Home loans for doctors and medical professionals

Who this is for

You are a doctor, dentist, specialist or another accredited medical professional, and you have heard that lenders treat your profession differently. Perhaps you are a registrar juggling rotations and a training contract, or a practice partner whose income arrives through a company or trust.

The rules are lender-specific, they change without announcement, and that is the whole problem worth paying a broker to solve.

How the process works

1. We check your eligibility properly. Which lenders currently include your specialty, at what loan-to-value ratio, and with what registration evidence, because none of those three answers is the same across the panel.
2. We present your income the way credit reads it. Registrar contracts, private billings, partnership distributions and salary packaging all need translating first. Credit teams read some of those well and others badly, so the order we present them in matters.
3. We compare the waiver against the rate. A waived premium at a slightly higher rate is not automatically the better deal. We run both numbers before recommending either. Sometimes the boring lender wins.
4. We manage it to settlement. With the extra registration and income evidence assembled once, not chased three times.

What a broker does that a bank doesn’t

A bank tells you whether you qualify for its own medical policy, which is a question worth asking only if that bank happens to be the right lender for you. Different lenders include different specialties, cap the waiver at different loan-to-value ratios, and treat registrar and locum income very differently. The comparison is the entire job.

We also know which of them apply the waiver to investment purchases rather than owner-occupied only, and that distinction changes the strategy for a lot of medical clients.

What the waiver actually is

Ordinarily a lender charges lenders mortgage insurance when you borrow above eighty per cent of a property’s value, and the premium climbs steeply as the deposit shrinks. Our LMI calculator shows the shape of that curve. Under a medical professional policy, selected lenders waive the premium entirely at higher loan-to-value ratios, treating the profession as a lower default risk.

The practical effect is that you buy years earlier with a smaller deposit and pay nothing for the privilege. On a hypothetical $1,500,000 purchase with a ten per cent deposit, an invented round number rather than a quote, the avoided premium can run into five figures, which is the case for taking this seriously rather than defaulting to whichever bank happens to run your practice account.

Where it gets specific

Eligibility lists differ. Some lenders include dentists, optometrists, veterinarians and pharmacists alongside doctors; others restrict the waiver to medical practitioners and specialists only. The maximum loan-to-value ratio differs too, as does whether the policy extends to investment lending or stops at owner-occupied. Registration with the relevant board is the common thread. Evidence of it is the first document we ask for.

Registrars are where the care is needed. Rotations complicate everything. Training contracts, rotating employers and overtime-heavy pay slips read awkwardly to a credit team that expects permanent employment, and the lender with the strongest waiver is not always the one that reads registrar income most generously, which pulls in opposite directions more often than you would expect.

Which lenders waive it, and on what terms

Three of the majors publish their medical policies and agree on less than you would think: Westpac splits eligible professions into two tiers with different limits, while NAB names who qualifies but publishes no limits at all. Each row carries the date of the source behind it, because these terms move without notice.

Each lender’s own published terms, linked. Terms change without notice, so we confirm current policy on every application rather than relying on this table.

What we tell clients that they do not expect

The row worth reading twice is the intern one. Westpac’s public page lists interns among the hospital doctors eligible at 95%, while ANZ’s terms, dated August 2024, exclude provisional registration, which is what an intern holds. On those two sources, the same first-year doctor qualifies at one bank and not at the other.

The waiver is not automatically the best outcome. A lender offering it may price the loan slightly higher. On a large loan held for a long time that margin can exceed the premium you avoided, so we model both paths before recommending either. Sometimes paying the insurance with a sharper lender wins, and we will say so even though the waiver is the more exciting story to tell.

The other caveat is about capacity.

A waiver removes an insurance cost, not a serviceability test, and every application still clears the same buffered assessment set out on our borrowing power calculator. If the numbers do not service, no profession-based policy fixes that, and we would rather tell you before you are emotionally committed to a property.