Doctors & Medical Professionals
How lenders assess your income, structure, and borrowing capacity
INTRO
This page explains how lenders assess doctors and medical professionals across home loans, investment property, and practice-related lending.
Medical professionals often have:
- multiple income components
- changing career stages
- allowances, overtime, or packaged income
- future plans that affect borrowing structure
These factors mean outcomes can differ significantly from standard salary-only borrowers.
This page explains how the lending system views medical professionals — and where to go next depending on what you are trying to do.
This is reference material only.
It does not provide personal advice or recommendations.
WHO THIS PAGE IS FOR
This page is commonly used by:
- Hospital-employed doctors
- Registrars and trainees
- Specialists and consultants
- Locums and contractors
- Medical professionals with mixed PAYG and business income
- Doctors considering practice ownership
You do not need to fit one category perfectly to use this page.
HOW LENDERS ASSESS DOCTORS (OVERVIEW)
When assessing doctors, lenders typically look beyond headline income and consider:
Income composition
- Base salary
- Overtime, allowances, and penalties
- Salary packaging
- Contract or locum income
- Business or practice income
Not all income is treated equally, even when total earnings are high.
Career stage and continuity
- Training stage vs post-fellowship
- Contract length and renewal risk
- Frequency of role changes
- Stability of income sources
Future earning potential is not always assessed the same way as current income.
Existing commitments
- HELP / HECS liabilities
- Personal debts
- Business or practice liabilities
- Guarantees
These can materially affect borrowing capacity.
Structure and future flexibility
- Personal ownership vs company or trust
- Practice ownership timing
- Equipment or fit-out finance
- How today’s decisions affect future borrowing
Two doctors with similar earnings can receive very different outcomes depending on these factors.
COMMON QUESTIONS MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS ASK
Doctors commonly ask:
- Do doctors really qualify for low-deposit loans without LMI?
- How are allowances, overtime, and packaged income treated?
- Why can borrowing capacity still cap out on a high income?
- How does HELP / HECS affect borrowing power?
- Is it better to buy during training or wait until later?
- How does practice ownership affect home borrowing?
These questions are covered across fact sheets and reference pages linked below.
WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO RIGHT NOW?
Doctors appear across multiple borrowing scenarios.
Most people use one of the pages below depending on what they are doing now:
- Buying your first home → First Home Buyers — Start Here
- Buying or investing → Property Investors — Start Here
- Buying while living overseas → Australian Expats — Start Here
- Practice or equipment finance → Business & Equipment Finance sections
These pages explain where everything lives — fact sheets, structure exploration, and execution — in one place.
OPTIONAL: EXPLORING STRUCTURE
Some doctors like to explore how different choices affect what they could do later — for example:
- buying again in the future
- changing work arrangements
- purchasing a practice
- adjusting timing or loan structure
This exploration does not start an application and does not commit you to anything.
Explore possible scenarios
This is not a loan application. No documents required.
FINAL NOTE
Model Mortgages is a reference library.
It explains how lending decisions are made so outcomes can be understood in context.
Execution and personal advice are handled separately.