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Can I roll my car loan and credit card into the home loan?

Bayley Clarke · Mortgage broker on the road · Last checked 1 September 2026 · 3 min read

The one minute version. The rest of this page is the detail underneath it.

The 80% line decides it

Consolidating debts into the home loan is a valuation question before it's anything else. The bank adds your car loan and credit card balances to your current home loan, and tests the new total against what the property is worth. Under 80%, and at most lenders this is a routine cash-out application: home loan rates on money that was costing you personal-loan and credit-card rates.

I checked the consolidation and cash-out rules across my panel, and the pattern is consistent: below 80% most lenders will do this without much friction, and many don't even cap the amount, they just want the purpose recorded. Where caps exist they range from about a hundred thousand to a million dollars depending on the lender, well clear of a car and a card.

Above 80% is a different world. Many lenders cap consolidation hard or decline it once mortgage insurance enters the picture, a couple allow nothing beyond 80% at all, and the ones that do allow it want evidence and charge you LMI for the pleasure. If rolling your debts in pushes you past 80%, the answer shifts from often makes sense to probably wait.

Why it can still be dumb, and the trick that fixes it

Here's the trap. Your car loan had maybe four years left. Your credit card was costing you a fortune but you were chipping at it. Roll both into the mortgage, make minimum repayments, and you've technically agreed to pay that car off over thirty years. The rate dropped, the term exploded, and the total interest can end up worse than what you left behind.

So the rule I talk through with every client who does this: pretend those debts still exist. Whatever the car repayment was, whatever you were paying on the card, keep paying it, just funnel it onto the home loan instead. Same money leaving your account, but now it's snowballing the whole debt down at home loan rates instead of servicing three separate ones. Done that way, consolidation saves real interest and clears the debts faster than they were ever going to clear on their own.

What the bank looks at

Your income has to service the new, bigger loan, and the valuation has to support it, which is why the answer is sometimes no even when the maths makes sense: if the bank's valuation comes in soft, there's no room to roll anything in. Some lenders also want the debts paid out directly at settlement rather than handing you the cash, and a consolidation that closes the credit card entirely reads a lot better than one that clears it and leaves the limit open.

That last one matters more than people think: an open credit card limit keeps dragging on your borrowing power even at a zero balance. If we're consolidating it, we're usually closing or cutting the limit at the same time, otherwise you've paid to solve half the problem.