Calculator
Most borrowing calculators flatter you. This one applies the full 3.00 percentage point APRA serviceability buffer, floors your living expenses at a HEM-style benchmark, and assesses credit cards on the limit rather than the balance, the way a credit assessor actually does. Every assumption is published below.
Household size drives the living-expense benchmark lenders apply.
Enter gross annual figures, before tax.
Everything except rent, existing loan repayments and the new mortgage.
Credit cards are assessed on the limit, not the balance, even if you clear them monthly.
Your approximate borrowing power
A range, not a number. Lenders assessing the same household routinely land tens of thousands apart.
The spread above is real lender variation. We assess your file against specific lender policies, covering income type, expenses, HECS and structure, and tell you which lender pays the top of that range.
Book a strategy callAsk a questionThis is an estimate of borrowing capacity, not an approval or a pre-approval. The living-expense benchmark used here is an indicative model, not the licensed Household Expenditure Measure tables that lenders use, and lender treatment of overtime, bonuses, rental income, HECS-HELP and self-employment varies widely. Two lenders assessing the same household can differ by tens of thousands of dollars. No credit check is performed and nothing you enter leaves your browser.
There is no income multiple in Australian lending. Nobody will tell you it is “five times your salary”, because that is not how the test works. A lender starts with your assessable income, taxes it, subtracts a benchmarked figure for living expenses, subtracts every existing commitment, and asks what is left. That surplus is then converted into the largest loan it could service, but tested at a rate several points above the one you will actually pay.
That last step is the one that surprises people. Under APRA’s prudential guidance, lenders must add a serviceability buffer of 3 percentage points to the loan’s product rate when assessing capacity. With owner-occupier rates near 5.99% in August 2026, applications are being assessed at roughly 8.99%, and many lenders apply a floor rate as well, using whichever is higher. Your capacity is set by a repayment you are not making, at a rate you are not paying.
Lenders do not simply accept the expenses you declare. They compare them against the Household Expenditure Measure, an independent benchmark produced quarterly by the Melbourne Institute and licensed to lenders, and they use the higher of the two. HEM varies by household composition, postcode and income band, and it is deliberately conservative: broadly the median of absolute basics plus the 25th percentile of discretionary basics.
The practical implication is that understating your expenses achieves nothing, because you will simply be floored at HEM. What does help is being able to evidence genuinely low expenses in categories the benchmark does not fix, and being ready to explain any spending that looks like an undisclosed commitment.
A credit card is assessed on its limit, not its balance. Most lenders apply around 3.8% of the limit per month as a notional repayment, on the reasoning that you could draw the card to its ceiling tomorrow. A $20,000 limit you never touch is treated as a $760 monthly commitment, which at current assessment rates costs you roughly $100,000 of borrowing power.
Cancelling or reducing unused card limits before you apply is the single cheapest and fastest way to increase capacity. It costs nothing and takes a phone call. Reduce the limit rather than merely paying the card off.
Because a single figure is misleading. Lenders differ on the assessment of overtime and bonus income, on how they shade rental income, on whether they use actual or benchmark expenses for a given household, on HECS treatment, and on the floor rate. Two lenders looking at the same file can differ by well over $100,000. A range is the honest output; the broker’s job is to find where in that range your file actually sits, and with which lender.
Borrowing power, or borrowing capacity, is the maximum a lender will lend you based on its assessment of your ability to service the debt. It is driven by income after tax, benchmarked living expenses, existing commitments and the assessment rate, not by the value of the property or the size of your deposit.
Deposit and property value determine a separate constraint, the loan-to-value ratio. You need to clear both tests: you must be able to service the loan, and the loan must sit within the lender's maximum LVR for your situation.
Next step
These figures are a starting point, not an assessment. Lender policy, your structure and your three-to-five year plan all change the answer. Tell us where you are today and what you’re working towards, and we’ll model it properly across our lender panel.