Tradie Home Loans: Get Your Overtime and Allowances Counted

Home Loans for Tradies: Get Your Whole Pay Counted

If you’re a tradie, a big chunk of what you earn never makes it into the bank’s borrowing calculator. Overtime, site allowances, travel, on-call: most lenders shade that income or ignore it, even when you’ve been pulling those hours for years.

Here’s the good news: selected lenders may count up to 100% of regular overtime, and low-deposit schemes don’t care what you do for a living. The difference between the right lender and the wrong one can be tens of thousands of dollars of borrowing power. It’s money you already earn.

At Hunter Galloway we help tradies across Brisbane and Australia get their full income counted, from apprentices to self-employed subbies running their own crews. We’re paid by the lender, not by you, and we work across a panel of 30+ banks and lenders, so the job is simply to find the one whose policy fits how you actually get paid.

Why Your Real Income Doesn’t Reach the Bank’s Calculator

Banks treat overtime and allowances as “non-guaranteed” income. The common approach is to count only around 80% of it, and some lenders count less, or nothing at all until you’ve been in the role a while. For a trade where overtime isn’t a bonus but simply how the job is structured, that shading quietly deletes assessable income:

The sting is worst for the trades where the extras are the point: sparkies and plumbers on commercial or industrial work, crane and plant operators on EBA sites, FIFO crews, and anyone stacking site and travel allowances. Getting all of that assessed instead of 80% of it is a serious difference to what you can borrow.

When 100% of Overtime Can Count: Why the Lender Matters

A lender-policy snapshot checked in July 2026 shows why the label alone is not enough. Many major lenders start by assessing about 80% of regular overtime. Westpac’s public PAYG Plus policy lists eligible core-building and essential-trade roles (including electricians and plumbers) that may have 100% of overtime and allowances assessed.

• Employment status matters:Westpac’s published concession is not available to casual, self-employed or contractor applicants.
• Evidence matters: Westpac generally requires at least six months of income evidence with the same employer; shorter histories may be referred.
• The income type matters: overtime, shift penalties, site allowances and reimbursements are not automatically assessed the same way.

This is conditional, not automatic. Eligibility, exclusions, evidence and credit criteria apply, so the right comparison is the live policy for your exact employment and income types.

The same overtime and allowances can be counted three different ways, depending on which lender reads your payslip:

Lender policies current at July 2026 and assessed individually; we confirm the live policy for your lender before relying on it. No lender is named here as “cheapest”. This is about whose policy counts your income, not whose rate is lowest.

PAYG on the Tools, or Your Own ABN?

This is the fork that decides your whole application. Two tradies on the same money can have completely different paths depending on how they’re paid.

• PAYG on the books: you’re on an employer’s payroll. You’re assessed like any employee: payslips and a Notice of Assessment do most of the work, and the overtime/allowance policy above is where the borrowing power hides.
• Self-employed under your own ABN: sole trader, company or trust. Lenders assess your business’s taxable income (after add-backs like depreciation), not your turnover, using your tax returns and financials. See our self-employed home loans guide.
• Subcontractor on an ABN, but working for one builder: some lenders will treat a long-term subbie closer to a PAYG employee. It’s lender-specific; our guide to home loans on contractor income walks through it.

If you can’t show two full years of tax returns yet, a low-doc loan uses BAS, business bank statements or an accountant’s declaration instead, with real trade-offs (fewer lenders, a lower maximum loan-to-value ratio, and a higher rate than the same lender’s full-doc loan). Several lenders have a latest-year assessment path rather than a two-year average, often with trading-history, evidence and loan-to-value conditions.

Apprentice Pathway: Buy Now, or Wait Until You Qualify?

A strong deposit helps, but an apprentice still has to service the loan on the income a lender can verify today. There is no single right timeline, so model these four paths before you choose a property target.

Self-Employed? Your Real Income Is Bigger Than Your Tax Return

Here’s the catch for self-employed tradies: the same smart tax planning that keeps your ATO bill down makes your income look small to a bank. The fix is add-backs: the right lender adds legitimate paper deductions back onto your net profit to work out what you can genuinely afford. It’s the self-employed version of getting your overtime counted: your assessable income is usually higher than your taxable income. Common add-backs:

• Depreciation: a paper expense on tools, your ute and plant, not cash out the door. It is often considered as an add-back, subject to the lender and the underlying financial statements.
• Additional (voluntary) super: contributions above the compulsory rate are your money, so many lenders add them back.
• One-off expenses and instant asset write-offs: a genuine non-recurring tool, plant or equipment purchase may be treated differently from an ongoing operating cost. The accounting deduction and the finance repayment are assessed separately.
• Interest on debts you’re clearing: if a business loan is paid out at settlement, some lenders add its interest back.
• Net profit retained in a company or trust: profit you left in the business rather than paying out to yourself.

Which add-backs a lender accepts varies from one to the next, and that difference decides your borrowing power. It’s exactly the kind of fine print a broker across a panel is paid to work. More in our self-employed home loans guide.

Which Trades Does This Help Most?

Any trade where structured overtime and allowances make up a real slice of the pay packet. We’ve written trade-specific guides for the two most common:

• Electrician home loans: sparkies are among eligible roles in Westpac’s conditional PAYG Plus policy, and the apprentice-to-A-grade pay jump has its own quirks
• Plumber home loans: on-call and weekend callback pay is lumpy week-to-week but reliable across a year, and lenders often mishandle it

Crane & plant operators: when your payslip doesn’t tell the whole story

Crane and plant operators on major-project EBAs are a textbook case of hidden borrowing power:

• The base looks ordinary: public data puts crane operators in the high-$90,000s to around $130,000 a year.
• The stack is where it adds up: rostered overtime, site allowances, travel and living-away-from-home allowance can push a major-project package toward the $150,000–$200,000 mark.
• That top figure isn’t typical: it takes EBA coverage, a big project, genuine living-away status and sustained overtime all at once. A metro-based operator sits much nearer the average.
• Documentation is everything here: keep payslips that itemise each allowance, and expect the lender to want your EBA classification confirmed.
• Living-away-from-home allowance is the swing factor: nearly every lender treats it differently (some count it, some don’t), so the lender you pick can move your assessable income by tens of thousands.

The Deposit Question: You Might Need Less Than You Think

Deposit is where a lot of tradies count themselves out too early. A few things worth knowing before you assume you need 20%:

• The 5% Deposit Scheme is occupation-agnostic. Since 1 October 2025 the Australian Government’s expanded Home Guarantee Scheme lets eligible first home buyers purchase with as little as a 5% deposit and no Lenders Mortgage Insurance, with no place limits or income caps and property price caps that vary by state (up to $1 million in Queensland at the time of writing). You just need to be an Australian citizen or permanent resident, 18+, and not have owned property here in the last 10 years. See our low deposit home loans guide and first home buyer guide.
• LMI protects the lender, not you. It’s generally charged when your deposit is under 20%, and the cost scales with how much you borrow. A 20% deposit, a family guarantor or an eligible government guarantee are the three ways around it.
• Grants and stamp-duty concessions still apply. In Queensland the First Home Owner Grant is $30,000 for an eligible new build (home valued under $750,000, at July 2026; check current eligibility), and first-home stamp-duty concessions can wipe out transfer duty entirely on eligible purchases. Other states run their own.

Want to sanity-check the numbers? Our mortgage calculator and borrowing power guide are a good place to start.

Estimate Your Borrowing Power

Use your current income and deposit for a first-pass estimate. It is a guide, not a loan approval: overtime, allowances, business add-backs and existing debts can all change what a lender will assess.

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On a Skill-Shortage Visa? Read This First

The Skills in Demand (SID) visa replaced the Temporary Skill Shortage (TSS) visa on 7 December 2024. Its Core Skills Occupation List contains 456 occupations, including Electrician (General and Special Class), Plumber (General), Roof Plumber, Carpenter, Joiner, Bricklayer, and Airconditioning and Refrigeration Mechanic. But whether you can buy a home, and what kind, comes down to your residency, not the occupation list.

For nominations lodged from 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027, the official Core Skills Income Threshold (CSIT) is $79,423 and the Specialist Skills Income Threshold (SSIT) is $146,576. SID uses CSIT and SSIT; the older TSMIT term now applies to specified regional visa nominations rather than the SID streams.

• Permanent residents: good news: most lenders assess you much like an Australian citizen, with the usual deposit and scheme options, and no Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) approval needed.
• Temporary visa holders (482 and similar): two things to plan for early. First, since 1 April 2025 (and now extended to 30 June 2029), foreign persons, including temporary residents, generally can’t buy an established (existing) home, even to live in. The main exception: buying as joint tenants with an Australian-citizen, permanent-resident or eligible New Zealand-citizen spouse generally needs no FIRB approval at all, which sits outside this ban. Otherwise you can still buy a new dwelling or vacant land to build on (with FIRB approval). See our construction loans guide. Second, a select group of lenders will consider 482 holders. Maximum loan-to-value ratios vary materially by visa, lender, mortgage-insurance availability and whether a citizen or permanent-resident spouse is part of the application; some mainstream policies cap the position around 70%–80%, while other pathways can go higher.
• Foreign-purchaser duty: temporary-visa buyers usually pay a surcharge on top of normal stamp duty. In Queensland that’s an extra 8% (AFAD), and a citizen or PR partner helps your loan without automatically removing the Queensland surcharge.

The rules here moved recently and they’re easy to get wrong, so the honest answer is: talk to us about your specific visa before you fall for a listing. We’ll tell you what you’re allowed to buy and which lenders will have you.

The Hidden Lever: Your Ute and Tool Finance

When a lender works out what you can afford, they take your net income, subtract your living expenses, subtract your existing debt repayments, and then test the new loan at a buffer of at least 3 percentage points above the actual rate (APRA’s rule). Two things about that quietly eat tradie borrowing power:

• Term loans: a ute loan, chattel mortgage or equipment loan is assessed on its actual monthly repayment. A big repayment on a 7-year finance deal can cost you more in borrowing power than it does in cashflow.
• Revolving limits: a business credit card or overdraft is assessed on its full approved limit, not what you’ve drawn. An unused $30,000 business card can shrink your home loan even if the balance is zero.

Sometimes clearing or restructuring one small debt (or trimming an oversized card limit) unlocks a much bigger loan. Timing matters too: taking on equipment finance the month before a home-loan application is rarely ideal.

What You’ll Need

The exact list depends on the lender, but this is the shape of it, and which column you’re in decides everything upstream of it:

Before You Apply: A Tradie’s Pre-Loan Checklist

1. Keep business and personal money separate. A clean split makes your income far easier for a lender to read, and for a broker to argue.
2. Get your tax and BAS up to date. Self-employed assessment runs off lodged returns; being behind is the most common thing that stalls a tradie’s application.
3. Clear or shrink personal, ute and tool debt. Every repayment, and every unused card limit, comes off your borrowing power before you start.
4. Line up your income evidence. PAYG: recent payslips plus a letter confirming your overtime is ongoing. Self-employed: your last one to two years of returns (or BAS for a low-doc option).
5. Talk to a broker before a bank. One well-placed application under the right policy beats five declines that each ding your credit file.

Talk to Us Before You Talk to a Bank

Two lenders can look at the same payslip and land on materially different borrowing figures. Before you assume you can’t borrow enough, or accept a number that ignores half your income, get your overtime and allowances assessed under the right policy. It costs nothing to check, and we’re paid by the lender, not by you.