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Kooky
Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.
About Kooky and Shaka →The federal 5% Deposit Scheme supported 102,594 first home buyers in the twelve months after it was opened to every first home buyer in the country. The figure comes from a joint media release by the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and the Minister for Housing, Clare O'Neil, published on the Treasury ministers' website on 1 October 2026, a year to the day after the expansion.
The release, titled "Helping 100,000 first home buyers into a home of their own", is the first full-year count since the scheme lost its income caps and its limit on places. It gives a national total, a breakdown by state and territory, an estimate of the insurance costs buyers avoided and three numbers on how the loans are performing. On the same day the Reserve Bank of Australia published its October Financial Stability Review, which looks at the same borrowers from the lender's side of the table. Read together, the two documents give the fullest picture so far of the scheme after its first year without caps.
Joint media release of the Prime Minister and the Minister for Housing, Treasury ministers' website, 1 October 2026.
What changed on 1 October 2025
According to the joint release, three things changed when the scheme was expanded on 1 October 2025. The income caps were removed, so a household's earnings no longer decide whether it qualifies. The number of places was uncapped, so there is no limit on how many buyers can use it. And the property price limits were raised, which widened the range of homes a participant can buy.
The core of the offer stayed the same. A first home buyer can purchase with a minimum deposit of 5 per cent of the purchase price and without paying lenders mortgage insurance, the cost that otherwise comes with a deposit that small.
Related readSingapore first-time buyers: BTO ballot, flat classes and CPF grantsThe size of that deposit is simple arithmetic. As an illustration only, on a purchase price of A$700,000 a 5 per cent deposit is A$35,000, and the loan covers the remaining A$665,000, or 95 per cent of the price. The price in that example is chosen for round numbers; it is not a market figure and not one of the scheme's price limits.
The release puts the reason for the scheme in terms of time. It says some buyers spend up to 11 years saving for a deposit, and Mr Albanese is quoted in it describing the expanded scheme as removing barriers and getting first home buyers into their own home faster.
What the first-year count shows
The title of the release speaks of 100,000 buyers; its own table gives 102,594 for the year. Spread evenly across 365 days, that is about 280 buyers a day. Ms O'Neil, in the release, points to the same milestone: more than 100,000 first home buyers using the expanded scheme in a single year.
The longer count is larger still. The release says more than 280,000 Australians have been supported through the scheme since 2022. Set against that, the 102,594 buyers of the uncapped year are more than a third of everyone the scheme has helped over the whole period, a sign of how much faster it has moved since the caps came off.
The release also makes a broader claim about the market: one in two first home buyers nationally now use a first home buyer scheme. That sentence is about first home buyer schemes in general, not this one alone.
Related readBuying an HDB flat as a single in Singapore: the rules from age 35Where the buyers are
The state and territory table is where the release is most useful to anyone working in a particular market. The figures below are for the seven jurisdictions this magazine covers; the national totals quoted above also include one further state.
| State or territory | Past year | Since 2022 | Past year as share of total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Victoria | 33,413 | 89,375 | 37.4% |
| New South Wales | 28,158 | 76,285 | 36.9% |
| Western Australia | 11,207 | 31,828 | 35.2% |
| South Australia | 4,495 | 10,436 | 43.1% |
| Australian Capital Territory | 3,106 | 7,207 | 43.1% |
| Tasmania | 1,588 | 4,401 | 36.1% |
| Northern Territory | 502 | 2,076 | 24.2% |
Joint ministerial media release, 1 October 2026. Shares are this magazine's calculation from the two columns. The "since 2022" column is read as the cumulative total; see the note below.
Victoria leads on both measures, ahead of New South Wales. The two states together account for 61,571 of the year's buyers, about 60 per cent of the national 102,594. The seven jurisdictions in the table add up to 82,469, roughly 80 per cent of the national figure.
The last column shows where the uncapped year mattered most relative to what came before. In South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory, 43.1 per cent of all buyers supported since 2022 came in the past twelve months, the highest shares in the table. In Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and Tasmania the share sits between 35 and 38 per cent. The Northern Territory is the exception: its 502 buyers in the year are 24.2 per cent of its total, so the expansion lifted activity there less than anywhere else in the table.
The cumulative column is labelled two ways in the release
The release describes its first column of state figures inconsistently, in one place as counting from the expansion and in another as the overall total. This article treats it as the cumulative count since 2022, the reading that matches the release's own national figure of more than 280,000. The past-year column is unambiguous and adds up to the 102,594 headline.
What the insurance saving is worth
The second set of numbers concerns lenders mortgage insurance. The release estimates that buyers have saved more than A$2.5 billion in such insurance under the present government, of which A$1.4 billion was saved in the last year alone. On those two figures, about half of the entire saving dates from the twelve months since the expansion.
For a single household, the release gives one reference point: a buyer of a home at the national median price, with a 5 per cent deposit, avoids about A$23,700. That is the government's own estimate for one price and one deposit level. It is not a figure for any actual purchase at another price or deposit.
Related readSouth Australia first home buyers: the A$15,000 grant and duty reliefWhat the figure does show is the order of magnitude. On the release's numbers, the insurance a median-price buyer avoids is a five-figure sum, which is money that would otherwise have had to be found on top of the deposit or added to the loan.
How the loans are performing
A scheme that lets people borrow 95 per cent of a purchase price invites an obvious question about repayment. The release answers it with three figures. It says 99 per cent of borrowers are ahead of or on track with their repayments. It says only 13 claims have been paid since the scheme launched. And it says most participants leave the scheme after about two and a half years.
Against a cumulative total of more than 280,000 buyers, 13 is a very small number, though a share of the loans written in the past year are by definition too young to have been tested for long.
The two-and-a-half-year average is worth a second look, because it describes the scheme as a stage rather than a permanent arrangement. The figure is best read simply as what it is: the typical length of time a borrower stays in the scheme.
A deposit of 5 per cent buys a home sooner. It also leaves the thinnest cushion if values slip in the first years.
What the Reserve Bank adds on risk
The Reserve Bank's October 2026 Financial Stability Review, also published on 1 October, covers the same ground from the point of view of financial stability, in its chapter on the resilience of households and businesses. Its findings sit comfortably beside the government's on repayment, and add a caution the release does not contain.
On repayment, the Review says arrears among first home buyers are low, and that hardship and arrears under the 5% Deposit Scheme are contained. It also records the scheme's footprint in the lending data: the share of new lending at high loan-to-valuation ratios, meaning loans that are large relative to the value of the home, rose after the scheme was expanded in October 2025. The Reserve Bank adds that this share remains low.
Related readUSA: how FHA loans and the VA funding fee work for buyers in 2026The caution is about equity. The Review says recent buyers and borrowers with high loan-to-valuation ratios, a group that includes scheme participants, are more likely to be in negative equity, the position of owing more on a loan than the home is currently worth.
Price data published the same day explain why that matters now. Cotality, in a report dated 1 October 2026, puts national home values 5.2 per cent below their peak of March 2026. Returning to the earlier illustration, a home bought for A$700,000 that lost 5.2 per cent would be worth A$663,600, a fall of A$36,400 and slightly more than the A$35,000 deposit, leaving the value just under the original A$665,000 loan before any repayments are counted. That is an illustration built on a national average measured from the peak; it describes no particular buyer, suburb or city, and repayments made since purchase reduce the loan.
Negative equity is not the same as difficulty repaying. A household that keeps up its repayments and does not need to sell is not forced to realise the gap, which is consistent with the Reserve Bank finding arrears contained while flagging the equity position.
The trade publication Real Estate Business followed the release on 6 October with a piece gathering anonymous comments from buyers who used the scheme. It is colour rather than data, and the comments are unverified accounts posted online, but they echo both halves of the official picture.
Some buyers, Real Estate Business reported, said similar homes to theirs were now selling for A$100,000 less. One compared rent of A$500 a week with a mortgage of A$800 a week. Neither remark can be generalised, and the publication does not present them as a survey. They do put a household face on the Reserve Bank's point about equity, and on the fact that owning sooner can cost more each week than renting did.
Where the scheme sits among other measures
The release places the scheme within a wider set of housing policies rather than presenting it alone. It names changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing, the 100,000 Homes for First Home Buyers program, the Help to Buy shared equity scheme and the A$47 billion Homes for Australia plan.
For the professionals who deal with first home buyers every week, the practical reading is narrow but clear. On the government's count, half of first home buyers now arrive with some scheme behind them, and the uncapped, income-test-free version of this one has been running for a full year in every state and territory. The repayment record published so far is strong on both the government's figures and the Reserve Bank's. The open question, which neither document claims to settle, is how the newest borrowers fare if values stay below their March peak for the two and a half years a typical participant spends in the scheme.
Kooky, from Shaka
Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.
