Last updated: 17 July 2026 · Lender policies verified July 2026 · Reviewed by Jayden Vecchio, Mortgage Broker & Founder, Hunter Galloway
The short answer: you can get a self-employed home loan with as little as one year of financials — and in some cases with no business financials at all. As at July 2026: some major lenders accept 18 months of ABN registration instead of two years, one bank assesses two years of ATO Notices of Assessment and nothing else, and professional pathways (doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers and more) can need just 12 months on an ABN.
The real trap isn't being self-employed — it's the transition. Switching from PAYG to ABN, or restructuring from sole trader to company or trust, usually resets the clock with the banks, even if nothing else about your work changed. If you're planning either move, the order you do things in matters more than almost anything else on this page.
How Lenders Actually Assess Self-Employed Income
If you're self-employed, you've probably had the experience that inspired this guide: your business is going well, your income is strong, and yet the bank's answer sounds nothing like your reality.
Here's why. When you're on a salary, the bank reads your payslip and takes the number at face value. When you work for yourself, the bank builds its own version of your income — and the rules it uses are different at every lender.
Three mechanics drive almost every self-employed decision:
1. Which year (or years) of income they count
Many lenders take your last two years of tax returns and use the lower of the latest year or the average of both. If your income grew from $90,000 to $140,000, plenty of banks will assess you somewhere around $115,000 — or less. But a handful of lenders use the most recent year on its own, no averaging. Same business, same tax returns, materially different borrowing power. We cover exactly who does what below.
2. Add-backs: the deductions that get added back on
Your accountant's job is to legally minimise your taxable income. The good news is lenders can "add back" expenses that don't reflect your real ongoing cash position, including:
- Depreciation (a paper expense, not cash out the door)
- One-off, non-recurring expenses
- Interest on debts being refinanced or paid out
- Super contributions above the compulsory minimum
- In some cases, company profits retained in the business
Two lenders can look at the same tax return and land $100,000+ apart in assessable income purely on how they treat add-backs and company profit.
3. How long you've been trading — under your current structure
This is the one that blindsides people. The banks don't just want to know how long you've been in your industry — they want history under your current ABN and business structure. Switch from employee to contractor, or from sole trader to a company, and most lenders treat you as a brand-new business. More on the restructure trap below, because it's the single most expensive surprise in self-employed lending.
The pattern we see over and over: a bank quotes a borrowing figure over the phone — sometimes without seeing a single financial document — and the borrower treats it as the truth. One couple came to us after their bank offered $230,000 toward a $550,000 renovation based on a phone conversation. Once we actually mapped their financials against lender policy, their real capacity was about $900,000. The bank wasn't lying; it was quoting its own policy, which happened to be the wrong policy for a sole trader with a down year. Full story below.
The ABN Timeline: What You Can Get At Every Stage
Rather than asking "can I get a loan?", the more useful question is "what can I get today, and what opens up when?" Here's the honest map, current as at July 2026:
Time on your ABN | What's realistically available | What to know |
Under 12 months | Specialist / low-doc lenders; limited exceptions at mainstream banks for contractors in the same industry | Higher rates and bigger deposits. Often the right answer is a short wait — your first lodged tax return changes everything. Medico policies are the big exception (some lenders take one year, or even a single BAS). |
12–18 months | Professional pathways (12 months ABN + 1 year financials for eligible professions); specialist lenders for everyone else | If you're an accountant, lawyer, doctor, engineer, vet, pharmacist, psychologist, architect, optometrist or podiatrist, one lender's professional pathway may already have you covered. |
18–24 months | Several major banks — the 2-year rule has quietly become 18 months at a number of lenders | Usually capped at 80% LVR and needs your first full year's return lodged. If you started your business 18–19 months ago, you may already be "in the door" at a major without any exceptions. |
2+ years | Effectively the full market, including the lightest-paperwork options (e.g. NOAs-only fast-track assessment) | Now the game shifts from "who will lend?" to "who assesses my income most generously?" — averaging vs latest-year policies can be a six-figure difference. |
Two things make this table dangerous to use on your own. First, "time on ABN" and "lodged tax returns" are different clocks — a lender that wants 18 months of ABN usually also wants at least one full financial year's return under that ABN. Second, every one of these policies changes without notice and gets assessed case-by-case. Treat this as a map, not a promise.
8 Lender Policies Most Self-Employed Borrowers Never Hear About
This is the section that makes the difference between "declined" and "approved" — or between borrowing $200,000 and $500,000. These are real policies at real lenders, current as at July 2026. Lender policies change without notice and every application is assessed case-by-case, so use these as conversation starters, not guarantees.
1. Skip the business financials entirely (ANZ & CBA)
For sole traders, ANZ doesn't make business financials (P&L and balance sheet) mandatory — your personal tax return and Notice of Assessment can carry the application. CBA's simple verification approach is similar: payslips or salary credits plus an accountant's letter confirming the business is profitable. If your accountant hasn't finished your full financials yet, this can save you months.
2. Latest year only — no averaging down (Bankwest & ME Bank)
Had a cracking year? Bankwest uses your most recent year's income straight up — no averaging with the prior year. ME Bank has a similar option: one year of financials, 100% of that year's income, up to 80% LVR. Most banks would drag your figure down by averaging in last year's lower number; these policies don't.
3. The professional shortcut — 12 months ABN (Macquarie)
If you're a self-employed accountant, lawyer, doctor, engineer, pharmacist, psychologist, vet, architect, optometrist or podiatrist, Macquarie's professional pathway needs just one year of financials and 12 months on your ABN — versus two years for everyone else. There's an even simpler option using only your personal tax return and NOA, up to 80% LVR. For recently-qualified professionals who've gone out on their own, this is often the whole answer.
4. 18 months ABN, not 2 years (ANZ, Bankwest & ME Bank)
Three lenders have dropped the traditional 2-year ABN requirement to 18 months: ANZ (sole traders), Bankwest (capped at 80% LVR) and ME Bank. If you started your business a year and a half ago, you don't need a special exception — you're already inside standard policy at a major.
5. Company directors: company financials only (NAB)
For company-structure borrowers at 80% LVR or under, NAB can assess the deal on company financials alone — a personal tax return isn't required as a baseline. They verify your entitlement to company funds through an ASIC/ABN search instead. If your personal return is delayed (or complicated), this cuts the document stack right down.
6. Fast Track: two NOAs and nothing else (Westpac & St.George)
The lightest paperwork in mainstream lending: Westpac and St.George offer a fast-track method needing only your last two years of ATO Notices of Assessment. No tax returns, no business financials, no accountant letters. The catches: your ABN needs two full financial years behind it, it caps at 80% LVR, and you'll need a clean credit score (roughly 650+).
7. Stack an LMI waiver on top of 1-year financials
Eligible professionals (accountants, lawyers, medical professionals) can access LMI waivers up to 90% LVR at Westpac, St.George, CBA, NAB and ANZ — income thresholds apply (around $100k–$120k+ depending on the lender). The clever bit: some borrowers can combine the waiver with a simplified one-year financials pathway. A 90% LVR loan, no LMI, verified on one year of financials — that's tens of thousands saved for a self-employed professional buying at high LVR.
8. One year of financials with a 10% haircut (ING)
ING accepts one year of personal tax return + NOA up to 80% LVR, shading the income to 90%. If your latest year is strong enough that 90% of it still services the loan, this is far simpler than pulling together two years of full financials. (Not available if you're consolidating personal debts.)
Why this list matters: none of these policies appear on a bank's home page, and the person at the branch is trained on their bank's policy only. The whole self-employed game is matching your structure, timing and income shape to the one or two lenders whose policy happens to fit it. That's the job of a broker — and it's why the same borrower can be declined at one bank and approved for triple the amount at another.
Tax Returns vs Accountant's Letter vs BAS: What Lenders Actually Accept
Self-employed verification isn't one list of documents — it's several competing pathways, and choosing the wrong one can genuinely torch your application. Here's the landscape:
Pathway | Typical documents | Best for |
Full-doc | 2 years personal + business tax returns, NOAs, sometimes interim financials | Established businesses wanting the sharpest rates and highest LVRs |
Simplified / 1-year | Most recent year's return + NOA; sometimes an accountant's letter | Growing income, recent (18 month+) starts, eligible professionals |
NOA-only fast track | Last 2 years of ATO Notices of Assessment | Clean, established borrowers who want minimal paperwork at ≤80% LVR |
Low-doc / alt-doc | BAS statements, business bank statements, or accountant's declaration | Under 2 years trading, returns not lodged yet, complex structures |
The document order matters more than you think
Here's something nobody tells you: once a lender has seen a document, they can't unsee it. We had a client whose accountant's letter was rejected on a technicality — it didn't state the financial year. The lender then demanded his BAS instead, which read low for reasons the full-year figures would have explained. His assessable borrowing crashed from $500,000 to around $200,000, and even a corrected letter couldn't fully restore it.
The lesson: which documents you show a lender, in what order, is a strategy decision — not an admin task. An accountant's letter that's missing one required detail (the financial year, the exact wording about profitability) doesn't just get bounced; it can force the application onto a worse verification pathway. Get the letter requirements from your broker before your accountant writes it. Most employers and accountants get these letters wrong the first time, through no fault of their own — the required wording is lender-specific and unpublished.
Related reading: home loans for accountants, how many bank statements you need, and if the ATO is part of your story, getting a home loan with ATO tax debt.
Check to see if you are eligible for a home loan
The Restructure Trap: Read This Before You Resign, Restructure Or Add Your Partner To The Business
If you take one thing from this page, take this: the biggest self-employed lending problems aren't caused by being self-employed. They're caused by the transition.
Banks don't care that it's the same industry, the same clients, even the same desk. New ABN = new business = the clock restarts. We see the same three versions of this constantly:
PAYG → ABN (going out on your own)
A physiotherapist we worked with switched from employee to ABN contracting in December — same industry, with a contract locked in to 2028. The banks reset his clock anyway and wanted two years of self-employed returns before his next purchase. His own words: "My position's better, and now I'm being punished for it." He wasn't wrong — but the sequencing was. Had he bought (or refinanced) before resigning, none of it would have applied.
Sole trader → company or trust
Restructuring for tax or asset-protection reasons is often the right call — but every restructure resets the lending clock, because lenders want financials under the new entity. A partnership-to-company restructure can make your income temporarily invisible to a bank even though the money never stopped flowing.
The income gap
A locum psychiatrist who'd averaged $120,000+ for years took an eight-month break to pivot into a telehealth clinic. Westpac and NAB wanted two years of ABN history under the new arrangement and couldn't give him confidence for a settlement deadline. The path forward ran through medico-specific policies (one lender can accept a single BAS statement under medical professional policy) with specialist lenders as backup and a plan to refinance to a sharp rate at the two-year mark. As his broker put it: "Someone earning half as much as you wouldn't have a problem getting a loan — it's just that the banks' policies don't facilitate it."
The rule of thumb: don't quit, don't restructure, don't add your partner to the business — until you've mapped the sequencing against your property plans. The tax benefit of a restructure is usually a few thousand dollars a year. The lending cost of a badly-timed one can be a two-year wait or a six-figure drop in borrowing power. If a purchase or refinance is anywhere on your horizon, timing beats everything.
Planning the move to contracting specifically? See our guide to home loans on contractor income.
Low-Doc Loans And The Refinance-Out Strategy
If you're inside the two-year window and the mainstream doors are shut, a low-doc (alt-doc) loan can be a bridge — as long as you go in with your eyes open about what it costs and how you get out.
Low-doc lenders verify income with BAS statements, business bank statements or an accountant's declaration instead of lodged tax returns. In exchange, you'll typically pay a meaningfully higher rate and may need a bigger deposit or pay a risk fee.
The strategy that makes low-doc worth it
The version of this we recommend is always a two-step plan, never a destination. A recent example: a sole trader who couldn't wait for his next tax return went in at roughly 8% deposit on a higher low-doc rate — with a mapped plan to refinance to a conventional loan the moment he hit 20% equity and had a full year's financials. The low-doc loan buys the property before prices move; the refinance fixes the rate problem 12–18 months later.
If someone offers you a low-doc loan without an exit plan attached, get a second opinion.
LMI Waivers For Self-Employed Professionals
Lenders Mortgage Insurance on a 90% loan can run to tens of thousands of dollars — and eligible professionals can often skip it entirely. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants and several other professions can access LMI waivers up to 90% LVR at most of the majors, subject to minimum income thresholds (roughly $100,000–$120,000+ depending on the lender).
Being self-employed doesn't disqualify you — and as covered above, some lenders will let an eligible professional combine the waiver with a one-year financials pathway. If you're a first home buyer, it's also worth comparing the waiver route against the government's 5% deposit scheme; depending on your deposit and price point, the scheme sometimes beats the professional waiver. We run that comparison for clients routinely — it's rarely intuitive.
Real Client Outcomes (Real Numbers, Names Changed)
These are real Hunter Galloway client scenarios from the past six months. Names changed for privacy; the numbers are the real ones, because "borrowing power can vary" tells you nothing and "$230K became $900K" tells you everything.
Fiona & her husband: the $230,000 phone quote that was really $900,000
Fiona's bank told her and her sole-trader husband they could borrow $230,000 toward a $500–550K renovation — quoted over the phone, without seeing his financials. His return showed $51K in a down year after a business split; her income was $140K. When we mapped it properly: about $900,000 of total lending available today, and if his next return lands around $70K, lenders that isolate one year's financials lift that to roughly $1.04 million — the full renovation funded.
"And they have told us that they'll only lend us $230,000."
A down year doesn't mean no. It means the right lender and the right documents.
Jake: one missing line in an accountant's letter
Jake's lender refused his accountant's letter because it didn't reference the right financial year, and demanded his BAS instead — which read artificially low. His target borrowing crashed from $500,000 to around $200,000 with a settlement deadline the same day. The document strategy — which papers, in which order — was the whole ballgame.
"Now they've seen it, they can't unsee it."
Mitch: same job, same industry — two-year reset anyway
Mitch the physio went from PAYG to ABN contracting with a contract running to 2028. Banks reset the clock regardless. Rather than a flat "wait two years," we mapped his position: about $825,000 of extra borrowing capacity keeping his unit, or around $1.05M plus ~$520K net proceeds if he sold the apartment. The wait became a plan.
Would you like to learn about your situation?
Why Online Borrowing Calculators Get Self-Employed Income Wrong
Almost every borrowing power calculator on the internet — including, until recently, one on our own site — assumes you're a PAYG employee. Enter your gross income and it happily multiplies. It doesn't know about two-year averaging, add-backs, company profit vs directors' wages, ABN length rules, or income shading.
How wrong can it be? One client's online calculator result said $700,000. His real, policy-checked capacity was $300,000 (plus $100K in gifted funds). That's not a rounding error — it's a $400,000 mistake that could have cost him a deposit on a contract he couldn't complete. (We flagged that calculator for correction — it's why we now build ours to handle self-employed income properly.)
Use our calculators as a starting point, then get the real number checked against actual lender policy before you sign anything.
Why Self-Employed Borrowers Use Hunter Galloway
Self-employed lending is the single biggest source of frustrated borrowers we speak to, and the pattern is always the same: the wall (a bank's "no" or lowball quote), the rule nobody told them (averaging, the ABN clock, the letter wording), then the pathway. That pattern is this page.
- 30+ lenders, which matters more for self-employed borrowers than anyone else — the policy spread between lenders is widest here.
- 97% loan approval rate — because we match the application to the lender before it's lodged, not after it bounces.
- 2,400+ five-star Google reviews — the highest rated and most reviewed mortgage broker in Brisbane, working with self-employed clients Australia-wide.
- No cost to you for standard residential lending — like most brokers, we're paid by the lender you settle with.
Tell us your structure, your ABN date and your last return, and we'll map which lenders fit you today — and what your borrowing power actually is. Get a free assessment or call us on 1300 088 065.
Self-Employed Home Loan FAQs
Can I get a home loan with only 1 year of self-employed financials?
Yes. As at July 2026, several lenders accept one year of financials — some using 100% of that year's income up to 80% LVR, one shading it to 90%, and professional pathways needing only 12 months of ABN registration. Policies change without notice and everything is case-by-case, but "two years or nothing" hasn't been true for a while.
How long does my ABN need to be registered?
It depends on the lender: 18 months gets you inside standard policy at several majors, 12 months on professional pathways, and specialist lenders can work with less at a higher cost. The traditional answer of "two years" is now the conservative end of the market, not the rule.
Do banks average my last two years of income?
Many use the lower of the latest year or the two-year average — which punishes growing businesses. A few use the latest year outright. If your income grew significantly, lender choice on this one policy can move your borrowing power by six figures.
My accountant minimises my taxable income. Can I still qualify?
Usually, yes. Add-backs (depreciation, one-off expenses, extra super, interest being refinanced) restore much of the difference between your taxable income and your real cash position. This is also a genuine trade-off to discuss with your accountant before lodgement time: every dollar of aggressive deduction saves you tax and costs you borrowing power.
I just switched from PAYG to an ABN doing the same work. Can I use my old payslips?
Generally no — most lenders now assess you as self-employed and want history under the new arrangement. A small number of lenders make exceptions for contractors in the same industry, or will credit prior industry experience. If you haven't switched yet and a purchase is coming, talk to us about sequencing first — buying before you resign is often the cleanest solution of all.
Does restructuring my business reset the clock?
Almost always. Sole trader to company, partnership to trust, moving a side business into a new entity — lenders want financials under the current structure, so each restructure restarts the wait at most banks. Time the restructure around your property plans, not the other way round.
What is a low-doc loan and am I eligible?
A low-doc (alt-doc) loan verifies income through BAS statements, business bank statements or an accountant's declaration instead of full tax returns. If you can't yet show the returns mainstream lenders want, it's a legitimate bridge — at a higher rate — ideally with a planned refinance to a conventional loan once your financials or equity catch up.
How much deposit do I need?
In principle the same as any borrower — from 5% with LMI or government schemes. In practice, most simplified self-employed pathways cap at 80% LVR, so a 20% deposit unlocks the widest choice of lenders and the least paperwork. Eligible professionals can push to 90% LVR with no LMI via a waiver.
Will a guarantor increase my borrowing power?
No — this is the most common myth we bust. A guarantor solves the deposit problem (helping you avoid LMI), not the income problem. If your borrowing power is constrained by how a lender reads your self-employed income, a guarantor changes nothing.
Should I wait until after EOFY to apply?
Sometimes — if your current financial year is much stronger than your last lodged return, waiting to lodge can transform your assessable income, especially at latest-year lenders. But waiting also has costs (prices, rates, the property you wanted). This is exactly the kind of sequencing decision we map for clients: apply now with lender A, or lodge-then-apply with lender B, with real numbers on both paths.
Lender policies referenced on this page are current as at July 2026, change without notice, and are always assessed case-by-case — nothing here is a guarantee of approval. This page is general information only and doesn't consider your personal circumstances; it isn't credit advice. Any calculators referenced provide estimates only. Hunter Galloway holds an Australian Credit Licence; see our Credit Guide.