adding a repayment, so two dependants range from $90,000 to $120,000 across the five households, a difference in treatment, not rounding. The rate-move figures are different again: they reprice each borrower's panel figure at the higher or lower assessment rate, so they are shown unrounded.
Deposits and Purchasing Power
- Purchasing power: the borrowing capacity plus the deposit. The price of the home someone could actually buy.
- Deposit tiers: 20%, priced at 6.09%; 10%, which carries Lenders Mortgage Insurance; and 5% under the Government's 5% Deposit Scheme, priced at 6.20%, where the government guarantee waives mortgage insurance.
- Why the 10% tier prices highest: it is the only tier that is neither low-risk for the lender nor government-backed, so it prices above both and carries mortgage insurance as well.
How the Regional Figures Are Built
- Regions: Australia's 87 SA4 statistical regions, as per the ABS. Queensland - Outback is excluded from every figure in this report, its 29% sampling error on income being beyond what the ABS considers usable, and is not one of the 87. Of those 87, income-based figures cover 86, because the ABS earnings release reports Western Australia's two Outback regions as a single row.
- Regional capacity is our own capacity curve, with the same servicing tools and the same ten-lender panel as every other borrowing figure here, read at each region's median income and interpolated between the income steps we modelled. The five borrower profiles are run individually rather than read off that curve, so the two are produced separately on identical lending assumptions. They agree exactly at three of the five profile incomes; at the other two the curve sits $5,000 lower, one rounding step and about 1%. A region whose median income matches a profile can therefore show a figure one step below that profile's.
- Price coverage is the 4,494 suburbs with at least ten sales behind the figure, out of the 15,352 suburbs assessed nationally.
- Sample: each median is built on the sixty most recent sales, or fewer where the suburb had fewer, with a floor of ten and nothing older than twelve months. A busy suburb reaches sixty within a few weeks; a quiet one draws on the full year.
- Aggregation: suburb prices roll up to regions as a dwelling-weighted median, weighted by 2021 Census dwelling counts, so a 12,000-home suburb counts for more than a 40-home locality and one very expensive suburb cannot drag a region. Houses and units are never blended, and the two are split the way the price data splits them: a house is a detached dwelling, while townhouses, terraces and semi-detached dwellings are counted with units.
- Two measures are reported: how far a region's income goes against its prices, and how many of the region's priced suburbs have a median home the household could afford. Rankings run on the first, because the second often reaches every suburb or none and cannot order the regions at either end.
Figures are published by region rather than by council, because council-level incomes were not available. The underlying suburb prices are not published due to licensing limitations.
How the Figures Were Tested
We rebuilt the borrowing figures independently from the stated assumptions, taking income after tax, subtracting living expenses and amortising over 30 years at the assessment rate. The two agree to within 2% on every profile, landing between 97.9% and 99.1%, with the small consistent gap being what you would expect if lenders require a modest surplus above the repayment.
The dependant scenarios are the one exception. The living-expense benchmark is supplied for households without children, so those figures are taken as modelled by the lender panel rather than rebuilt from the stated assumptions. Every other commitment in this report can be rebuilt from the assumptions table: at a 9.09% assessment rate over 30 years a dollar of monthly commitment is worth about $123 of borrowing power, which puts a $20,000 card limit assessed at 3.8% of the limit within one rounding step of the published figure.
The regional ranking was rebuilt several different ways to see what moved. Discarding the dwelling weights entirely and treating every suburb equally shifts the average region by 1.9 places out of 87 and keeps 9 of the top 10. Counting terraces and townhouses as houses rather than units, which is the main judgement call in the price data, shifts the average region by 0.6 places and also keeps 9 of the top 10. Against those, adding prices to the income ranking moves the average region 36 places. The order is driven by prices and incomes, not by the choices we made in handling the data, and the age of the Census weights cannot move it.
What Is Not Included
- Purchase costs are excluded, such as stamp duty, conveyancing and legal fees, and Lenders Mortgage Insurance. Real buyers pay these and they run to tens of thousands of dollars.
- Interest over the life of the loan, and the size of the monthly repayment, are outside this modelling. The figures stop at the maximum purchase price.
Limitations
- The suburb count counts suburbs, not homes. A suburb counts when the household could afford its median house, or its median unit. In a suburb that counts, the dearer homes are still out of range, and in one that does not, some cheaper homes may be within reach. It does not say what share of a region's homes a household could buy.
- It also counts only the suburbs we can price. The 4,494 suburbs covered are those that transact often enough to have a median; the rest are thin rural localities holding little of the housing stock.
- Unit prices are available for 1,682 of the 4,494 suburbs covered, so in some regions the unit count rests on only one or two suburbs, and Darwin has no priced unit median at all. Every count shows its own base, so a thin one is visible rather than suppressed: Darwin's house count rests on a single suburb.
- The five-suburb threshold governs only the share of houses priced above the 5% Deposit Scheme cap. Darwin is the only region below it: its median house price rests on a single suburb, so it carries a median house price, appears in the rankings and in the counts of regions where the median house is within reach, and is left out of the scheme-cap figures.
- The two regional measures can point in different ways, and that is correct. The purchasing power ratio counts houses only, while the suburb counts are given for houses and units separately, each against its own median.
- The living-expense benchmark supplied for a single earner on $110,000 is marginally higher than the one supplied for $120,000. It is published as supplied rather than smoothed. Borrowing capacities are supplied by the panel rather than derived from the benchmark, so no published figure moves with it; it affects only the independent rebuild described above, and by less than one rounding step.
- Living costs do not vary by region. Holding the benchmark fixed isolates prices and incomes, but it means the ranking does not reflect the fact that it costs more to live in some regions than others.
- Some figures count 86 regions and some 87, for two separate reasons. The ABS earnings release reports Western Australia's two Outback regions as a single row, so anything ranked on income covers 86 and anything based on prices covers 87. Both halves carry the same income and nothing is double-counted, which is why they are ranked separately under their own names, Outback (North) and Outback (South), but appear merged as Outback (North and South) wherever the figure rests on income. The scheme-cap figures are a third case: they are price-based, so they start from 87, and report 86 because Darwin is left out.
- Incomes and prices are still not from exactly the same date. The most recent ABS earnings observation is August 2025, so incomes are carried forward with the Wage Price Index to the June quarter of 2026, the latest published. Prices are September 2026. Closing the last quarter would mean forecasting an unpublished figure, so it is left open: borrowing capacity here is understated against current prices by roughly one quarter of wage growth.
- A capped sample is not a full year of sales. Each median rests on the sixty most recent sales and nothing older than twelve months, so a busy suburb's figure covers a few weeks where a quiet one covers the full year. September 2026 is the date the data speaks to, not a window it covers.
Assumptions
| Assumption | Value |
|---|---|
| Assessment rate | 6.09% product rate + 3.00pp buffer = 9.09% |
| 5% Deposit Scheme rate | 6.20% product rate + 3.00pp buffer = 9.20% |
| 10% deposit tier rate | Not separately stated; capacities for that tier are supplied by the panel |
| Rate as at | August 2026 |
| Loan term and type | 30 years, principal and interest, owner-occupier |
| Lender basis | Panel of ten; figure reported is the panel median |
| Living expenses | Industry benchmark, held at one reference location |
| Credit cards | 3.8% of the approved limit per month |
| Personal and car loans | Actual contracted monthly repayment |
| HELP debt | Compulsory repayment from income, 2026-27 rates |
| Overtime and commission | Assessed at 80%; allowances at 100% |
| Debt-to-income cap | 6×, treated as a referral rather than a decline |
| Excluded from home prices | Stamp duty, conveyancing, mortgage insurance, interest over the loan |
Sources and Disclaimer
Using this data: The figures in this report can be republished in articles, reports and social posts with credit to AFMS Group and a link to this page. For the underlying tables or a comment from Andrew Hadjidemetri, email enquiries@afmsgroup.com.au.
Borrowing capacity is our own, calculated across a ten-lender panel. Regional incomes are from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Characteristics of Employment release, pooled 2023-25. Dwelling counts are from ABS Census 2021. Suburb prices are supplied by Microburbs, September 2026. The assessment buffer follows Australian Prudential Regulation Authority guidance, tax and HELP thresholds are the Australian Taxation Office's published 2026-27 scales, and reference lending rates are Reserve Bank of Australia series.
General information only: This report is general information. It is not financial, credit, legal or taxation advice, and it is not credit assistance or a recommendation to apply for any credit product. It does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. You should consider whether it is appropriate for you and seek independent professional advice before acting on it.
Not an offer, approval or guarantee of finance: Nothing in this report is an offer of credit, a pre-approval, a conditional approval, or any assurance that a lender will lend you a particular amount, or lend to you at all. Every application is assessed by the lender against its own criteria at the time it is made.
The figures are illustrative estimates: They describe five hypothetical borrower profiles constructed for this report. They are not real customers and are not case studies. Each figure is produced by applying one consistent set of stated assumptions, listed in full above, and the borrowing capacities supplied by the lender panel are rounded to the nearest $5,000. Your own borrowing capacity will differ, and may differ substantially, because it depends on your income, expenses, existing commitments, credit history, employment type, the property, the lender and the product you choose.
Figures are current as at the date stated and will change: Interest rates, lender credit policy, serviceability assessment rates, living expense benchmarks, tax and HELP repayment thresholds, government scheme rules and property prices all change over time. Figures stated as at August 2026 should not be relied on after that date without checking current conditions.
Government scheme information: References to the Government 5% Deposit Scheme describe the scheme as we understand it at the date of publication. Eligibility, places, price caps and terms are set by the government and can change. Only the scheme's property price cap has been modelled; no other eligibility criterion has been tested. Eligibility for any scheme is determined by the relevant authority and participating lenders, not by this report.
Costs not included: The purchase price figures exclude stamp duty, conveyancing and legal fees, Lenders Mortgage Insurance, and all other transaction and ongoing costs. They also exclude interest payable over the life of the loan and the size of loan repayments. Real buyers pay all of these.
Third-party information: This report draws on information supplied by third parties, including the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, the Australian Taxation Office, the Reserve Bank of Australia, property data providers and a panel of lenders. While that information is believed to be accurate at the date of publication, AFMS Group does not warrant its accuracy or completeness and accepts no liability for any loss arising from reliance on it. Lender figures reflect a panel median at a point in time and no figure is attributed to any individual lender.
Licensing: AFMS Group provides credit assistance only. Australian Credit Licence 389087, Credit Representative 523450. MFAA member. To the extent permitted by law, AFMS Group excludes all liability for any loss or damage arising from use of, or reliance on, this report.