Home loans for pilots and cabin crew

How lenders view pilots and cabin crew

Aviation income is high but unusually structured: base salary plus flying hours, per-diems, overnight and duty allowances. Lenders that understand rosters assess most of it; lenders that don't assess base only, which can halve your borrowing power.

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 pilots and cabin crew

• Base salary from your enterprise agreement, verified by payslips.
• Flying-hour and duty allowances, usually annualised from year-to-date rather than taken from a single payslip.
• Per-diems and overnight allowances — treated as income by some lenders, ignored as expense reimbursement by others.
• Foreign-currency income for crew based overseas, shaded by 10–20% and accepted at a minority of lenders.

Advantages available to pilots and cabin crew

• Strong assessed income where a lender annualises allowances properly.
• Airline enterprise agreements make income easy to verify and forecast.
• Some lenders treat long-tenure airline employment as a stability positive, easing casual or part-time rostering concerns.

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 assessing base salary only and ignoring allowances that make up a third of your pay.
• Post-pandemic gaps in employment history still being queried on longer-tenure files.
• Living overseas or being paid in foreign currency, which narrows the lender panel sharply.

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 pilots and cabin crew — 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.