Are You a Medical Professional? You Could Get a Home Loan With a Smaller Deposit
Home Loan Benefits for Medical Professionals in Australia
If you work in medicine or healthcare, you may have access to home loan benefits that aren’t available to every borrower.
And surprisingly, plenty of medical professionals don’t realise it.
Depending on your profession and the lender, you may be able to buy with a smaller deposit without paying Lenders Mortgage Insurance (LMI), access lending policies specifically designed for medical professionals, or have certain types of income assessed more favourably.
That can potentially make a significant difference when you’re buying your first home, upgrading or purchasing an investment property.
Here’s the tea:
Why do lenders offer special benefits to medical professionals?
Some lenders consider certain medical professionals to be lower-risk borrowers because of factors such as employment stability and future earning potential.
As a result, they offer lending policies specifically for eligible medical professionals.
The benefits aren’t identical across every bank.
Your profession, registration, income, property, loan amount and whether you’re buying a home or investment property can all affect what you’re eligible for.
This is why it’s worth checking your options rather than assuming your everyday bank automatically has the best home loan for you.
Could you buy with a smaller deposit without paying LMI?
This is potentially one of the biggest benefits available to eligible medical professionals.
Usually, when someone borrows more than 80% of a property’s value, they may need to pay Lenders Mortgage Insurance.
LMI protects the lender rather than you, but the borrower (you) pay the cost.
Some lenders will waive this requirement for eligible medical professionals.
Depending on your profession and the lender, you may potentially be able to borrow 90% of the property’s value and in some cases up to 95% without paying LMI.
That could mean buying with a deposit of around 5–10% rather than needing to save a full 20% deposit simply to avoid LMI.
For someone buying an expensive property, that difference can be huge!
Which medical professionals could be eligible?
This is where things get interesting.
It’s not only specialist doctors.
Depending on the lender, eligible professions can include:
General practitioners
Hospital doctors
Medical specialists
Surgeons
Anaesthetists
Psychiatrists
Radiologists
Dentists
Pharmacists
Optometrists
Physiotherapists
Chiropractors
Veterinary practitioners
Registered nurses
Midwives
Occupational therapists
Psychologists
Radiographers
Other eligible healthcare professionals
However, there isn’t one universal list.
For example, one lender may offer an LMI waiver to a physiotherapist while another may restrict its strongest medical-professional policy to doctors and dentists.
Some lenders may also require you to be registered with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), meet a minimum income requirement or satisfy other criteria.
So don’t assume you’re eligible or ineligible based purely on your job title.
What could an LMI waiver actually mean for you?
Let’s keep this simple.
Imagine you’re buying a $1 million property.
A 20% deposit would be:
$200,000
A 10% deposit would be:
$100,000
If you’re an eligible medical professional who can borrow 90% without paying LMI, that’s a very different amount of money you need to have available for the purchase.
It could potentially mean buying sooner rather than spending additional years saving purely to reach a 20% deposit.
But there’s an important distinction.
Being allowed to borrow 90% or 95% doesn’t automatically mean you should.
A smaller deposit means you’re borrowing more money.
You’ll still need to be comfortable with the repayments and have enough money available for purchasing costs and other expenses.
The benefit is having the option.
Your medical income can also matter
Working in healthcare doesn’t always come with a beautifully simple Monday-to-Friday salary.
You might receive:
Overtime
Shift allowances
Penalty rates
On-call income
Bonuses
Locum income
Salary packaging
Income from private practice
The way lenders assess these types of income can vary.
One lender may be comfortable using certain additional income when calculating how much you can borrow, while another may only use part of it or require a longer income history.
This can make a meaningful difference to your borrowing capacity.
It’s another reason why comparing lenders based purely on the advertised interest rate can miss a big part of the picture.
What if you’re an intern, resident or registrar?
You don’t necessarily need to wait until you’re a fully qualified specialist before looking into medical-professional lending options.
Some lenders have policies that include eligible hospital-employed doctors at earlier stages of their careers.
Your registration, employment status and income will still matter, and policies vary between lenders.
But don’t automatically assume:
“I’m only a registrar, so none of this applies to me yet.”
It’s definitely worth checking.
Can medical-professional benefits be used for investment properties?
Potentially, yeah!
Some lenders extend their medical-professional policies to investment lending as well as owner-occupied home loans.
That can be particularly useful if you’re a medical professional looking to purchase your first investment property while keeping more of your savings available.
Again, this isn’t universal.
A lender may allow a particular benefit for your own home but have different requirements for an investment property.
The maximum loan amount, deposit requirement and eligible professions can also differ.
Does having access to a 95% loan mean you can borrow 95%?
Not automatically.
This is probably the most important part of the article.
Being eligible for a medical-professional lending policy and being approved for the loan you want are two different things.
The lender still needs to assess your financial position.
That can include your:
Income
Living expenses
Existing debts
Credit cards
HECS/HELP debt
Dependants
Existing properties
Proposed loan repayments
So you might qualify for a lender’s medical-professional LMI waiver but still not have enough borrowing capacity for the property you’re considering.
The benefit doesn’t override normal lending requirements.
Don’t assume the specialist medical lender is automatically the best option
There are lenders that specialise in banking for medical professionals.
They can absolutely be worth considering.
But being a doctor doesn’t mean you should automatically choose the bank with “medical” written all over its marketing.
Mainstream lenders also offer strong medical-professional policies, and some of those benefits aren’t always obvious when you’re looking at their standard home loan pages.
The lender offering the highest borrowing percentage isn’t automatically the best choice either.
You still need to consider the interest rate, fees, loan features, how your income is assessed and whether the loan works for what you’re trying to achieve.
Find out what your profession could give you access to
If you’re a doctor, dentist, nurse, pharmacist, physiotherapist or another healthcare professional, don’t assume you need the same deposit or will be assessed in exactly the same way as every other borrower.
Your profession may give you access to lending options you didn’t realise were available.
Before deciding you need another year to save a 20% deposit or simply applying with the bank you’ve used since university, find out what’s actually available for your profession.
Some useful questions are:
Do I qualify for an LMI waiver?
How much deposit would I actually need?
Which lenders recognise my profession?
How will my overtime, allowances or other income be assessed?
And how much could I realistically borrow?
If you work in medicine or healthcare and you’re thinking about buying a home or investment property, I can help you work through which lenders recognise your profession, what benefits you may be eligible for and what your borrowing position could look like.
You can book a chat with Eshanee by clicking here.
Eshanee Collins is a mortgage broker and founder of April Six , helping first-home buyers and property investors understand their finance options and make confident property decisions.