Home loans when you're self-employed

Who this is for

• You run a business, contract, or freelance — and a bank has already made it feel harder than it should be.
• Your taxable income doesn't reflect what your business actually earns.
• You have irregular income across years and need a lender who can read it properly.
• You've been declined and don't know whether it was you or the lender's policy.

How the process works

1. We understand the business first. Structure (sole trader, company, trust), how long you've operated, and how income flows to you.
2. We match the documentation to the lender. Full-doc where your financials support it; alternative documentation policies where they're the right fit. Different lenders accept different evidence.
3. We present your income the way the lender assesses it. Add-backs, retained profits, and one-off expenses treated correctly — presentation is often the difference between yes and no.
4. We manage the application to settlement. With your accountant looped in when lender verification needs them.

What a broker does that a bank doesn’t

• A bank applies its own self-employed policy and stops there. We know which lenders suit your business structure before anything is lodged.
• A declined application leaves a mark on your credit file — we avoid speculative applications by checking policy fit first.
• We speak accountant: add-backs, distributions, and retained earnings presented the way credit teams actually read them.
• Low-doc and alt-doc options are explained honestly, including what they cost relative to full-doc lending.

How lenders actually read business income

The gap between what your business earns and what a lender counts is where most self-employed applications live or die. Credit teams start from your tax returns — documents your accountant has legitimately optimised to minimise taxable income — and then reconstruct your real capacity through add-backs: depreciation, one-off expenses, interest on debts being refinanced, superannuation above the compulsory rate, and salaries paid to a spouse can all be added back to the income the lender assesses. Which add-backs a lender accepts, and how willingly, is pure policy — and it varies more than almost any other credit setting.

Structure adds a second layer. Sole trader income, company profits, trust distributions and director salaries each flow through assessment differently, and retained profits sitting in a company are counted by some lenders and ignored by others. If your income dipped and recovered, some lenders average the years, some take the latest, some take the lower. Presenting the same business to the right lender, in the language their credit team uses, is most of what we do for self-employed clients.

Full-doc, alt-doc, low-doc — in plain English

Full-doc means standard verification: financial statements and tax returns, assessed like any other income. If your paperwork supports it, it gets the widest lender choice and the sharpest pricing — and it's where we aim first.

Alt-doc substitutes other evidence — business activity statements, business bank statements, or an accountant's declaration — for borrowers whose financials are genuinely not ready or not representative. It's real lending with real verification, priced somewhat higher for the flexibility. Low-doc, the loosest historical version, has largely tightened into today's alt-doc policies since responsible-lending rules matured.

The honest hierarchy: never pay an alt-doc premium if your financials can carry a full-doc application. We check that before recommending anything — sometimes the answer is simply to wait for this year's returns to be finalised.

What to have ready before we talk to lenders

Nothing needs to be perfect for the first conversation — but settlement moves fastest when this set is close at hand:

• Recent years' business and personal tax returns, with notices of assessment.
• Financial statements — profit and loss, balance sheet — for the same period.
• Business activity statements for the current year, if returns aren't finalised yet.
• Business and personal bank statements.
• Your accountant's contact details — lenders often verify directly, and we'd rather brief them than surprise them.