How many times my salary can I borrow for a house?

It is a question rooted in an older era of lending: how many times my salary can I borrow? The honest answer is that lenders stopped working that way a long time ago. They assess your actual capacity to repay, not a simple multiple, and leaning on a multiple today will usually mislead you. Here is how it really works.

The salary multiple is an outdated rule of thumb

Years ago, a rough multiple of income was a common shorthand for borrowing capacity. Modern lending does not use it. Instead, lenders assess serviceability, the genuine surplus you have to make repayments, which depends on far more than your salary alone. So any single multiple you see quoted is a generalisation at best.

How capacity is really assessed

A lender takes your income, deducts tax, living expenses and existing debt commitments, and looks at what is left to service a loan. It then stress tests that against a buffer of around 3 percentage points above your actual rate. The result is your borrowing capacity, and it can differ greatly between two people on identical salaries.

The debt-to-income guardrail

There is a related number worth knowing. From 1 February 2026, APRA limits banks so that only a small share of their new lending can go to borrowers whose total debt is more than six times their gross income. This debt-to-income measure is a ceiling on the bank, not a target for you, and non-bank lenders are not subject to this particular cap. For higher borrowers it can become the binding limit.

Why a simple multiple misleads

Two people earning the same salary can have very different borrowing capacity. One might have a car loan, a high credit card limit and a couple of dependents, while the other has none of these. A multiple ignores all of that. Your debts, expenses, dependents and income type shape your number far more than salary alone.

What moves your number up or down

The practical drivers are familiar: existing loans and credit card limits reduce your capacity, as do higher living expenses and dependents, while a clean balance sheet lifts it. Stable salaried income is assessed more fully than variable income. These factors, not a multiple, decide what you can borrow.

The buffer caps it too

On top of all this, the serviceability buffer limits the maximum. Because you are assessed at your rate plus around 3 percentage points, your capacity is lower than a simple affordability sum at todays rate would suggest. It is a deliberate safety margin built into every regulated assessment.

So what can you actually borrow

The real answer comes from assessing your whole picture, income, expenses, debts, dependents and income type, against a specific lender policies. That is why the only reliable figure is one worked out for you, rather than a multiple read off a chart.

How a broker works out your real figure

A broker can assess your full situation, allow for the buffer and the debt-to-income rules, and tell you what you can genuinely borrow and which lender stretches furthest. That is usually at no cost to you, because the lender pays the broker on settlement.