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Will the bank give me a home loan if I'm casual?
Bayley Clarke · Mortgage broker on the road · Lender policy checked 19 August 2026 · 6 min read
The short answer
Yes, of course. Most lenders will use 100% of your casual income once you've been in the same casual role for around six months. Being casual is not the problem people expect it to be.
The catch is hidden somewhere nobody looks. Lenders annualise your pay by multiplying it across a set number of weeks, and that number is a policy setting, not a fact. The best use a full 52 weeks. Plenty use 48. Several use 46. A few drop to 40 for casual teachers. Nobody calls it shading, but that's exactly what it is.
The 60 second version. Everything below is the detail underneath it.
The real haircut isn't a percentage, it's the weeks
When a lender assesses a salary, the number is already annual. When they assess casual income, they have to build the annual figure themselves. They take what you're actually earning and multiply it out.
How many weeks they multiply by is where lenders quietly disagree. The generous ones use 52 weeks, treating your casual pay like any other income. Many use 48. A cluster use 46, on the reasoning that you get no annual leave and no sick leave so you can't really work every week of the year. And a handful drop to 40 weeks for casual teachers, because of school holidays.
Here's what that does to the same person on the same roster.
| Casual on $45/hr, 38 hours a week | Weeks used | Income the lender sees |
|---|---|---|
| Most generous on the panel | 52 | $88,920 |
| Common middle ground | 48 | $82,080 |
| The no-leave reasoning | 46 | $78,660 |
| Casual teacher treatment | 40 | $68,400 |
Illustrative numbers, not a quote. But look at the spread. Over $20,000 of assessed income between the top and bottom of that table, for identical work. No conversation about interest rates comes close to moving your borrowing power that far.
One lender goes further again and applies a straight 20% cut to casual income on top of its history test. It's the only one on the main panel that does, and it's the kind of thing you only find out by knowing beforehand.
Six months, but six months of what
Around six months in the same casual role is the common benchmark. It's the answer you'll hear everywhere, and for most people it's right.
What almost nobody mentions is that some lenders will accept six months in the same industry or the same type of work instead of the same employer. If you've just moved from one hospitality job to another, or one agency to another, that distinction is the difference between applying now and waiting half a year.
The spread on the rest of it: a couple of lenders want a full twelve months. One will work with three months for education and essential services workers. One asks for six months in the role plus two years of overall work history. And at least one is explicit that prior permanent experience in the same industry doesn't count towards your casual tenure, which catches people who have gone from full-time to casual in the same field.
Gaps, seasonal work, and changing jobs
This is where casual applications actually come unstuck, and it's rarely the number of hours.
| Situation | How lenders differ |
|---|---|
| A gap between casual jobs | One ignores gaps between roles entirely. One accepts gaps under 28 days. One allows a single break of up to four weeks. Others don't address it, which means the assessor decides. |
| Seasonal work | Two lenders won't accept it at all. One limits you to two roles in a twelve month period. |
| Agency work | At least one major explicitly accepts agency employment as the employer for tenure purposes. Others treat each placement as a new job. |
| Different industries | This is the genuine problem. Chopping and changing casual roles across unrelated industries is what makes an application hard, not being casual. |
| Irregular hours | One lender counts regular casual income at 100% and irregular casual income at nil. Not discounted. Ignored. |
Three things worth knowing before you apply
- Casual can't always be the main income. At least one lender won't let a casual applicant be the sole or primary earner where lenders mortgage insurance is involved. Another accepts casual income only on a joint application. Neither is a judgement about you, they're policy lines, and they're avoidable by going somewhere else.
- Being casual can cost you a waiver. At one lender, casual status disqualifies you from the essential services LMI waiver, which is a meaningful amount of money if you're a nurse or a paramedic picking up casual shifts.
- Overtime and penalties inside casual pay are treated separately again. One major counts overtime and penalty rates at 100% when they sit inside casual income. Others fold them into the same annualisation. If a chunk of your pay is night and weekend loading, read that alongside how allowances and penalties get assessed.
What to bring, and what to ask
You don't need to collect months of payslips. What a lender reads is the year to date figure on a recent payslip, or your income statement from the ATO. A couple of your latest payslips plus that statement is normally the whole request.
Then the question isn't "will you lend to a casual." Almost everyone will. It's "how many weeks do you annualise my pay over, and does my six months need to be with this employer or in this industry." Those two answers sort the panel faster than anything else, and they're the two things a branch will never volunteer.
Lender policies described above were checked in August 2026 and change regularly. Individual lenders aren't named here on purpose: policy moves, and the right lender depends entirely on your situation rather than on a list in an article.
Want to know which lenders annualise you over 52 weeks?
Send me a couple of recent payslips and I'll run your number across lenders that use 52 weeks and lenders that use 46, so you can see the actual gap rather than guess at it. For a lot of casual workers that single setting is the whole difference between yes and not yet.
No application, no credit check, nothing on your file. Just the numbers.
Next question
Do shift allowances and penalties count as income?If a chunk of your casual pay is night and weekend loading, this is the other half of the answer.
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