Who can afford the local median?
We made these four households up. Their prices we didn’t: each is buying at the median sale in its postcode for the March 2026 quarter from the NSW Rent and Sales Report, and take-home pay uses the ATO’s 2026–27 resident rates and the Medicare levy, ignoring offsets and HELP debt. Transfer duty comes on top of the loan, paid from savings.
| Household | Take-home | Could borrow | Loan the median needs, before duty | Room or gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First home in Hornsby | $141,360 | $848,706 | $675,000 | $173,706 spare |
| Buying alone in Epping | $97,880 | $516,642 | $697,000 | $180,358 short |
| A bigger unit in Chatswood | $201,510 | $1,232,137 | $928,000 | $304,137 spare |
| Upgrading to a Turramurra house | $242,610 | $1,200,567 | $2,063,000 | $862,433 short |
The Hornsby couple are fine. A $675,000 loan on the $750,000 median unit sits well inside their estimate, and as first home buyers under $800,000 they pay no transfer duty.
The Epping buyer runs into the one-income problem. On a salary of $130,000, the estimate comes to $516,642, about $180,358 short of what the $820,000 median unit needs. Clear the $450 a month car loan and cancel the $15,000 of card limits and it rises to $638,158. That’s $121,516 more, and still not enough. Closing the rest takes a bigger deposit, a guarantor, or a cheaper unit.
The Turramurra family show the opposite problem. Their income is high, but a $3,263,000 house with $1,200,000 going in still needs $2,063,000, and the estimate stops at $1,200,567. Upgrading on the upper North Shore is usually limited by the loan, not the deposit, and loans that size are Sina’s work: the lender with the best rate is rarely the one whose rules stretch furthest.
Why your number is lower than a repayment calculator suggests
A lender doesn’t ask whether you can pay the loan at today’s rate. It asks whether you could at 3 points more. At 6.48% that’s 9.48%, and that one rule explains most of the gap between what you think you could repay and what a bank will lend. It’s a stress test rather than a forecast, and every bank runs it.
What lenders do differently, and what we can’t change
This page uses one method. Lenders each count bonuses, overtime, rent and self-employed income in their own way, and some cut the borrowing on high incomes or on loans above a set size, so the same household can get answers six figures apart. Finding the lender whose rules fit your income is most of the job. What we can’t do is talk a lender out of its expense benchmark, or make a new business income read like a salary before it has the tax returns behind it that a lender wants to see.
We’d plan around the repayment you’re comfortable with, not the most a lender will approve, and buyers’ agents often see that differently. Ansa runs our first-home work, and the first number he asks for is the weekly repayment you’d be comfortable with on the repayment calculator, before any borrowing estimate. Duty sits on top of all of it, and the stamp duty calculator uses the same four households.