Overtime, on-call, locum work, private billings, a service entity — lenders treat all of it differently. We’ll help you find the one that fits yours.
You’ve spent ten or fifteen years becoming what you are. You’re finally earning properly. And somewhere in the middle of a home loan application, you find yourself being treated like a risk.
It usually isn’t the income. It’s the shape of it. Base plus overtime plus on-call. A stint of locum work. Private billings with no long history yet. A service entity your accountant set up for good reasons. Every part of it is real, and secure, and none of it fits neatly into a form built for someone on a flat salary.
So one lender counts most of your overtime and another counts far less. One covers your profession and the next one doesn’t cover it at all. One is comfortable with registrars, another treats each one case by case. You are not told any of this. You are simply told no — and left to guess which door to try next.
A decline isn’t a comment on you. It’s a policy you were never shown.
That is the actual problem, and it is the one worth solving before you apply anywhere.
Not what a form designed for salaried applicants can recognise.
Where a waiver genuinely works in your favour — and we’ll say when it doesn’t.
Rather than collecting declines that sit on your credit file.
You’ve done fifteen years of training. Justifying your income shouldn’t be the hard part.
Navigator Broking is run by Santino Marinelli — Credit Representative 473888 under Australian Credit Licence 389328, with more than fifteen years in mortgage broking on the back of a longer career in finance, and a member of the Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia.
What matters more than any of that is knowing where the differences sit: which lenders count variable income generously and which don’t, which cover your profession, which take your structure, and which will look at a registrar the same way they look at a consultant. That knowledge is the job. Everything below is a working sample of it.
Three steps, in this order
All of it — base, overtime, on-call, allowances, locum, private billings, service entity, trust distributions. The parts you assume won’t count are often the parts that decide which lender fits.
Which lenders cover your profession, count your variable income properly, accept your structure, and treat your existing commitments the way that suits your situation.
To the lender that fits — not to three in a row to see what happens. If the medico package isn’t your best option, we’ll tell you that too.
The variation is wider than most people expect, and none of it is visible from outside
“Medical professional” is not a defined term — each lender writes its own list. Doctors and dentists are on nearly all of them. Beyond that it narrows quickly: veterinarians and pharmacists appear on only a couple of packages, and allied health — physiotherapy, optometry and similar — is covered by very few.
This is the single most common reason a good application gets declined for no apparent reason. A physiotherapist approaches a lender whose package doesn’t extend to allied health, is assessed as an ordinary applicant, and never learns that a small number of lenders would have treated them as a professional.
Higher loan-to-value lending without Lenders Mortgage Insurance is the headline benefit of most medico packages, and it is genuinely valuable — it can be worth tens of thousands of dollars and it lets you buy years earlier than you otherwise could.
But the ceilings differ between lenders, some reduce the premium rather than waiving it entirely, and the top tiers are often assessed case by case rather than guaranteed. It is also worth testing against the alternative: a waiver attached to a higher interest rate can cost more across five years than the insurance premium it saved. That calculation is specific to your loan size and how long you expect to hold the loan, and it is worth running before you accept a package on the strength of the waiver alone.
Very few doctors are paid one flat number. Overtime, on-call and shift allowances are usually assessed at a discount to their face value, and the size of that discount varies materially between lenders. For a hospital-based doctor carrying significant overtime, that difference alone can move borrowing capacity by a six-figure sum — on identical payslips.
Locum income is treated more sharply still. Most lenders will not count it in any standard way; a small number will, generally where there is a sustained history. If locum work is a meaningful part of what you earn, it narrows the field before anything else is considered.
Registrars sit in an awkward gap: strong future earnings, a moving employer, a fixed-term contract, and often a substantial HECS or HELP balance. Some lenders are genuinely comfortable with that profile. Others will look at it case by case, and some are not set up for it at all.
The HECS balance itself is worth understanding rather than fearing — it is treated as a commitment while it exists, but it behaves differently from ordinary debt, and paying it down early is not automatically the right move before an application.
Once you are billing privately, or operating through a company, trust or service entity, you have moved from being assessed on payslips to being assessed as a business. That generally means financial statements and a trading history, and it introduces a second layer of variation: what a lender will add back to profit, how distributions are treated, and whether a company or trust borrower is eligible for the simplified documentation routes at all.
It also means your structure quietly determines your options before your income is even looked at — which is why the structure conversation belongs at the start of the process rather than near the end.
Which of your existing debts are counted, and how heavily, is a policy question rather than a fixed rule. Investment property debt, practice borrowings, a car under a novated lease and a HECS balance are not all treated the same way across the market. Where several of them apply at once, this can be the deciding factor.
None of these differences are published in one place, and none of them are visible to you when you walk into a branch. That is what a broker is for on a file like yours — not to find a slightly better rate, but to know which of these questions each lender asks first.
Eligible-profession lists vary by lender — these groups commonly qualify
General practitioners, physicians, anaesthetists, surgeons and other specialists — typically the strongest eligibility across the panel.
Dentists, dental surgeons and veterinarians qualify with many lenders.
Optometrists, pharmacists and some allied-health professionals qualify with selected lenders — eligibility varies, so lender choice matters.
Early-career doctors still building income can often access professional concessions — we'll find the lenders that recognise your trajectory.
Not sure if you qualify? That's the point of a quick chat — we'll tell you which lenders accept your profession and situation before you apply.
Complex income, a short window, and a lender who read the contract
A hospital-based specialist came to us after three major lenders had declined her. Each declined on much the same ground, and none of them explained it in a way she could act on. She had concluded, reasonably enough, that the problem was her.
It wasn’t. Her income was substantial and secure. It simply didn’t arrive in the shape a standard serviceability model expects, and each of the three lenders she had tried assessed that shape in much the same unhelpful way.
We took her to a lender that assesses medical specialists on their contract and their profession rather than on payslip history alone, and structured the application so her deposit did the work rather than being spent on insurance she didn’t need to pay. She bought the home she had already decided on.
Nothing about her changed between the third decline and the approval. Only the policy she was being measured against.
Illustrative example. Identifying details removed. Not a recommendation — every application is assessed on its own circumstances.
Yes. Many lenders treat eligible medical professionals as lower-risk and will waive Lenders Mortgage Insurance (LMI) on loans up to 90% of the property value — and in selected cases higher — which can save tens of thousands of dollars. Some also offer professional-package rate discounts. Eligibility depends on your profession, the lender and your circumstances.
Eligible doctors can often borrow up to 90% of the property value without paying LMI, and a small number of lenders extend this further for certain professions. It's a lender concession, not an automatic entitlement — the waiver, maximum LVR and eligible-profession list vary, so the right lender depends on your situation.
Borrowing capacity depends on your income, existing commitments, expenses and the lender's assessment — not profession alone. Because many doctors have strong, stable income and can avoid LMI, they can often borrow more relative to their deposit than the general population. We calculate your specific capacity across the whole panel before you commit.
Eligible groups usually include GPs, specialists, surgeons and anaesthetists, and often dentists, veterinarians, optometrists and some allied-health professionals. Each lender publishes its own list, so a profession that qualifies with one lender may not with another. We match you to the lenders where you qualify.
Often no. Because eligible doctors can avoid LMI up to 90% (and sometimes higher), you may be able to buy with a smaller deposit than would otherwise be required — without the LMI cost that usually applies above 80%. We'll show you the trade-offs for your deposit and goals.
No. The lender pays the broker a commission on settlement, so our service is free to you. Lenders pay us a commission that can vary between lenders and products; under Best Interests Duty we must recommend what is in your interests regardless of that difference, and we disclose the commission for any loan we recommend.
Tell us how you’re paid and we’ll tell you where it fits. No obligation, and we’ll be straight with you if the answer is to wait.
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