Home loans for aged care and disability support workers

How lenders view aged care and disability support workers

Care sector workers combine award income, heavy shift penalties and — critically — not-for-profit salary packaging, which lenders that understand the sector will gross up into assessable income.

Two lenders assessing the identical payslip can arrive at borrowing power figures more than $100,000 apart, purely from policy differences. Choosing the lender whose policy matches your income shape is worth far more than shaving a few basis points off the rate.

Income lenders will assess for aged care and disability support workers

• Base award rate plus sleepover, broken-shift, weekend and night penalties.
• Not-for-profit salary packaging (a meaningful tax-free component), grossed up by sector-aware lenders.
• Multiple employers or agency shifts, common in the sector and combinable with enough history.
• Overtime and additional shifts, shaded 80–100% depending on lender.

Advantages available to aged care and disability support workers

• Grossing up salary packaging can add the equivalent of several thousand dollars of pre-tax income.
• Essential-services treatment of penalties at selected lenders.
• Sector demand growth supports strong employment stability assessments.

Lenders mortgage insurance

There's no standard occupation-based LMI waiver for your profession, but a 5% deposit is still achievable through the First Home Guarantee, and a family guarantor can remove LMI entirely.

Common mistakes we see

• A lender ignoring packaging entirely — the single biggest avoidable loss for this occupation.
• Income spread across two or three employers being partly discarded.
• Sleepover allowances misclassified as one-off payments.

What to have ready before you apply

• Two recent payslips showing year-to-date gross, plus your latest income statement or PAYG summary.
• Three months of transaction statements for every account, including any buy-now-pay-later facility.
• Details of all debts and credit limits — lenders assess the limit, not the balance.
• For self-employed income: the last one to two years of tax returns and notices of assessment.
• Evidence of your deposit, its source, and how long it's been held.

How much could you borrow?

Our borrowing power calculator assesses at a 3% serviceability buffer, the same way a lender does, and applies a HEM living-expense floor. It's an estimate — the number that matters is the one from the lender whose policy best fits aged care and disability support workers — but it's a realistic starting point.

If you'd rather skip the guesswork, a 15-minute chat gets you a lender-specific figure with the policy quirks already applied.