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Does my tax refund count as genuine savings?
Bayley Clarke · Mortgage broker on the road · Last checked 16 October 2026 · 2 min read
The short answer
You've just got to use your brain with it. Getting a thousand or two back inside months of steady saving? Really don't overthink it. Getting back 15 grand as one lump sum that's doing most of the work? That's when it pays to check before you apply.
On camera I drew the line at the size of the refund. The lenders actually draw it somewhere else: plenty of them list a tax refund as genuine savings outright, and the ones that are fussier care about how long it's been sitting in your account and how they rank it, not how big it is.
The 60 second version, filmed from the driver's seat. The rest of this page is the detail underneath it.
Why the bank still wants a pattern
A genuine savings test isn't about where every dollar came from. It's about whether your account shows you can put money aside consistently. A $1,000 or $2,000 refund landing in an account that's been growing every month is just noise in that pattern.
A $15,000 refund is a bigger part of the story. If that one deposit is most of your savings, the account doesn't show much of a pattern on its own. That doesn't make it a no. It means the refund has to do the work, so it needs to land with a lender that's happy to count it.
What the bank is really checking
You've got to prove you can afford the loan. That's why lenders have their genuine savings tests in the first place. Months of regular saving is the closest thing they've got to a trial run of you paying a mortgage.
So the real question is 'does my account show I can save, and does this lender count a refund toward it'. If you've been saving steadily, the refund is a bonus. If the refund is most of it, we pick the lender around it, or prove genuine savings another way, like a rental ledger if you're renting.
Where the banks actually split on this
A fair chunk of the panel lists a tax refund as an acceptable source of genuine savings, with no size limit written anywhere. One of the big banks takes it on normal loans with mortgage insurance, evidenced by your notice of assessment or the bank credit.
A couple of the big banks put a refund in a second tier of savings: it has to have landed in an account in your name within the last three months, and they want your notice of assessment plus the statement showing it. A couple of smaller lenders only count it once it's been held for three months. And a good number of lenders don't address tax refunds in their written policy at all. For those, the honest answer is that the lender has to tell us, so I ask before we lodge, not after.
The honest bit: there's no dollar line, but there are lines
No lender draws a line at a dollar figure where a refund stops counting. The lines that do exist are how long the money has been held, how the lender ranks that kind of deposit, and whether they've written a rule on it at all.
If your refund is a big chunk of your deposit, tell me upfront. It's an easy thing to plan around before you apply, and an annoying thing to discover after.
Big tax refund making up your deposit?
A 30 minute call. We look at how your savings have built up, whether the refund is going to be an issue, and which lenders suit the way you've saved.
No cost to you. The bank pays me when a loan settles. · How I get paid
Next question
If I'm saving in a joint account with my partner, does it count as genuine savings if I'm buying by myself?Most lenders accept savings held in at least one borrower's name, but how much of a joint balance is yours isn't written down.
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