Your fixed rate is ending. Here is the order of operations.

Who this is for

The bank has sent the letter: your fixed term finishes on a stated date, and somewhere below it sits the rate your loan rolls onto if nobody does anything. Most people file that letter. This page is for the ones who would rather use the window it describes, because the weeks around a fixed-term expiry are the one moment in a loan's life when switching is at its cheapest and lenders know you are looking.

Charlie runs this work for us. The conversation is short and the arithmetic is small.

How the process works

1. We find your revert rate. It is in the letter, or one phone call away. Everything else is measured against this number, because doing nothing means paying it.
2. We ask your current lender first. A repricing request costs nothing and breaks nothing. If your lender moves to match the market, you stay put. The work is finished inside a week.
3. We price the switch if they will not move. Setup costs, government fees, and the payback period stated in months. The same arithmetic as any refinance, with one difference covered below.
4. We line settlement up with your expiry date. A new loan can settle as the old term ends, so you never spend a single repayment cycle on the revert rate.

What a broker does that a bank doesn’t

The letter your lender sends serves the lender: it names their revert rate and their re-fix offer, and compares them to nothing. We put the same two numbers next to what the rest of the panel is writing this month, and we ask your lender to defend theirs. You get the comparison in dollars either way.

Then the loan goes on review every six months for its whole life, so the next expiry never sneaks up on you either.

What actually happens when a fixed term ends

Nothing announces itself. The loan rolls onto your lender's revert rate automatically, with no paperwork and no decision required from you, which is precisely the problem. Revert rates are generally set above what the same lender offers new customers for the same loan. The gap is not an accident. It is priced for the borrowers who file the letter.

Your lender will usually offer a one-click re-fix in the same letter. Our opinion, and the banks will not thank us for it: the re-fix offer is priced for people who do not compare, and signing it unread is only marginally better than rolling onto the revert rate. Sometimes it genuinely is the right rate. You find out by checking it against the market, not by trusting the letterhead.

Break costs: the part most people have backwards

While a fixed term is running, breaking it can cost real money. Break costs move with wholesale funding markets, they can be large when rates have fallen since you fixed, and your lender must quote them on request before you commit to anything.

The moment the term ends, there is nothing left to break. Break costs fall to nil. The fortnight after expiry is the cheapest exit a fixed-rate borrower will ever get, and most people miss it because nothing forces the decision. That is the single most useful fact on this page, and it is the reason the timing conversation should start before the date in the letter rather than after.

One caveat, stated plainly: nil break costs after expiry does not mean waiting is always right. If the rate gap is wide enough, paying a quoted break cost early can still come out ahead, and we will show you that comparison with the quote in hand rather than guessing at it.

The timeline

Start two to three months before the expiry date. A repricing request needs days; a full switch needs a credit approval and a discharge from your current lender, and the discharge is the slow part far more often than the approval is. Started early, the new loan settles as the term ends and the revert rate never touches you. Started late, you sit on the revert rate while the paperwork catches up, which is an expensive way to learn about discharge queues.

And if your term ended two years ago and the revert rate has been quietly collecting ever since, we cannot claw any of that back. The review only fixes the future. Start with the borrowing power calculator if your circumstances have shifted since you fixed, and see how we run a refinance for the switch mechanics and costs in full.