First Home Buyer Loans Parramatta

From 1 October 2025 the federal scheme changed shape. The income caps came off, the annual limit on places came off, and the property price cap for Sydney went to $1,500,000. Australian citizens and permanent residents can both use it.

It is a guarantee, not a grant. No money is paid to you. The government guarantees part of the loan so the lender does not require you to hold a twenty per cent deposit and does not charge lenders mortgage insurance. You still borrow the full amount and you still repay it. What you save is the insurance premium and the years spent saving the rest of the deposit.

Two practical points. The cap applies to the property, and the government publishes a tool for checking which postcodes fall into which cap, so the answer for a specific address is knowable rather than a matter of opinion. And not every lender participates, which means the scheme quietly narrows your lender choice at the same time as it widens your buying power. We work with that rather than around it.

The First Home Buyers Assistance Scheme removes transfer duty entirely on a first home valued up to $800,000, and reduces it on a sliding scale between $800,000 and $1,000,000. On vacant land the full exemption runs to $350,000 with a concession up to $450,000. Above the top of each band, duty is payable in full.

Those thresholds have a hard edge, and it is where a lot of money moves. A purchase agreed just over $800,000 is not slightly worse off than one just under it. The difference at that line is large enough to be worth knowing before you make an offer, because it is the sort of thing that a few thousand dollars of negotiation can decide.

There is a residence requirement attached: you have to move in within the required period and live there for the required time. It is not a rule you can plan to ignore and it does not fit every buyer, particularly anyone intending to rent the place out. We check it against what you are actually planning to do.

The First Home Owner Grant is $10,000, and it is narrower than most people expect. It applies to a newly built home valued at up to $600,000, or to a land purchase plus a building contract with a combined value up to $750,000. An established apartment or house, however long you have been saving for it, does not attract the grant at all.

In practice that steers the grant towards new stock and towards building, which is a real consideration in Parramatta given how much new supply there is. It is also why the grant and the duty concession do not always land on the same property: one favours new, the other is set by price.

One piece of history worth clearing up, because it still comes up in conversation. First Home Buyer Choice, the option to pay an annual property tax instead of duty, closed to new applicants on 1 July 2023. If you read about it on a page that has not been updated, it is not available to you.

Where your deposit is under twenty per cent, most lenders want to see genuine savings: broadly, around five per cent of the purchase price held in your name for about three months. The idea behind it is that a lender wants evidence you can accumulate money, not just that money appeared.

That has consequences for gifts. A parent transferring a lump sum a fortnight before you buy is a real deposit but it is not genuine savings by most policies, and treating the two as the same is a common way to be surprised late. Rent paid consistently can count with some lenders. Policy varies more than you would expect.

The reason to have this conversation early is that three months is a clock. If a small change to where your savings sit turns a decline into an approval, it costs nothing to make that change now and everything to discover it once you have found the place you want.