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Straight Answers · Bank said no

Why was I rejected, and does the bank have to tell me?

Bayley Clarke · Mortgage broker on the road · Last checked 24 August 2026 · 4 min read

The 30 second version. The rest of this page is the detail underneath it.

What the bank will actually tell you

A decline usually arrives as a short letter or a two minute phone call, and the operative sentence is some version of: your application did not meet our lending criteria. No breakdown, no scorecard, nothing you can act on. A few lenders will name the broad area, your credit history, say, or your borrowing power. Most won't, and nothing forces them to sit down and walk you through where it fell over.

From the bank's side that vagueness is deliberate. Their credit policy is theirs, and explaining exactly where the line sits tells the next applicant how to dress a file to slip past it. From your side, it leaves you knocked back with no idea whether the problem was your credit card limit, your new job, or the unit you picked.

One thing worth knowing: the decline itself isn't stamped on your credit file, but the application is. Every home loan application sits on your file as an enquiry, and the next lender can see it. That matters for what you do next, which we'll get to.

What "didn't meet our criteria" usually means

Criteria is a big word doing a lot of hiding. In practice, a decline nearly always comes back to one of a handful of gates:

• Serviceability. On that lender's calculator, your income minus your expenses, debts and a buffer didn't leave room for the repayments. The most common gate, and the one that varies most from lender to lender.
• Credit history. A default, missed repayments, too many recent enquiries, or a file so thin the lender can't read you.
• Deposit and loan size. The loan was too big a share of the property's value for that lender's appetite.
• The shape of your income. New job, probation, casual hours, self-employed without the history that lender wants. Same income, and different lenders count different amounts of it.
• The property itself. The location, the type of dwelling, the size, or a valuation that came in under what you paid.

Here's the part that matters: every lender draws each of those lines in a different place. The same file can fail one lender's criteria and sail through another's. So "you didn't meet our criteria" is not a verdict on you. It's a verdict on the match between your situation and one lender's rulebook.

How to find out what actually went wrong

Pull your own credit report first. You can get it for free from the credit reporting bodies, and it rules your credit file in or out as the cause in about ten minutes. If there's a default or a pile of enquiries sitting on it, you've likely found your answer without asking anyone.

Ask the lender anyway. You might get a sentence, you might get nothing, and it costs you nothing to ask.

Then have someone reconstruct the decision. This is most of what I do when someone comes to me after a decline. Your income, debts, deposit and the property go down next to that lender's policy, and the gate you hit is usually findable from the outside. A decline is rarely a mystery once your file is sitting beside the rules it was assessed under. The bank won't tell you why. Their own policy usually will.

Why the real work happens before the application

This is the actual point of the video. The reason to work with a broker isn't that we can make a bank explain itself afterwards. It's that we look through your situation first and make sure a lender's policies line up with what your financial world actually looks like, before the application goes anywhere near them.

A bank assesses the application in front of it against one rulebook, theirs. I get to read the rulebooks first and pick the one your file already passes. Done in that order, the decline mostly never happens, and you never need the explanation the bank wasn't going to give you anyway.